Acting Columbia University President Claire Shipman was met with raucous jeers from students disgruntled with her handling of pro-Palestinian protests and the Trump administration’s attempts to deport a prominent student activist.
“Good morning class of 2025. I know that many of you feel some amount of frustration with me, and I know you feel it with the administration,” she said as a chorus of boos and jeers, which had already forced her to restart her comments at Columbia College’s commencement ceremony, poured out from students. “And I know we have a strong, strong tradition of free speech at this university, and I am always open to feedback, which I am getting right now.”
Shipman, a former journalist who has helmed Columbia on an interim basis since March, was repeatedly forced to grind her remarks to a halt as students erupted in protest. Student chants of “Free Mahmoud” forced Shipman to stop for nearly half a minute as she stood silent.
The rallying cry is a reference to Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student activist and lawful permanent resident of the US, who the Trump administration is seeking to deport for his role in last year’s student protest movement against Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.
Khalil was taken into custody by immigration officers in March and has remained in a detention facility in the state of Louisiana for more than two months as his court case plays out in New Jersey.
Khalil said, in a letter dictated from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement prison in which he is being held, that he is a “political prisoner,” describing his arrest as “a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
“While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University,” he said. “Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing — based on racism and disinformation—to go unchecked.”
He was referring to Columbia University presidents Minouche Shafi and Katrina Armstrong, who preceded Shipman.
Shipman called the New York Police Department on May 7 onto campus after students occupied Butler Library. Dozens were arrested, and after initially saying the university had reason to believe there was a “significant presence of individuals not affiliated with the University” at the demonstration, she walked back those comments.
“We certainly reject a group of students—and we don’t yet know whether there were outsiders involved—closing down a library in the middle of the week before finals and forcing 900 students out of their study spaces, many leaving belongings behind,” she said in a subsequent statement.