Three completely different ladies have taken turns as Columbia College’s president amid ongoing turmoil surrounding the dealing with of pro-Palestinian protests on the New York Metropolis campus. Now, Columbia has invited a fourth — and the primary to be Jewish — to attempt her hand at working the Ivy League faculty.
Jennifer Mnookin, the chancellor of College of Wisconsin, has been chosen as Columbia’s subsequent president, the college’s TK introduced on Sunday. She would be the faculty’s first Jewish chief since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering a battle in Gaza and a pupil protest motion in the US of which Columbia was an epicenter.
Mnookin, a authorized scholar, served as dean of the College of California, Los Angeles College of Legislation earlier than shifting to Wisconsin in 2022. A minimum of two different candidates reportedly declined the Columbia place previous to her choice.
She takes the helm at a fragile time for Columbia because it continues to reel from the fallout of the coed protests, which has included included penalties from the Trump administration, fast management adjustments and ongoing concern and nervousness amongst many Jewish college students.
“I’m honored and thrilled to affix Columbia College at this vital second,” Mnookin stated in an announcement launched by the college. “Columbia is outlined by rigorous scholarship, a deep dedication to open inquiry, world-class affected person care, and an inseparable and enduring connection to New York Metropolis, the best metropolis on the planet.”
She follows three different ladies who struggled amid the turmoil. The president in cost on Oct. 7, Nemat Minouche Shafik, cited the “interval of turmoil” that adopted when she resigned in 2024; she had confronted criticism from members of Congress in addition to the Columbia group over her dealing with of the coed encampment that fashioned this 12 months.
Her non permanent substitute, Katrina Armstrong, stepped down in March 2025 as the college confronted strain from the Trump administration over antisemitism allegations. Armstong’s successor, the present interim president, Claire Shipman, struck a $221 million take care of Trump to settle the claims; she additionally apologized quickly after taking workplace for having steered the removing of a Jewish member of the college’s board of trustees.
Now, Mnookin will likely be chargeable for managing Columbia’s relationship with federal authorities, weighing and implementing the suggestions of its antisemitism process power and therapeutic a divided campus, which has been closed to outsiders now for years.
“The previous couple of years have been undeniably tough for the Jewish and Israeli communities on campus. Whereas challenges stay, there’s a vibrant, joyful, proud Jewish group at Columbia,” Brian Cohen, govt director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, stated in an announcement. “I’m hopeful that President-elect Mnookin will convey the status, expertise, and understanding that we have to construct on that sturdy basis.”
It will likely be Mnookin’s first time working at a personal college. At Wisconsin, first despatched regulation enforcement to close down a pupil encampment, then negotiated with protesters after they established a second one. The deal required College students for Justice in Palestine to adjust to college guidelines associated to protest in alternate for the fitting to current their divestment calls for to “resolution makers,” who didn’t accede to them.
She additionally denounced neo-Nazi protesters who marched on the Wisconsin campus in November 2023, calling them “completely repugnant.” By all of it, she gained a status for selling open inquiry and tutorial freedom — at the same time as Wisconsin, like dozens of different universities, confronted a federal investigation over antisemitism allegations.
“I feel universities ought to be areas the place concepts, and completely different concepts, embodied by folks from completely different backgrounds, come collectively, and the place it gained’t all the time be comfy, however the place we are going to be taught and do higher from that engagement,” she stated in a roundtable of school presidents revealed in The New York Instances in November. (The opposite presidents had been additionally Jewish: Sian Bellock of Dartmouth School and Michael Roth of Wesleyan College, who has emerged as a uncommon chief in larger schooling who’s prepared to spar with the Trump administration.)
Mnookin was raised in a Reform Jewish household within the Bay Space that escalated its Jewish engagement when she requested to rejoice her bat mitzvah, in accordance with her father Robert. A scholar of battle negotiation, he described the evolution in his 2015 guide “The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Selection in a Altering World,” which he stated he wrote partially to discover his personal late-onset attachment to Judaism.
