On April 17, college students at Columbia University escalated their ongoing protests in opposition to the war on Gaza by occupying college lawns and making a ‘Gaza solidarity encampment’. At about the identical time, Columbia University’s first lady president Nemat ‘Minouche’ Shafik was attending a Congressional listening to earlier than the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce whereby she testified concerning the University’s action-plan to counter “anti-Semitic” situations on the campus. In a gruelling interrogation, Ms. Shafik was requested whether or not phrases comparable to ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ or ‘long live intifada’ have been anti-Semitic. She stated that whereas to her it appeared anti-Semitic, to others it didn’t.
“Trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of discrimination and harassment has been the central challenge on our campus and numerous others across the country,” Ms. Shafik advised the committee. Amid requires her resignation as president, she assured the committee that the college will proceed to be a secure house for Jewish college students and that college students violating college coverage would face penalties. And the very subsequent day, Ms. Shafik requested the New York Police Department to enter the campus and arrest the scholars who have been peacefully protesting within the encampment. More than 100 students were arrested.
Also learn: Why are students protesting across U.S. campuses? | Explained
The Baroness
Ms. Shafik’s profession has been a journey of many milestones. She was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and when she was 4 years outdated, her household moved to the U.S. within the mid-1960s. After doing her masters from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and her DPhil from Oxford, she went on to work for the World Bank. At age 36, she grew to become the youngest Vice President of the World Bank. Her work principally focussed on international improvement and international support programmes. She additionally labored with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Department for International Development of the U.Ok. In 2014, Ms. Shavik joined the Bank of England as its first Deputy Governor on Markets and Banking, whereby she labored on the contingency planning across the Brexit referendum. She is a member of the U.Ok. House of Lords and her full title is ‘The Baroness Shafik DBE’.
“I have had jobs that are about doing good, such as fighting poverty or leading educational institutions as well as jobs that are about preventing bad things from happening, like at the IMF and Bank of England,” Ms. Shafik has stated of her profession. “Both are vital if we are to make and secure progress for humanity.”Columbia wasn’t Ms. Shafik’s first college presidency. In 2017, she took cost because the president of LSE, her alma mater. Even although Columbia appears to be her hardest stint but, her tenure at LSE was not very clean both.
It was throughout her time as president that larger training within the U.Ok. confronted an enormous disaster, whereby college employees throughout the U.Ok. represented by the University and College Union (UCU) went on successive strikes, from 2018 to 2023, in opposition to pension cuts, pay decline, pay inequality, and exploitative and insecure contracts, regardless of mounting workload. At the time college directors, together with Ms. Shafik, got here under intense criticism for not doing extra on the nationwide stage for placing college. In an interview to The Beaver, the LSE’s pupil newspaper, UCU President Janet Farrar stated college administrators are “on the most ridiculous salaries that you’ve ever heard”, quoting Ms. Shafik’s pay in 2019-20, which amounted to a whopping £5,07,000. There are employees members “who are highly casualised, who are using food banks, who are burning out with stress, who are experiencing race, disability, and gender pay gaps for work of equal value,” Ms. Farrar stated.
Interestingly, Baroness Shafik in her newest e-book in 2021, What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract, talks concerning the want for a brand new social contract for society with a view to resolve the growing anger manifested in polarised politics, tradition wars and conflicts over inequality and race. In the e-book, she calls upon people and establishments to rethink how they’ll higher help one another in order that society can prosper. As tensions throughout campuses peak within the U.S., possibly it’s time Ms. Shavik revisits her personal place inside society and takes her personal recommendation.