Katrina Armstrong is leaving the post a week after the university agreed to a list of demands from the White House.
Columbia University changed its president on Friday evening, one week after the university bowed to a series of demands from the Trump administration, which had moved to withhold $400 million in essential federal funding.
The abrupt exit of Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, made way for the university’s third leader since August: Claire Shipman, the co-chair of the university’s board of trustees.
The university announced Dr. Armstrong’s departure and Ms. Shipman’s appointment in an email to the campus community Friday night. The letter thanked Dr. Armstrong for her efforts during “a time of great uncertainty for the university” and said that Ms. Shipman has “a clear understanding of the serious challenges facing our community.”
Ms. Shipman, a journalist with two degrees from Columbia, was named acting president and assumed the top job at one of the nation’s pre-eminent universities at an extraordinarily charged moment in American higher education.
The federal government is threatening to end the flow of billions of dollars to universities across the country, many of which are facing inquiries from agencies that range from the Justice Department to the Department of Health and Human Services.
But the Trump administration’s punitive approach to universities is playing out most acutely at Columbia. The university, a hub of last spring’s campus protest movement against the war in Gaza, has spent months confronting accusations that it condoned antisemitic behavior, permitted lawlessness to dominate, and stifled academic and political speech.
