In her previous role as the co-chair of Columbia University’s board of trustees, now acting president Claire Shipman privately pushed for the school to get an “Arab on our board,” and later suggested that a Jewish trustee be removed over her pro-Israel advocacy, text messages obtained by the House Committee on Education and Workforce show.
“We need to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board,” Shipman said in a message sent on January 17, 2024. “Quickly I think. Somehow.”
Shipman told her colleagues a week later that Shoshana Shendelman, one of the board’s most outspoken critics of the disruptive anti-Israel protests taking place on campus, has been “extraordinarily unhelpful.”
“I just don’t think she should be on the
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