It makes for a most tempting “Help Wanted” ad: Earn $5 million a year to lead one of the nation’s most powerful and prestigious institutions. Enjoy fancy dinners, almost unlimited travel, and a complimentary mansion in Upper Manhattan.
This is an incomplete list of the perks that the president of Columbia University receives. And yet no one seems to want the job.
In late March, Katrina Armstrong, Columbia’s interim president, resigned after an unhappy seven-month tenure, one marked by a never-ending dispute about campus anti-Semitism, and by President Donald Trump’s war on Columbia’s funding and independence. The school is now on its fourth president in only three years, and its latest leader isn’t even an academic.
In a sure sign of near-pathological administrative dysfunction, Columbia’s board of trustees chose its own co-chair, the journalist Claire Shipman, to serve as the school’s newest acting president. In other words, the hiring committee, evidently finding no one willing or able to run the school, hired itself. This is an exceedingly rare occurrence in the history of elite higher education, a fact Shipman seemed to acknowledge in her first public statement: “Ornamental language can’t disguise the fact that this is a precarious moment for Columbia University.” (A university spokesperson declined to comment on how the acting president was chosen. Shipman did not respond to an interview request.)
Columbia’s difficulty in appointing even an acting president suggests that it may be, at least for t...
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