Columbia College introduced Wednesday that Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, an economist who has served as president of the London Faculty of Economics since 2017, might be its subsequent president. Shafik, 60, would be the first girl to guide the Ivy League establishment when she replaces present president Lee Bollinger in July.
Different elite universities together with Dartmouth, Harvard and the College of Pennsylvania additionally appointed girls as their presidents in current months.
The board of trustees referred to as Shafik “the right candidate” in a letter to the Columbia group, describing her as a “good and ready world chief, a group builder, and a preeminent economist, who understands” greater schooling “and the world past it.”
Shafik has intensive expertise in monetary establishments throughout the globe, serving because the World Financial institution’s vp, the Worldwide Financial Fund’s deputy managing director and the Financial institution of England’s deputy governor. She was additionally the primary girl to be president of the London Faculty of Economics and the primary girl to be everlasting secretary of the U.Okay. Division for Worldwide Growth.
Within the letter, the trustees wrote that what set Shafik aside past her accomplishments was “her unshakable confidence within the important function establishments of upper schooling can and should play in fixing the world’s most advanced issues.”
Shafik’s household got here to the U.S. from Egypt within the Sixties when she was 4 years outdated, and she or he attended faculties in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina earlier than incomes her undergraduate diploma in economics and politics on the College of Massachusetts-Amherst. She then earned a grasp’s diploma in economics from LSE and a Ph.D. in economics at Oxford College.
Shafik will assume the presidency as universities await Supreme Court docket choices involving race-conscious admissions and face controversies over the excessive value of schooling and free speech on campuses.
