The (New) President Next Door
- Chris Brown
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
Musings on another transition of power.
By Chris Brown
On July 1, Jennifer Mnookin will start her term as the 21st President of Columbia University. On the list of presidents, her name will follow after President Minouche Shafik, who resigned nearly two years ago. The presidencies of Katrina Armstrong and Claire Shipman will become footnotes. For students, Mnookin will be the fifth president in four years.
In October of 2024, I wrote The President Next Door, shortly after Shafik’s resignation. It was a piece about trust—about what happens when our most powerful neighbor, Columbia’s President, feels more like an enemy than a friend. The president’s mansion sits next to the largest dorm on campus, but its occupant is invisible day to day. Our campus is smaller than most of our peers, those of us on Morningside campus live in close proximity. Since Shafik, it’s been four semesters, multiple mass arrests of students, and two more presidents, with a third on the way.
The President’s Office has been unable to build trust for the last four semesters. Shafik’s successor, Katrina Armstrong, stepped down in the face of the Trump administration’s $400 million cut in federal funding. Her replacement, Claire Shipman, CC ’86, SIPA ’94, has been controversial from the beginning: She was appointed while serving as the co-chair of the Board of Trustees. In Columbia’s “triangle” system of governance, between the President, Trustees, and University Senate, the President was supposed to be a check on the Trustees power; now, the President was one of them. Columbia students found ourselves asking, “Why not us?” as Harvard President Alan Garber publicly fought back against similar funding cuts. There was a sense of betrayal among the student body that its own administration had capitulated when its student body was still willing to fight. Just nine months before, Columbia was the epicenter of an international student protest movement—now, the University’s reputation was cowardice.
…
“Shipman, Shipman, we know you. You ____ your students too!”
The blank in this student protest chant is filled in many ways: suspend, arrest, deport. These chants are part of an institutional memory of protest and administrative actions that have been passed down over the years. Walking along Broadway, even at a time when campus protest has slowed down, you still hear Shipman’s name chanted. It has become synonymous with everything students see as wrong with Columbia—increasing corporatization, power seizure by Trustees, and a lack of transparency. Even after the announcement of Mnookin’s succession, chants against Shipman remain common. Before Shipman, Shafik’s name filled that role. There’s no way to know how old these chants are. Perhaps they predate all of the current student body. Maybe it doesn’t matter who our neighbor is; as long as Columbia itself refuses to change, a new name will fill that chant.
Our new neighbor will enter the role without the baggage of the previous three. She won’t have been here during Columbia’s police raids, she isn’t a member of the Board of Trustees, and her name has yet to become a staple of our protest chants. Her background, similar to Lee Bollinger’s, seems like a choice to bring stability to a campus in crisis. But her record isn’t spotless either: In 2024, she authorized a similar police raid on the University of Wisconsin’s encampment. It’s a worrying continuity of choices by the Trustees, an indication of what kind of leadership they were looking for in their year-and-a-half long search.
And regardless of her record, students will remember. Institutional memory at a college is transient—it resets itself every four years. Even despite this, and attempts to increase the size of incoming classes, Mnookin will inherit upperclassmen with memories of the encampment and the May 2025 Butler arrests, and underclassmen who have heard those stories from their peers. At the same time, formerly suspended students are returning for the first time since the Hamilton Hall protest in 2024. There’s no such thing as a fresh start, even under a new presidency.
Mnookin will step into a university actively engaged in a fight with the Trump administration. She will inherit the same questions around student labor relations, campus and student body expansion, and a multitude of other issues that have dominated the university since the time of Lee Bollinger. But she will also inherit a student body in fear.
On Feb. 26, the Columbia community woke up to an email from the Office of the President stating that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had detained a Columbia student. Ellie Aghayeva, GS ’26, had been taken from her Columbia Residential apartment without a warrant. This was the first major ICE escalation on campus after almost a year, and it left the entire community shaken and uncertain.
The President’s role as the most powerful person on Columbia’s campus means that they bear the responsibility for incidents like that one, and the responsibility to ensure that students feel safe on campus. It is the President’s emails that are the source of much major breaking news on campus. They’ve announced funding cuts, hate crimes, agreements with the Trump administration, and police raids on students. In recent years, they have increasingly symbolized the student body’s fear over what our powerful neighbor may do.
I will never experience President Mnookin as a neighbor—I’ll graduate before she moves into her new home. But as someone who will be an alumnus, permanently connected to Columbia no matter how close or far I am from it, I still feel a stake in the state of campus. I hope that she will restore stability to our school, I hope she will engage in dialogue with its students, I hope that she will believe in protecting them. I hope for actionable change. But the last 18 months have demonstrated that hope alone isn’t enough; it still falls on those of us who believe in it to continue fighting for a university worth taking pride in, whether or not the administration is on board. I only hope that this time, they will be.
Still, and forever, love thy neighbor.
