Columbia Universitys interim president stepped down on Friday, marking the 2nd leadership departure, after the Donald Trump administrations crackdown on pro-Palestine student activities prompted her to concur with sweeping policy modifications at the Ivy League school.Katrina Armstrong resigned efficient instantly, and journalist Claire Shipman, the schools board chair, has actually been designated as the new interim president.Armstrong had taken control of the role from the universitys former president, Minouche Shafik, who stepped down in August.Armstrongs resignation came simply a week after the institution yielded to a series of needs from the Trump administration to open talks to gain back access to $400 million in frozen research study financing, which had actually been kept over allegations of anti-Semitism on campus.Trumps joint task force to combat anti-Semitism welcomed Armstrongs resignation, calling it an essential step toward advancing negotiations as set forth in the pre-conditional understanding reached last Friday in a statement.The Trump administration has actually consistently implicated the universitys leadership of refraining from doing enough to attend to anti-Semitism throughout trainees mass campus protests against the Israeli routine forces genocidal war versus the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.The Trump administration has actually warned at least 60 other scholastic institutions that they could deal with charges over continuous probes into anti-Semitism on college campuses.Columbia University is presently facing numerous federal investigations, and it has actually ended up being a main focus of Trumps migration crackdown targeting pro-Palestine trainee activists.One such specific, former Columbia graduate student and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, is currently being apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In recent weeks, the State Department has actually transferred to deport a number of Columbia students with visas over supposed pro-Hamas belief.
The university has actually also confirmed that Department of Homeland Security representatives have actually existed on campus.Armstrong, the 4th Ivy League president to resign amid Republican pressure on universities reactions to pro-Palestine student advocacy, follows in the footsteps of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who stepped down after extreme examination from your home education panel.Armstrong will now go back to her previous task of leading Columbias Irving Medical Center in New York City.(Source: Press Television)