Nemat Shafik, Columbia University’s besieged president, faced skeptics on Wednesday in a meeting with the university senate that could vote to censure her over her handling of protests on the Upper Manhattan campus.
Dr. Shafik, who last week called in the police officers who made more than 100 arrests while they cleared a student protest encampment, is facing mounting calls for her resignation, including from House Speaker Mike Johnson, who visited Columbia on Wednesday. If Dr. Shafik ultimately remains atop Columbia, her meeting with the university senate made plain that it will likely be as a scarred figure.
Dr. Shafik defended her choice to summon the New York authorities to campus, according to three people who attended the meeting at the law school. But, according to two of those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting, Dr. Shafik used part of her roughly hourlong appearance to acknowledge that the decision to bring in the police had exacerbated the problems. She said she believed, though, that it was necessary for the safety of protesting students.
The group could vote on a censure as soon as Friday, but some senators were discussing the possibility of pursuing a more moderate course in the aftermath of Wednesday’s meeting.
Although predicting the outcome of a university senate vote is an inexact science — the body includes in excess of 100 faculty members, students, alumni and administrators from a wide range of academic disciplines — a draft censure resolution was unsparing. In it, Dr. Shafik was accused of violating fundamental rules by ignoring a 13-member senate executive committee that had unanimously rejected her request to ask the police onto campus.
By calling in the police anyway, the resolution said, Dr. Shafik had endangered both the welfare and the futures of the arrested students. Dr. Shafik had already angered many at Columbia with her testimony on Capitol Hill on April 17, when she tried to placate Republican lawmakers but provoked outrage on campus, in part for not robustly defending academic freedom.
