After Columbia interim President Katrina Armstrong’s abrupt resignation on Friday, several of the university’s congressional antagonists quickly jumped in to criticize Armstrong’s successor, former ABC News journalist Claire Shipman, the co-chair of Columbia’s board. 

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the former chair of the House Education Committee, said that Shipman’s tenure as interim president would be “short-lived.” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), freshly returned to Capitol Hill after President Donald Trump withdrew her nomination to be U.N. ambassador, called the choice of Shipman “untenable.” 

But a different reaction came from the White House: subtle praise. The Trump administration’s antisemitism task force called Columbia’s Friday night actions an “important step,” which an administration official confirmed to Jewish Insider was in reaction to Shipman’s appointment. News reports last week indicated that days before her resignation, Armstrong had promised the Trump administration she would enforce a mask ban on campus while telling faculty privately that she would not. 

On Columbia’s campus, the news of Shipman’s hiring was met with cautious optimism from pro-Israel student leaders.

“We’re in desperate need of strong leadership willing to make the deep-seated reforms necessary to save the university at this pivotal moment,” said Eden Yadegar, a senior studying Middle East studies and modern Jewish studies who last year testified before Congress about the antisemitism she has faced on Columbia’s campus. Yadegar declined to elaborate on whether she believes Shipman will bring about those reforms. 

Lishi Baker, a junior studying Middle East history and co-chair of the campus Israel advocacy group Aryeh, also said he would take a wait-and-see approach to Shipman. Baker expects university leadership to bring “deep structural and cultural changes at Columbia [that] are necessary to restore our campus to its primary mission of teaching, learning, and research,” he said. 

“Some of these changes can happen immediately and some will take longer,” Baker told JI. 

The university’s Hillel director, Brian Cohen, praised Shipman in a statement to JI, saying that she “is deeply committed to Columbia University and has consistently demonstrated concern for the well-being and needs of its Jewish community.”

“I look forward to working with her in this new role,” Cohen said.    

Major Jewish organizations have largely avoided weighing in on Shipman’s appointment. The Anti-Defamation League told JI that it was “too early.” 

Shipman, a veteran reporter and author with no academic leadership experience, has publicly stood by the university’s leadership as co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees in response to the antisemitism that exploded on campus after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and ensuing war in Gaza. 

From the beginning of her tenure, Shipman will be contending with a complex campus landscape: Many liberal faculty and students are angry about the university’s decision to acquiesce to Trump’s demands as a way to regain access to $400 million in federal funding that his administration pulled in March, citing Columbia’s failure to properly address antisemitism. 

She will also face a tough negotiating partner in Washington, and pressure from Jewish students and alumni to take a stronger stance against a campus culture in which anti-Israel protests have thrived, with little consequences for rule-breaking activists until recently.

“In an existential crisis, they need to collaborate and to be candid in the exchanges with the Trump administration and what they’ll do, and they need to stick with that,” Mark Yudof, former president of the University of California, offered as advice for Shipman. “You need good faith implementation of what you agree with with the administration, that you’re not looking for loopholes.”

In a message sent to the Columbia community on Monday, Shipman expressed a desire to meet with people across Columbia’s campus as she navigates this “precarious moment” for the university. She did not reference the circumstances of her appointment, nor did she discuss antisemitism on campus, although she hinted at the seriousness of the task before her. 

“My request, right now, is that we all — students, faculty, staff and everyone in this remarkable place — come together and work to protect and support this invaluable repository of knowledge, this home to the next generation of intellectual explorers, and this place of great and continuing promise,” Shipman wrote. 

Last April, Shipman testified at a congressional hearing about antisemitism at Columbia alongside then-Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who resigned from her role in August, and board Co-Chair David Greenwald. Shipman told members of the House Committee on Education and Workforce that she knows Columbia has “significant and important work to do to address antisemitism and to ensure that our Jewish community is safe and welcome.” 

The hearing generally avoided the splashy headlines that followed testimony from the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania in December 2023. (Shipman reportedly described that hearing as “capital [sic] hill nonsense,” according to a congressional report published in October.) 

But her Capitol Hill appearance with Shafik and Greenwald was followed by the erecting of Columbia’s anti-Israel encampment — the first such protest in the country, which touched off dozens of others. Columbia’s response to the encampment earned criticism from bipartisan lawmakers, even as Shipman and her fellow board members stood by Shafik’s handling of the protests, which turned violent when students occupied a campus building. 

Choosing a university president from outside of academia is an unusual choice, even for an interim position. Shipman, who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, graduated from Columbia College in 1986 and returned to earn a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in 1994. She reported from Moscow for CNN, covered the Clinton administration at NBC News and spent 15 years covering politics and international affairs at ABC News. 

Shipman, notably, also spent time earlier in her career covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on assignment in the Middle East.