"Three down, so many to go," posted House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) on X at the unexpected news of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik's sudden resignation on Wednesday.

Woefully misidentified by her controversial predecessor Lee C. Bollinger as "the best person to next lead Columbia," Shafik had a 13-month tenure during which she shambolically debased one of America's so-called best institutions of higher education as she spent months failing to resolve prolonged and often violent pro-Palestinian protests over the war in Gaza (full disclosure: I was offered admission to Columbia in the 1990s but declined in significant part because even then I could not find a single person who would recommend the experience of studying there).

In her Ivy League-level disgrace, Shafik joins former University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill and former Harvard President Claudine Gay, who both resigned after infamously telling Stefanik's Congressional committee last December that unspecified "context" would determine whether calling for the deaths of Jews violated their campus harassment policies. Through this ill-advised answer, all three women are believed to have cost their institutions hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, massive reputational harm, and in, Gay's case, embarrassing revelations that a majority of her academic publications include what appear to be........

© Newsweek