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Sharon Otterman
New York Times
In May 2024, a pro-Palestinian encampment formed on a campus lawn at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When the students refused to leave, Jennifer Mnookin, who was then the chancellor of the flagship state university, called in the police to remove their tents. Thirty-four people were arrested. But after the students set up their tents again, Dr. Mnookin pivoted. She decided “there were limits to the extent of policing that I was prepared to authorize,” she said, and spent the next nine days negotiating with the students.
Her confidence in handling that potential tinderbox, and others like it, impressed the trustees of Columbia University, who appointed Dr. Mnookin to be the 21st president, a role she starts on Wednesday. It is also emblematic of the deliberative leadership style she will seek to pursue at Columbia, she said in a wide-ranging interview last week.
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Rep. Elise Stefanik’s withering questioning of presidents of prominent colleges during a congressional hearing on antisemitism became a flashpoint in the national debate over campus speech. Then the New York Republican wrote a book about it.
In Poisoned Ivies, published earlier this year, Representative Stefanik decries the “academic rot” at prestigious institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities and the University of Pennsylvania, whose leaders eventually resigned amid criticism of their handling of 2024 protests over the war in Gaza. But Stefanik levies her critique more broadly at “American colleges and universities,” “campuses across the country,” and a “broken system.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s widely criticized rule limiting how long international students can stay in the country won’t take effect Sept. 15 after a federal judge postponed the rule as part of a lawsuit challenging the policy.
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote in a 48-page order that Trump officials didn’t respond adequately to public comments on the rule or consider alternative options, among other violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how departments create regulations. The department also failed to show a rational connection between the rule and its purported national security objectives.
The grief Emily Taylor had been holding at bay finally washed over her in January. It had been four months since a lone gunman shot Charlie Kirk in the throat at Utah Valley University, killing the conservative commentator in minutes. That winter “was the first time in my entire life that I didn’t go back to school,” said the former English professor, holding back tears.
Taylor had resigned from her tenured position in December to save her tiny college in South Carolina from a political witch hunt in which lawmakers threatened to pull her school’s funding because she’d written a brief essay acknowledging that before his violent death, Kirk had employed violent rhetoric.
