Minouche Shafik’s resignation as president of Columbia University should be a watermark event in how Americans understand their institutional leaders in this era—and why change is necessary. We live in the age of the interchangeable technocrat, the permanent managers who come and go through a revolving door filled with people who think like them, act like them, and fail like them.

But never do they stop walking through that door.

It’s worth taking a brief review of Shafik’s very short tenure at Columbia. She was hired in July 2023, 13 months ago. Her predecessor was Lee Bollinger, whose career is marked by his atrocious handling of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to campus in 2007 (and perhaps should have been a warning to his successor). The low-level anti-Semitism buzzing in the background burst into the fore after Hamas’s October 7 massacre and the campus’s pro-Hamas students and faculty and administrators came out of the closet. The campus ceased to function for many Jewish students, and Shafik came before a House committee in April. Her meek criticism of some of the rank anti-Semitism at the school infuriated colleagues and students, and the tentifada encampments dug in. After pro-Hamas protesters occupied a building and took a hostage, police were called in to restore order. No one is happy with Shafik’s handling of the situation.

Shafik’s pre-Columbia career gave a hint as to why she would so suddenly resign, effective immediately, as Columbia president two weeks before Labor Day.

Before Columbia, The Right Honorable Baroness Life Peer Shafik was president of the London School of Economics. Prior to that, she was deputy governor of the Bank of England, vice president of the World Bank, and managing director of the International Monetary Fund, among others.

Next up: Shafik will be working for the British Foreign Ministry leading a review of the government’s international development policies.

You don’t have to worry about Minouche Shafik; she always lands on someone’s feet. Her life peerage in the House of Lords is nothing compared to her life peerage in the House of Technocrats.

Truth is, Shafik’s stacked resume should have been a warning sign—not that she was overqualified for Columbia, but that she is part of a global class of bureaucrats who live and work on autopilot. She has reached that heralded point in her career at which her jobs are interchangeable. Once you are admitted to this class, there is little you can do to earn expulsion. (And if you are French, there is probably nothing you can do to earn expulsion.)

The problem arises when a job requires you to care.

I don’t mean to suggest that Shafik is heartless, for I doubt that is the case. When speaking before Congress of the anti-Semitic harassment of Jews on her campus, she often pursed her lips and furrowed her brow at appropriate moments, suggesting that, all else being equal, she would probably prefer all of this not to be happening.

So she had two options: stay and reform the university to put it back in line with its stated goals and values, or flee the country for a well-paid position pushing papers around her desk and listening to the calming swoosh-swooshing sounds they make.

And that is very much her right. But is anyone interested in turning around America’s elite universities? Because this crisis predated Shafik and it is only getting worse. And not just at Columbia.

This week, a judge ruled that UCLA cannot allow Jews to be blocked or excluded from campus facilities simply because they are Jewish. Sounds obvious, right—especially for a public university? It is discouraging that UCLA had to be told this in the first place. As the judge said: “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the U.C.L.A. campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating.”

And yet even worse than that is the fact that UCLA is challenging this obligation at all. “The district court’s ruling is improper and would hamstring our ability to respond to events on the ground,” argued university spokeswoman Mary Osako.

Large and prestigious universities are going into the fall semester still explicitly dedicated to allowing the physical prevention of Jews from accessing parts of campus that are open to all. Ending this crisis will require school leaders who give their blood, sweat, and tears to the cause of reversing the increasingly segregationist bent of American higher education and the cult-like mind-washing of the student bodies into ragged conspiracist nests. Is anyone up to the task?