Columbia President Katrina Armstrong Steps Down Amid Battle With Trump. Claire Shipman, Wife of Obama Press Sec, Will Take the Job.
Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong stepped down on Friday amid the Ivy League school's protracted battle with the Trump administration, Columbia announced in a statement. Her replacement, Claire Shipman, is a former ABC and CNN journalist who is married to former Obama press secretary Jay Carney.
Armstrong "is returning to lead the University's Irving Medical Center," the job she held before she assumed the presidency just seven months ago following former Columbia president Minouche Shafik's resignation, Columbia said. "Board of Trustees Co-Chair Claire Shipman has been appointed Acting President, effective immediately, and will serve until the Board completes its presidential search."
The news comes just weeks into Columbia's standoff with the Trump administration over the cancellation of $430 million in federal grant money. At the administration’s behest, Armstrong announced a series of reforms earlier this month intended to jumpstart negotiations with Trump officials to restore the lost funds.
But behind closed doors, Armstrong told faculty members that little would change on campus, the Washington Free Beacon reported. One faculty member accused her of a failure to "understand the political landscape and be able to read the room."
It's unclear whether Shipman intends to implement the policy changes the university announced.
The former journalist, who was serving as co-chairwoman of the Columbia board of trustees, has close ties to former president Joe Biden, who looked the other way as student radicals took over campus last spring.
Shipman's husband, Carney, left Time magazine in 2008 to serve as the then vice president-elect Biden's communications director. He became former president Barack Obama's second press secretary three years later and left the White House for CNN in 2014. He now serves as Airbnb's global head of communications.
Shipman began her career in 1989 in CNN's Moscow bureau as an unpaid intern. Two years later, she married the bureau's chief, Steve Hurst, and rose to cover the White House. She left for ABC News in 2001, where she worked for 15 years, most recently as senior national correspondent for Good Morning America. A Columbia alumna, she joined Columbia's board in 2013, 17 years after she split from Hurst and 15 years after she married Carney.
Shipman testified in front of the House Education Committee alongside Shafik last April, calling the proliferation of anti-Semitism on Columbia's Manhattan campus "shocking."
Carney has more experience with the anti-Semitic rhetoric that has long percolated on Columbia's campus. He joined the Obama administration as the president’s friendship with former Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, who served as a spokesman for the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, sparked controversy. Obama credited Khalidi with giving "constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases." Khalidi went on to blame Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel's "settler colonialism" and "apartheid."
"This has to be put within the context," he said in the wake of the attack. "The context is settler colonialism and apartheid."
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