Columbia Taps University of Wisconsin Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin as Fourth President in Two Years
Columbia University has selected University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor Jennifer Mnookin as its next president, according to three people familiar with the decision. Mnookin, the former dean of UCLA School of Law, will be Columbia’s fourth president in two years.
Her appointment comes at a tumultuous time for the university, which is still recovering from its protracted battle with the Trump administration.
As UW-Madison chancellor, Mnookin struck a deal with the school’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” after it occupied a major campus thoroughfare, framing the protesters as well-intentioned activists who were “motivated by understandably passionate feelings about the devastation in Gaza.” In exchange for their cooperation, the school pledged to go easy on the protesters and host at least three guest scholars from Palestinian universities.
Mnookin also threw her support behind the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, telling black students at UCLA Law, “we see you. Black Lives Matter.”
“As members of a law school community in particular, we must recognize and grapple with the complicity of the legal system and law enforcement in acts of racism and violence,” she wrote to the school. “These recent horrifying instances are, sadly, not aberrations; our legal system has been part and parcel of our nation’s shameful history of institutionalized racism.”
She would strike a different tone five years later in a November conversation with the New York Times that took place while she was being considered for the Columbia job. She told the paper that universities had over-indexed on identity politics.
“I think that many universities, not all, but many, were for a period of time deeply focused on identity diversity, and really not so focused on viewpoint diversity or belief diversity,” she said in an interview. “[U]niversities should be spaces where ideas, and different ideas, embodied by people from different backgrounds, come together.”
A spokesman for Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an announcement posted Sunday evening, the university described Mnookin as a “thoughtful consensus builder who strives for excellence in every pursuit.”
Columbia’s last full-time president, Minouche Shafik, resigned in August 2024 after she allowed an anti-Israel encampment to consume the campus for nearly a month. Her successor, Katrina Armstrong, resigned after seven months as interim president, shortly after she told faculty in a closed-door meeting that the changes being made at the behest of the Trump administration were largely window dressing. She went on to tell the administration in a deposition that she could not recall a single instance of anti-Semitism taking place on campus.
Since Armstong’s resignation, the school has been led by Claire Shipman, the former co-chair of the university’s Board of Trustees. While leading the board, the Washington Free Beacon reported, Shipman said that the school needed to get an “Arab on our board” and suggested removing a Jewish trustee. She apologized for the comments, made in text messages released by the House Committee on Education and Workforce, after Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., NY) demanded she resign.
The school’s leadership crises prolonged the university’s fight with the Trump administration, which froze $400 million to the school in March over Columbia’s alleged failure to address anti-Semitism. Though the administration reinstated most of the money when it reached a settlement with Columbia, the effects are still being felt: Columbia has laid off nearly 180 researchers funded by federal grants, and the school’s operating surplus declined by 63 percent between 2024 and 2025.
The tumult appears to have made it difficult for Columbia to woo prospective presidents. The university extended its presidential search in December after two candidates, former Harvard Law dean John Manning and Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeir, removed themselves from consideration.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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