Within a day of my posting Part I of this series about leadership in higher education, which focused on Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia University, the situation over which she presided went from bad to worse. In just in the last 24 hours tensions at Columbia escalated considerably. Largely pro-Palestinian students continued to refuse to back down. In person classes were suspended for at least the Passover holiday. All students who did not live on campus were told not to come in. And Jewish students were advised by a resident rabbi to go home and stay there until things cooled down. The campus was so roiled that the White House felt compelled to comment that “blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous,” and to warn that “silence is complicity.”
President Shafik was of course the lightning rod, she got it from all sides. Predictably, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik – who appears hellbent on being the bane of women leaders, specifically those of large Ivy League institutions – demanded that Shafik resign immediately, charging that she had “clearly lost control of the campus.” Protesters in turn thought just the opposite – that Shafik had not been too weak in response to their continuing disruptions but too strong.
Their view was most remarkably expressed not by them but by a group of untenured faculty who sided, unequivocally, with the protesters. In a letter to the student newspaper, The Columbia Spectator, they wrote: “The behavior of university administrators that has created this atmosphere of fear is not normal or acceptable. We are working to overturn the student suspensions that have been issued and ensure that administrators are not allowed to summon [the New York City] police on a whim.”
To say that Shafik is caught between a rock and a hard place doesn’t quite capture it. On the assumption that other campus leaders – other presidents, deans, and trustees – don’t want to fall into the same trap, is there anything to be learned from this case?
I will have more to say about this in a future post. For now, just five quick leadership lessons. 1) Take a clear, unambiguous position early on and stick to it. Flexibility in a prestigious post is not generally a strength. 2) Ground your positions in both morality and legality – simultaneously, not sequentially. 3) Keep your allies close and your close allies even closer. Keep your enemies at a distance. 4) Never allow anything or anyone bad to persist. If left to fester bad has a malevolent habit of getting worse. 5) If you reach a point where too many followers refuse to follow, and neither their numbers nor their levels of resistance show signs of abating, recalibrate. Consider your options, which likely are only three. The first is somehow to restore order before the spring semester ends. The second is to do little or nothing until the spring semester ends – which is soon. The third is to resign.