Columbia University is still struggling to get back the $400 million in research money that the Trump administration cut. While that effort is ongoing behind the scenes the school continues to get bad news. In fact, there are at least four separate stories out in the past 24 hours about distinct categories of bad news for Columbia. Let's walk through these in order from most alarming to least alarming.
First up, Rep. Elise Stefanik is directly criticizing President Claire Shipman over some comments she made about the composition of the school's board.
In a letter sent to acting university president Claire Shipman on Tuesday, Stefanik and GOP Rep. Tim Walberg, chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, pointed to a message from January 17, 2024, where Shipman – then the chair of Columbia University’s board of trustees – said the university needed “to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board,” adding, “Quickly I think. Somehow.”...
The letter also points to Shipman’s criticism of Jewish board member Shoshana Shendelman, whom Stefanik and Walberg claim is one of the board’s “most outspoken members against the bullying, harassment, and intimidation of Jewish students.”
Shipman said of Shendelman in January 25, 2024, according to the letter: “I just don’t think she should be on the board.”
The committee says the comment raises “the question of why you appeared to be in favor of removing one of the board’s most outspoken Jewish advocates at a time when Columbia students were facing a shocking level of fear and hostility.”
Columbia offered a statement saying these comments were taken out of context and were essentially old news. Still, this may be the most serious of the bad news stories because it suggests the Trump administration could be teeing up another change in the school's president before it returns any funding. But there's a lot more of this so let's move on.
The next bit of bad news involves Columbia's accreditation. About a month ago the Trump Department of Education announced that Columbia was in violation of anti-discrimination law and therefore its accreditation could be in danger. Columbia's accreditor is a separate institution so the Trump administration can't control it directly, but the announcement triggered a review and this week Columbia got a warning letter.
The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the organization that accredits Columbia, has notified the University that its status as an accredited institution “may be in jeopardy.”
Heather Perfetti, president of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, wrote Monday that the University “remains accredited while on warning” in a letter to acting University President Claire Shipman, CC ’86, SIPA ’94.
Perfetti cited “insufficient evidence that the institution is currently in compliance with Standard II (Ethics and Integrity)” as the reason why Columbia’s accreditation “may be in jeopardy.”
In practice, this means Columbia will have to submit a report by November which demonstrates they have met the ethics and integrity standard by providing a climate of respect for all students. Columbia expressed confidence it could work things out with the accreditor but obviously they don't know that for certain. Losing accreditation would mean losing access to federal student funding which would be another big blow to their enrollment and finances.
Moving on, Columbia experience a major cyberattack last week and now the school is suggesting that attack was politically motivated. Specifically, the person behind it spoke to Bloomberg anonymously and expressed interest in using the loads of hacked data to determine if Columbia is still using race as a factor in admissions.
The alleged hacker, speaking via text and claiming to work alone, said they sought to acquire information about university applications that would suggest a continuation of affirmative action policies in Columbia’s admissions, following a 2023 Supreme Court decision that effectively barred the practice. The Columbia official said the school’s admissions processes are compliant with the Supreme Court decision.
The alleged hacker declined to provide their name, saying they didn’t want to go to prison.
This one may not present an immediate problem for anyone but the hacker who will go to prison if caught. However, having the raw data out there means that someone could eventually crunch the numbers and find out if Columbia is cheating in some way to preserve a pre-determined equity outcome among those accepted for admissions. If so, that would put the school in serious trouble legally especially while Trump is in office. Even if they work out a deal to get their $400 million in funding back, this data theft could potentially lead to them losing it again.
Finally, this last story is really the least significant. Columbia has agreed to pay about $9 million to settle a lawsuit, which isn't a huge amount of money in the scheme of the school's finances, but the specifics of this settlement are really embarrassing for the school. Basically, they are admitting that they cheated to artificially inflate their ranking in the U.S. News & World Report list of best universities.
The lawsuit stemmed from a 2022 scandal over how Columbia earned a No. 2 spot in the magazine’s annual “Best Colleges” rankings that year, acing a process that is a powerful driver of prestige and applications for American universities. Believing there were flaws in the data underpinning the university’s score, a Columbia mathematician investigated and published a blog post asserting that several key figures were “inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading.”
The discrepancies caused Columbia to drop to No. 18 in the rankings. The next year, Columbia opted out of the rankings all together.
The proposed settlement, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday, did not require Columbia to formally admit wrongdoing. But the university said in a statement on Tuesday that it “deeply regrets deficiencies in prior reporting.”
Umm, no, sorry. Read the lengthy blog post linked above. What it shows is not a series of "deficiencies in prior reporting" but a clear campaign to game the system in every possible category that can be checked against the numbers. The blog post is really long but here's a bit of the conclusion:
The role played by Columbia itself in this drama is troubling and strange. In some ways its conduct seems typical of an elite institution with a strong interest in crafting a positive image from the data that it collects. Its choice to count undergraduates only, contrary to the guidelines, when computing student-faculty ratios is an example of this. Many other institutions appear to do the same. Yet in other ways Columbia seems atypical, and indeed extreme, either in its actual features or in those that it dubiously claims...
All in all, we have seen that 13% of the U.S. News ranking is based on reported figures that conflict with data released elsewhere by Columbia; that another 10% rests on questionable assertions about the financial resources Columbia devotes to its students; and that 22.6% is based on graduation rates that would surely fall if Columbia’s transfer students were counted. A further 14.4% is based on other factors (first-year retention, test scores, and student debt) that also do not count transfer students and that might well be lower if they did, although firm evidence of this is lacking...
In 2003, when Columbia was ranked in 10th place by U.S. News, its president, Lee Bollinger, told the New York Times, “Rankings give a false sense of the world and an inauthentic view of what a college education really is.” These words ring true today. Even as Columbia has soared to 2nd place in the ranking, there is reason for concern that its ascendancy may largely be founded, not on an authentic presentation of the university’s strengths, but on a web of illusions.
So the school now under pressure to demonstrate its ethics and integrity to its accreditor was caught essentially cheating on an exam. Not a little cheating but a lot of cheating. If Columbia University were a student at Columbia University they would likely be expelled for violating the honor code. Again, the financial penalty associated with this won't do a lot of harm to a big school like Columbia, but the public's assessment of the school's credibility as an institution deserves to drop substantially.
To be fair, that credibility is redeemed in part by the fact that a Columbia math professor figured all of this out and revealed it. He deserves a lot of credit for what looks like many hours of hard work digging out the real numbers and for presenting the unvarnished truth.
Michael Thaddeus, the mathematician who first revealed the flaws in the data, said on Tuesday that he found the settlement gratifying “because it amounts to an admission that the students’ complaint has merit.”
“Columbia did report false data over many years, and it reported false data about several things, not just class sizes,” he said.
He added that it would have been even better if Columbia had made an “honest attempt to explain its actions,” perhaps with an independent investigation addressing questions like why and how the false data were reported in the first place.
That really does seem appropriate, but as demonstrated above Columbia has a lot of other problems to deal with at the moment.
Update: President Shipman apologizes, claiming she didn't mean it.
Claire Shipman, acting president of Columbia University, issued an apology to several members of the campus community for leaked text messages where she suggested that a Jewish trustee should be removed from the university’s board over her pro-Israel advocacy.
“The things I said in a moment of frustration and stress were wrong. They do not reflect how I feel,” Shipman wrote on Wednesday in a private email obtained by Jewish Insider, noting that she was addressing “some trusted groups of friends and colleagues, with whom I’ve talked regularly over the last few months.”
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