The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the early 19th century that war was the continuation of politics by other means. Today I could add that one of the battlefields of this bloodless contest are the US campuses: the university as the scene of culture wars, caught between Joe Biden’s promise to partially forgive student debt, rejected by the Supreme Court, and the end of positive discrimination also by decision of the high court. In this bristly context, as the 20th Chancellor of Columbia -and the first at the helm of the institution- lands the Egyptian-born economist Nemat minouche Shafik. Director of the London School of Economics since 2017, with a career that has zigzagged between teaching and business, the British-American Shafik (Alexandria, 60 years old) will have to navigate a panorama of extremes, in which cancellations are common currency and the union mobilization that runs through the country also catches on in the classrooms.
Shafik was officially sworn in on July 1, one day after the Supreme Court challenged the admissions system at Harvard and North Carolina universities. Her appointment is the last of a woman at the head of important institutions, such as Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and the George Washington. But landing at Columbia, which has eight Nobel Prize winners in Economics, such as Professor Joseph Stiglitz, has special significance. Stiglitz has greeted his arrival with enthusiasm: “One of the things I have always admired about Minouche [el apelativo francés por el que es conocida] it is that he has maintained his commitment to intellectual rigor, even while working in positions of enormous responsibility.”
These positions include senior positions in the most important international institutions, from the World Bank or the Bank of England to the International Monetary Fund, where she was deputy managing director. During her period as deputy governor of the British central bank, she was responsible for contingency plans for the Brexit referendum in 2016. She also directed the British International Cooperation agency, where she forged a commitment to allocate 0.7% of GDP to Development aid. In recognition of her public service, she was created a baroness by Queen Elizabeth II in 2015 and a member of the House of Lords in 2020.
When he was four years old, Shafik’s family, an enlightened middle class, fled Egypt due to the political and economic instability of the mid-1960s. It is not difficult to reconstruct the historical context and the personal mourning of exile following the autobiographical work far from egyptor, of André Aciman, another Alexandrian transplanted to the United States like her. The Mediterranean city’s bourgeoisie was targeted by a nationalist regime and when the government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser confiscated her home and property, the Shafiks fled. Her father, a scientist, found a job in the US, where he had done his doctorate. Minouche and her sister attended numerous colleges in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. After spending part of her adolescence in Egypt, the future president of Columbia graduated summa cum laude in Economics and Politics from the University of Massachusetts in 1983. He continued his studies at the London School of Economics and at Oxford.
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Remembering his childhood, Shafik refers to education as the unwavering value that gave him strength and encouragement to move forward. “When my family left Alexandria in the early 1960s, my father told me: ‘They can take everything away from you except your education,’” she explained when she was named rector in January. Hence her determination to also address skeptics who doubt the value of education. “We are at a time in history where universities need to be both academic and relevant,” she added. She wants higher education to interact with the res publicathat both worlds stop turning their backs on each other.
Professor at Georgetown, author of books advocating for a new social order updating Rousseauian ideals, she identifies as brunette (brown) on the forms that require racial portrayals in the US. That is why for Columbia he was the “perfect candidate”, as a “brilliant and capable global leader, preeminent economist who understands academia and the world beyond their respective limits” . His international experience, scarce in the inbred university world, gives him a panoramic vision. And his staunch defense of diversity and inclusion, an asset in the face of the new scenario opened by the revocation by the Supreme Court of a doctrine that seemed established since the ruling in the case Grutter vs. Bollinger in 2003, which advocated affirmative action, or positive discrimination, in admissions.
The Bollinger who gives that sentence its name is none other than Lee C. Bollinger, Shafik’s predecessor at Columbia and until now the most veteran of the rectors of the Ivy League, who warned that a negative ruling by the Supreme Court would drastically reduce racial diversity and ethnicity in classrooms, depriving marginalized minorities of opportunities. After the setback of the Supreme Court, Chancellor Shafik, of Arab origin, brunette and cosmopolitan, she will face the challenge of defending equal opportunities in a country as radically unequal as the US. “I am convinced that talent is distributed evenly throughout the world, but opportunity is not”, she pointed out, recalling that, otherwise to have been born in another family, or in another place like the United States without going any further, would not have reached even remotely where he has arrived.
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