Columbia University President Minouche Shafik resigned Wednesday after months of widespread fury over her handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and questions about her management of a bitterly divided campus.

She was the third leader of an Ivy League university to resign in about eight months after scathing appearances before Congress about anti-Semitism on their campuses.

Shafik, an economist who spent much of her career in London, said in a letter to the Columbia community that while she felt the campus had made progress in some important areas, there had also been a period of concern “where it has been difficult to overcome different opinions in our society.”

“This period has taken a significant toll on my family, as it has on others in our community,” Shafik wrote. “Over the summer, I have been able to reflect and have decided that what I am doing going forward at this time would best enable Columbia to meet the challenges ahead.”

She added that her resignation was effective immediately and that she would take a job with Britain’s foreign secretary to lead a review of the government’s approach to international development.

The university’s board appointed Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong, CEO of Columbia’s medical center and dean of its medical school since 2022, to interim president. The board did not immediately announce a timeline for appointing a permanent leader.

“Minouche has contributed so much to the Columbia community during an extraordinarily challenging time,” the board’s co-chairs wrote in a statement, adding, “While we are disappointed to see her leave us, we understand and respect her decision.”

The departure of Shafik, who in July 2023 became the first woman to lead Columbia, was unexpected in its timing, with the first day of the fall semester less than three weeks away. Columbia board members have repeatedly said they stood behind her leadership and that the campus had been largely quiet over the summer.

But as much as its sudden end, the brevity of Shafik’s presidency underscores how deeply pro-Palestinian demonstrations shook her campus in New York and universities across the country.

Facing accusations that she allowed anti-Semitism to go unchecked on campus, Shafik made a conciliatory appearance before Congress in April that ended with many members of her own faculty outraged. She twice called the police to Columbia’s campus, including to clear an occupied building. The actions outraged some students and faculty, even as others in the community, including some major donors, said she had not done enough to protect Jewish students on campus.

Shafik’s tenure was among the shortest in Columbia’s 270-year history, and much of it was a stark reminder of the challenges facing university presidents, who have at times struggled recently to lead burgeoning campuses while balancing student safety, free speech and academic freedom .

Few university leaders were as publicly linked to that dilemma as Shafik, whose school emerged as a hub for the campus protests that began after the Israel-Hamas war broke out last year.

Those protests, as well as accusations of endemic anti-Semitism, caught the attention of House Republicans, who orchestrated a series of hearings in Washington that began last year.

Shafik appeared at one in April, months after appearances by Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Claudine Gay, the head of Harvard University, helped drive them out of their jobs. (Another Ivy League president, Martha Pollack of Cornell University, recently resigned. Pollack, who had not been publicly grilled by lawmakers, stressed that the decision was “mine and mine alone,” but her resignation came amid acrimony over disciplinary action against pro-Palestinian student activists.)

The departures of Gay and Magill, who were also relative newcomers to the high stakes of university presidency, highlighted the dangers of standing firm on the right to protest, even when the protesters’ words were hateful or anti-Semitic. But Shafik’s difficulties in recent months showed the consequences of cracking down on protesters and teachers.

Neither strategy proved a foolproof antidote to campus demonstrations, which led to thousands of arrests across the country and which students have vowed to continue this fall.

When Shafik — whose first name is Nemat but goes by Minouche — arrived at Columbia last year, she was the rare Ivy League president not steeped in American academia and new to the tensions on her college campuses. She had been president of the London School of Economics and Political Science for six years before taking the job at Columbia.

Before that, she served in senior roles at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as in the UK government, where she was deputy governor of the Bank of England and an independent member of the House of Lords.

Columbia’s board of directors had seen her international experience as a source of strength. But the way she approached the protests from the start last fall generated fierce criticism across campus, and tensions only escalated after her testimony to Congress in April.

When a group of pro-Palestinian students set up camp on a college lawn, Shafik quickly called the police, leading to more than 100 arrests the next day. Students were outraged, and the episode helped spark a wave of similar camps at colleges across the country.

But when Columbia protesters defied university administrators and re-established their camp, Shafik was seen as too slow to act, making those who objected to their language and tactics. Her negotiations with the protesters were limited and she never visited the camp herself. Almost two weeks passed before she called the police again, and only after protesters took over a campus building, Hamilton Hall.

In May, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia passed a resolution of no confidence in Shafik, saying she had violated the “fundamental demands of academic freedom and shared governance.” They also accused her of engaging in “an unprecedented assault on student rights” when she decided to call for the arrest of protesters despite contrary advice from the university’s senate — a serious charge on a campus with a history of police crackdowns on protesters has dogged administrators for decades.

The faculty also said she had violated standards of academic freedom when, during her appearance on Capitol Hill, she named and publicly promised to fire faculty accused of anti-Semitism. Her decision to keep the campus in a state of near-lockdown for weeks, with a continued police presence after taking over Hamilton Hall, also upset many people on campus.

Meanwhile, some leading donors sharply criticized Columbia’s response as inadequate and demanded that the university do much more to protect Jewish students. Some contributors, including Robert Kraft, an alumnus and owner of the New England Patriots, publicly said they would stop donating until things changed.

Many people with close ties to the university said Wednesday night that the news had left them shocked.

But rope. Elise Stefanik, RN.Y., who led some of the most intense rounds of questioning during the congressional hearings, celebrated Shafik’s resignation and said she would continue to monitor the campus for signs of anti-Semitism.

Although the campus was mostly quiet during the summer, tensions remain. Four undergraduate deans were swept up in a scandal sparked by derisive texts they were caught sending to each other in late May during a campus forum on anti-Semitism. Three have since resigned.

To prepare for the possibility of renewed protests in the fall, the university announced a new color-coded system to guide the community on the protest risk level on campus, similar to a homeland security advisory system. The level was recently raised from green to orange, the second highest, meaning “moderate risk”. Only people with Columbia identification are allowed to enter the central campus in upper Manhattan, which has previously been open to the public.

College protesters have vowed to come back stronger than ever to push their main demand that Columbia divest arms manufacturers and other companies that profit from the occupation of Palestinian territories.

“Regardless of who leads Columbia, students will continue their activism and their actions until Columbia rids itself of Israeli apartheid,” said Mahmoud Khalil, a student negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the largest protest movement. “We want the president to be a president for Columbia students, responding to their needs and demands, rather than responding to political pressures outside the university.”

This article originally appeared in New York Times.