Hi Rulers! Happy Friday. I have some news to share with you — next week, I’ll be joining our health care team here at POLITICO! Sadly, that means I’ll be handing off this newsletter. You can expect to hear from a variety of talented POLITICO journalists in the coming weeks. (You’ll be in good hands, I promise!) Thank you to everyone who has read my pieces this past year. It’s been a delight to write for you. Let’s get into it: Last year, academia celebrated the crossing of a new threshold: six out of eight Ivy Leagues would be helmed by women. Just five months later, that number has shrunk to four out of eight. And if House Republicans get their way, it could soon be three — a shockingly rapid departure from the majority-female class of presidents that started out the academic year. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson personally traveled to Columbia University, flanked by some of his GOP colleagues, to call for Minouche Shafik — the first woman to ever lead the university — to resign. Calls for her resignation have been rapidly growing since the campus erupted in sweeping protests over the Israel-Hamas war, which culminated in a large encampment of students living in tents. She testified before Congress last week, where she faced sharp criticism from Republicans for not doing enough to protect students from antisemitism. Shafik is just the latest Ivy League president to face intense pressure to resign. After Claudine Gay, the first Black president of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania's Liz Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth testified before Congress in December about protests on their own campuses, both Gay and Magill stepped down. (Gay resigned after conservative activist Christopher Rufo came forward with accusations that she had previously failed to properly provide attributions in some of her academic writing.) No male university presidents have testified. After their resignations, Gay and Magill were replaced with white men, who are serving as the universities’ interim presidents. Some women in academia are convinced these presidents are facing intense pressure because of their gender, not because of how they’ve handled the protests. Amy Diehl, gender equity researcher and co-author of Glass Walls: Shattering the Six Gender Bias Barriers Still Holding Women Back at Work, describes the phenomenon as a “glass cliff,” where women are expected to fix organizations that are in “crisis.” “When a woman leader is kicked out of her role after she doesn't perform the miraculous, organizations will often hire a white man to replace her, to signal a return to the status quo,” says Diehl, pointing back to Harvard and UPenn. The protests have become a rallying point for Republicans, who are raising alarms about Jewish students facing antisemitism on campus. It’s also proved a catalyst for fundraising, with GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik — who has largely championed the calls for resignation — raising 7 million in the first quarter of the year, more than she previously raised in any other quarter. Koritha Mitchell, a literary historian and cultural critic who teaches at Ohio State University, suggests that women — especially women of color — are often perceived as more liberal, which could feed into the GOP narrative that the Ivy League presidents are ideologically too far left on the Israel-Hamas war. That’s not the case, says Mitchell, but because Gay, Magill, and Shafik are all women — and Gay is Black and Shafik is Egyptian American — they could inherently be perceived as more “radical.” “You don’t get to be in these positions by being radical,” says Mitchell. “But because of the demographic, it’s so easy to paint it that way. Because of the racism and sexism in the country, there is always suspicion clinging to someone who isn’t a straight, cisgendered white man.” Academia has faced something of a reckoning over its treatment of women of color in the past year, in part because of Gay’s resignation and the end of affirmative action, but also because of the suicide of Antoinette "Bonnie" Candia-Bailey, former vice president of student affairs at Lincoln University in Missouri, who had accused the university’s president of bullying, harassment and discrimination. (Lincoln University is a historically Black university.) “You're seeing women and Black people are under attack on these campuses,” says Noliwe Rooks, chair of Africana Studies at Brown University, noting that those two groups benefited immensely from affirmative action. Even today, women presidents at prestigious universities are the exception. Many qualified women are still never able to secure a place as a university president at all, as just over three in 10 college presidents are women, according to the American Council on Education’s 2023 survey. And women are more likely than men to leave academia altogether, says Katie Spoon, lead author on a research article which shows that women in most academic fields are still underrepresented among tenure-track and tenured faculty. Why? “The greatest gender gap was in the workplace climate,” Spoon tells Women Rule. “This category includes factors such as feeling like they don’t belong or fit, feeling like they have to prove themselves and harassment.” As for the spate of resignations, Spoon says, “there’s certainly a gendered aspect” to it. “The academic climate in many places is one that still seems to look for any reason to deem a woman incapable of performing the job.”
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