Claire Shipman, acting president of Columbia University, issued an apology to several members of the campus community for leaked text messages where she suggested that a Jewish trustee should be removed from the university’s board over her pro-Israel advocacy.

“The things I said in a moment of frustration and stress were wrong. They do not reflect how I feel,” Shipman wrote on Wednesday in a private email obtained by Jewish Insider, noting that she was addressing “some trusted groups of friends and colleagues, with whom I’ve talked regularly over the last few months.” 

The text messages, from 2023 and 2024, were obtained by the House Committee on Education and Workforce and published in a letter from the committee’s chairman, Tim Walberg (R-MI), and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to the university on Tuesday as part of the committee’s ongoing investigation into whether the school is violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by allowing harassment of Jewish students. 

Shipman, then co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees, also wrote in a separate message to the board’s vice chair on Jan. 17, 2024, “We need to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board.”  

Shipman said in a follow-up message days later that Shoshana Shendelman, a Jewish board member who frequently condemned campus antisemitism, had been “extraordinarily unhelpful” and said, “I just don’t think she should be on the board.” In another communication on April 22, 2024, she expressed belief that Shendelman was a “mole”.

“I have apologized directly to the person named in my texts, and I am apologizing now to you,” Shipman wrote in Wednesday’s email. “I have tremendous respect and appreciation for that board member, whose voice on behalf of Columbia’s Jewish community is critically important. I should not have written those things, and I am sorry. It was a moment of immense pressure, over a year and a half ago, as we navigated some deeply turbulent times. But that doesn’t change the fact that I made a mistake. I promise to do better.” 

Shipman continued, “One thing I hope salacious headlines will not obscure—my deep commitment to fighting antisemitism and protecting our Jewish students and faculty. Board members who have worked with me for more than a decade know that antisemitism, and the culture on our campus, was a priority well before October 7^th, as do colleagues at the university, and personal friends.”

She included a link to steps the university pledged to take to combat antisemitism. Shipman added that she continues to commit to “restoring our critical partnership with the federal government as quickly as possible, so that thousands of our faculty and researchers and students can get back to the essential work they do on behalf of humanity.” The Trump administration canceled approximately $400 million in grants and contracts with Columbia in March. The university has since entered into negotiations with the federal government.