By Sofia Matson

By the time Columbia College’s Class Day ceremony began late last month, some words had lost their meaning. As students found their seats beneath the white tent over Butler Lawns and parents summited the bleachers behind, a prerecorded message echoed through the loudspeakers: “The University retains the right to reasonably regulate certain forms of public discussion.” Evasive and indirect, the vague threat pricked no more ears than a routine subway announcement. Students had been receiving warnings like this, typically in emails addressed to “members of the Columbia community,” for months.

Thomas Edwards, the Class of 2025 student speaker, struck a more personal note as the ceremony began. “No one can silence your voice,” said the bespectacled, self-described “class yapper.” He advised his peers to celebrate each other—the legacies of their 3am friendships, their bravery, their compassion, and their honest words.

For most of the ceremony, however, student voices were, if not silent, then muted. During the presentation of awards winners smiled awkwardly beneath their caps, unsure where to look as they listened to their accomplishments (“liaison at the United Nations,” “National Youth Poet Laureate”) read aloud. Applause from the audience was polite, a little perfunctory. Outside it was a cool fifty degrees. Students sitting beneath the shaded tent tucked their hands into the folds of their gowns for warmth.

Two hours in, Acting President Claire Shipman approached the podium. By then, students were warm and ready not to be “props in anyone’s political play,” as they had been told by Jodi Kantor, this year’s keynote speaker – and the journalist who broke the Harvey Weinstein story in 2017. The boos began before Shipman open her mouth. Once it was clear that the shouts would not cease, she began her address by evoking Columbia’s tradition of free speech. “I am always open to feedback, which I am getting right now,” she said. She encouraged students to thank their families for supporting them throughout their college career. The boos quieted. She then began to quote a speech from Robert Kennedy when he spoke to the National Union of South African Students. The boos and jeers resumed and became words. “Shame!” “Get off the stage!” “Free Mahmoud!”

Mahmoud Khalil, a December 2024 graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on March 8. Since then he has remained in a detention center in Louisiana while his wife, Noor Abdalla, has given birth to their first child and accepted an honorary degree on his behalf at a ceremony organized by Columbia and New York University students. Khalil is both a powerful figure and a sign of the larger times, in which an undergraduate student at Columbia University can be arrested following a scheduled citizenship interview, in which a graduate student at Tufts University can be arrested by masked agents after publishing an op-ed criticizing Israel in the student newspaper, in which student journalists covering pro-Palestine protests are issued interim suspensions by Columbia and Barnard.

For Columbia these rights violations go hand-in-hand with more sweeping capitulations to the Trump administration, including banning face masks at protests and increasing oversight of Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies department.

That such clumsy attempts to balance university autonomy with federal demands are unfolding under the leadership of a longtime journalist is especially disappointing. Shipman spent a decade at CNN, five of those years reporting Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. She was a White House correspondent for NBC, then a senior correspondent for ABC News. Among her numerous prizes is an Emmy Award for covering the 1989 Tiananmen Square student uprising. Yet her choice to sacrifice academic freedom and civic protections to the Trump Administration are a far cry from the values of a free press.

Shipman has served on Columbia’s Board of Trustees since 2013, and many on campus see in this the explanation for her leadership. Like her predecessors Katrina Armstrong and Minouche Shafik, the latter of whom was away at a dinner with donors in Washington, D.C., when she called the New York City Police to forcibly remove students from pro-Palestine encampments on the university’s lawns, Shipman has failed to put her students first. On May 22, a joint federal civil rights violation notice buried Columbia under yet another layer of regulatory scrutiny, with long-term implications including the potential loss of federal funding for programs like NIH medical research and Pell Grants and structural reforms such as rewriting discrimination policies. Shipman disagreed with the government’s determination, as she wrote in an email addressed to members of the Columbia community the next day. However, she continued, “it is not a signal that we are no longer working to resolve the issues with regard to our critical and long-standing partnership with the federal government.”

Perhaps Shipman’s gestures towards unity on Class Day were bound to fall flat considering the nature of her job. Certainly she made things no easier for herself by blatantly ignoring her audience. Over the shouts and jeers she persisted; there was no vaudeville hook. She congratulated students, “emissaries of this great institution,” and spoke of trust, dialogue, common ground. Her tone, steady but distant, matched the increasingly blanket-statement emails students had come to expect. She tried to endear herself to students by recalling a lively anecdote from senior class president Rohan Mehta’s speech. Each time she mentioned Rohan, however, she mispronounced his name. The students only shouted louder, as if cheering for a martyr: “Say his name!”

Shipman concluded on a note of forced excitement, looking forward to “hearing just how loud you can get for Columbia College tomorrow.” Tomorrow, at Columbia’s university wide commencement, students in the crowd—batting around inflatable college lions, engineering school hammers, and blue Barnard “B”s—would joke about knocking back a shot every time she said the word democracy.

For Shipman, boos and bravos were one and the same shouts for Columbia, a show of institutional loyalty. At Class Day and Commencement she sought to perform a harmony between students and administrators that does not exist. But the Class of 2025 refused to pretend. As Edwards, the class day speaker, had already put it: “Today is not about Columbia University. It’s about you.”

Sofia Matson, a writer living in New York City, is a 2025 graduate of Columbia University.