Mnookin, who is Jewish, will be the Ivy League school’s fourth president in just over two years and the fourth woman in a row to hold the role. (The Washington Free Beacon first reported the news.)

Columbia has been accused in both federal probes and civil litigation of inadequately protecting Jews on campus, including during an anti-Israel encampment and occupation of a building on campus.

“The last few years have been undeniably difficult for the Jewish and Israeli communities on campus,” Brian Cohen, executive director at the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, part of the Columbia and Barnard Hillel, told JNS.

“I am hopeful that president-elect Mnookin will bring the reputation, experience and understanding that we need to build on that strong foundation,” Cohen said.

David Greenwald and Jeh Johnson, co-chairs of the Columbia board of trustees, stated that Mnookin “will be an exceptional leader for Columbia’s future.”

“She is a distinguished scholar, who now leads a complex institution with clarity and vision. She understands the essential role that higher education and research play in advancing knowledge, serving the public good and addressing our most pressing challenges,” they said. “She is also a keen listener, who builds consensus and does not shy away from making difficult decisions when necessary.”

A Columbia professor, who was on campus during the encampment and who asked not to be named, told JNS that it has been “a traumatic couple of years” on campus.

Last March, the Trump administration cut $400 million in funding to Columbia, citing its handling of Jew-hatred. In July, Columbia agreed to pay $221 million to settle the claims. It admitted no guilt.

It also agreed to allow a federal monitor, to report data relevant to affirmative action and to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred.

Four days after the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, Mnookin released a statement about the attacks, in which she appeared to universalize their impact.

“I fear the terrifying inevitability of a great many further deaths, of Israelis and Palestinians, of civilians and soldiers,” the then UW chancellor stated. “I worry, too, that these devastating developments will fan the global flames of both antisemitism and Islamophobia, making peace and justice in the region even more elusive.”

“To the great many people in our community who have friends, family and loved ones in Israel or the Palestinian Territories: my heart goes out to you,” she added.

On May 10, 2024, Mnookin stated that UW had “reached an agreement with Students for Justice in Palestine to end its encampment on Library Mall, which is being cleared now.”

She thanked “SJP student leaders and their faculty liaisons for their constructive engagement as we searched for a mutually acceptable path forward.”

“We appreciate that the encampment, named by SJP the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, although in violation of Chapter 18, was motivated by understandably passionate feelings about the devastation in Gaza, and was a source of community for many participants,” the school stated.

“We also understand that the encampment made others in our community, especially portions of our Jewish community, feel uncomfortable and unseen,” it said. “We reiterate our strong condemnation of antisemitism, Islamophobia and hate and bigotry in all its forms, and we recognize the costs of war and displacement on so many across the globe.”

In July 2025, the university suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.

In her first day at UW, Mnookin posted that the school was on what she said is “ancestral Ho-Chunk land,” and as dean of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, she wrote in June 2020 “to the black members of our community: we see you. Black Lives Matter.”

“Racial disparities, and ongoing structural racism, are vividly and disgracefully present in so many aspects of our society: policing, of course, but also income inequality, health care and access to education,” she wrote at the time. “National and local incidents are layered upon these disparities, and I recognize the immense emotional toll these events can take, especially on our students, faculty and staff of color.”

As chancellor of UW-Madison, Mnookin has overseen a complex educational organization with a $4.95 billion budget (in 2024-25), with 51,822 in fall 2025, 27,293 faculty and staff in fall 2024, per its website. Madison has a medical school with an affiliated medical center, much as Columbia has.

As of 2024, Columbia had a total enrollment of 35,769 students, about 26,000 of whom were graduate and professional studies students.

Beginning in 2023, Columbia students held a walkout demanding that the university divest from anything having to do with Israel, including a joint degree program. There were later takeovers of the central campus quad by anti-Israel tent encampments organized by Students for Justice in Palestine. Anti-Israel protesters also broke into a campus building, barricading themselves inside, and hung a large banner from its facade calling for “intifada.”

There was soon a heavy New York City Police Department presence around Columbia’s main campus, which is located in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights.

Police barricades blocked the campus and Columbia University ID was required for entry. Some Jewish students were harassed and blocked from getting to their classes by angry anti-Israel protesters.

More than 100 people were arrested in May 2024 and approximately another 80 were arrested on May 7, 2025 for occupying Columbia’s Butler Library.

The university’s leadership was viewed by some as being slow to act and as failing to protect its Jewish students from antisemitic abuse.