How To Appoint a Commissar (Part 12) - Columbia Interim President Claire Shipman

The commissars will get cringier until morale improves - A MSM propagandist is now cosplaying as a Demoralized DIEvy League president, and why every university needs DOGE like Bloat @ Brown

Comrades: Meet the new girlboss, same as the old girlboss.

Columbia University has appointed former CNN “journalist” Claire Shipman as its new interim president. She is making herstory as the institution’s third female president, after the first and second both resigned within the past year. The three presidents before them served for a decade each and 30 years combined, but they weren’t diverse enough for this stunning progress. Dwight D. Eisenhower was Columbia’s President from 1948-1953 before he was elected President of the United States. He warned us about the military industrial complex and scientific-technological elite that now run academia. How far we have fallen.

---

University presidents used to have cushy gigs. All they had to do was fundraise from rich donors, stroke the egos of professors, and give a few cliched speeches to the students. Pass Go, collect millions in salary, allocate billions in federal funding, rinse and repeat for the next school year. Now the job is much more difficult, though it still pays well. Donors are up in arms because you have tarnished the brand on their diplomas. Professors and administrators despise you because you will never be ideologically pure enough, yet they need you to keep their federal funding gravy train rolling. The red guard students are going full Hamas/Luigi struggle session on you, while they sink into debt and despair.

---

Columbia has an endowment of $15 billion and is the largest private landowner in New York City. It is essentially a tax-free hedge fund with a woke jihad madrassa attached to it. What important academic breakthroughs have been made at Columbia over the past decade? What have the alumni of this period contributed to the world? What experience does Shipman have to steady the ship? What ideological diversity exists within these ivory towers? Close to none, but they continue to demand billions every year from the American taxpayer. You are welcome to steel man with evidence to the contrary.

Mercifully, the press release announcing Claire’s appointment was much shorter than other commissars because no one wants to get embarrassed when she inevitably resigns in a few months.

---

Claire Shipman, CC ‘86, SIPA ‘94, was appointed Acting President of Columbia University in March 2025. She is a distinguished journalist, best-selling author, and a leading voice for the advancement of women’s leadership. Shipman earned a Bachelor of Arts in Russian Studies from Columbia College and a Master of International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). She has long been dedicated to the interests of the Columbia community and to advancing academic and leadership initiatives. Shipman has served on Columbia’s Board of Trustees since 2013, and was elected Co-Chair in 2023. She has been honored with the University's John Jay Award for professional achievement and the Hamilton Award.

Shipman and her two predecessors are making women’s leadership look bad. Columbia must be desperate. They have appointed a commissar with no previous experience in academia. Claire was previously half of a commissar power couple. Her ex-husband Jay Carney served as press secretary for Obama, perhaps the most famous living Columbia alum. He cashed in on Barry’s cache with cushy corporate lobbying gigs at Amazon and Airbnb. Stunning and brave resistance!

Shipman has also co-written four New York Times bestsellers with the BBC’s Katty Kay, including The Confidence Code and The Power Code. Her work on the economic argument for women in leadership and the confidence gap young girls and women often face has driven change in workplaces and schools across the nation. Before turning to writing, Shipman built a career as a leading international and political journalist. She reported for CNN, NBC, and ABC, covering some of the world’s most transformative events, including the collapse of the Soviet Union. Shipman spent 15 years as a senior correspondent and substitute anchor for ABC’s Good Morning America, contributing to shows like This Week and World News Tonight. She also served as a White House correspondent for NBC News, covering presidential policy for Nightly News and Today. She received a DuPont and an Emmy Award for her coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square student uprising, a second DuPont Award for reporting on the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and a Peabody Award as part of CNN’s team covering the failed 1993 Soviet coup.

Bold strategy to have someone who worked at CNN/ABC/NBC, the networks Trump hates the most, to negotiate with him. Let’s see if it pays off! You couldn’t script this poetic justice any better. She covered the collapse of the Soviet Union, only to oversee the collapse of Columbia. Pravda would blush at all the propaganda she has produced.

---

Who put Claire in this position? David Greenwald is Chairman of the Columbia Board of Trustees. He previously served as a chairman and general counsel of Goldman Sachs, the vampire squid. He also serves on Boards of the New York Presbyterian Hospital, the Legal Aid Society, and the Lincoln Center Theater. Like every striver globalist, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Let’s all give David a pat on the back for overseeing the rot of preeminent institutions in medicine, law, and art.

I nominate

The Ivy Exile

to be the next President of Columbia. As he states: “Why not me? You could probably do better, but you’ve already done worse.”

---

Woke, DEI, and affirmative action remain deeply entrenched across academia. That is why the Trump administrative should continue to pull federal funding. I salute the young rooftop Alex Shieh, who published Bloat@Brown. He made ~4,000 administrators melt down by asking them a simple question: “What do you do all day?” Now the university is threatening him with sanctions and expulsion.

The Dean of DEI at Brown’s medical school has just been promoted to VP of Campus Life:

Patricia Poitevien MD, MSc, FAAP is the Senior Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University. Dr. Poitevien’s research focuses on inclusion and mentorship of underrepresented learners in academic medicine, bias in assessment and the impact of racism on medical education. She was a founding member of the Association of Pediatric Program Directors (APPD) Learning Community on Underrepresented Minorities in Medicine a (UIM) and is currently the Immediate Past-President of the APPD. She has lectured nationally on disparities in medical education and in healthcare and has led numerous workshops on building diverse and inclusive environments within academic medicine. She has published on professional identity formation and belonging for underrepresented in medicine (UIM) learners, using a competency based medical education framework to advance anti-racist medical education and utilizing simulation in faculty development to address bias in the clinical learning environment. Her interests include recruitment and mentorship of UIM trainees and faculty, competency based medical education and professional identity formation for UIM learners.

Anti-racist medical education sounds fun and definitely won’t get patients killed. Although she graduated medical school in 1998, she didn’t receive a medical license until 2018. Reminder that if you step onto her campus, half of the students would find it justified to kill you for disagreeing with them.

---

Palantir, Thiel Fellowships, and UATX are building new tracks to promote merit where incumbent universities have failed:

Good Will Hunting tried to warn us: “You dropped 150 grand on a fuckin’ education you could’ve gotten for $1.50 in late charges at the public libary.”

---

Fake news about me from The Atlantic:

---

Shipman is an AWFL.PMC.NPC.DNC carbon copy of her predecessors and sister school president - there is no diversity of thought in these boardrooms: