In a letter to the university community, Jonathan Lavine, chair of Columbia’s board of trustees, called Shafik “the perfect candidate: a brilliant and able global leader, a community builder, and a preeminent economist who understands the academy and the world beyond it.”
When Shafik takes office, she will be the first new president in more than 20 years at the private university in New York. Columbia has more than 33,000 students, including about 8,800 undergraduates.
“The university is vibrant, flourishing and world-leading and -shaping,” Shafik, 60, said Wednesday in remarks that the university live-streamed.
Shafik will take the helm several months after Columbia made an embarrassing disclosure — that it had reported faulty data on class size and faculty credentials to U.S. News & World Report for its national university rankings. Scrambling to fix the problem, Columbia, which had recently tied for second on that list, halted its data submission last year and slipped to 18th.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Shafik fled the country with her family when she was 4 years old. She attended schools in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and politics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
She holds a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, known as LSE, and a doctorate in economics from Oxford University. She has worked for the World Bank, for a British government agency of international development and for the International Monetary Fund. She also was deputy governor of the Bank of England, and in 2020, according to LSE, was named a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords with the title of baroness. In academia, Shafik also had stints at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University. She has led LSE since 2017.
“I have had jobs that are about doing good, such as fighting poverty or leading educational institutions, as well as jobs that are about preventing bad things from happening, like at the IMF and Bank of England,” Shafik has said of her career, according to a short biography that Columbia distributed. “Both are vital if we are to make and secure progress for humanity.”
Shafik joins women who have broken glass ceilings for leadership in recent decades at the eight Ivy League universities. Dartmouth College in July named Sian Beilock to become its next president, the first woman selected to fill that position on more than an interim basis. Yale University was led by a pioneering female acting president, Hanna Holborn Gray, in 1977-78, but no woman has held the Yale presidency in a permanent capacity.
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