Liz Essley Whyte, Douglas Belkin and Sara Randazzo:
Columbia University’s president had already been hounded out of office, but her ordeal wasn’t over.
Four days after she stepped down under government pressure during fraught federal funding negotiations, Katrina Armstrong spent three hours being deposed by a government attorney in Washington, D.C. The lawyer grilled Armstrong over whether she had done enough to protect Jewish students against antisemitism.
As she dodged specifics under questioning, the lawyer said her answer “makes absolutely no sense” and that he was “baffled” by her leadership style.
“I’m just trying to understand how you have such a terrible memory of specific incidents of antisemitism when you’re clearly an intelligent doctor,” he said.
The attorney in the room during the April 1 deposition, a senior Health and Human Services official named Sean Keveney, is part of a little-known government task force that has shaken elite American universities to their core in recent weeks. It has targeted billions of dollars in federal funding at premiere institutions such as Columbia and Harvard, with cascading effects on campuses nationwide. Now it is pressing to put Columbia under a form of federal oversight known as a consent decree.
