ICYMI: Acting President Claire Shipman issued a public statement which you can read here and watch here. It acknowledged the time constraints we are under before permanent damage is done to our research enterprise, our red lines on academic freedom and institutional autonomy, the financial and regulatory realities facing us, the surge of antisemitic incidents on our campus, and that “conformity of thought and orthodoxy of any sort” are bad for any academic community. Overall, it was a balanced and thoughtful statement.

TL;DR

• Computer science majors grew from 14 in 2004 to 171 in 2024 at Columbia College, making it the second-most popular major after economics, even though it’s offered by the faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
• Over the past 20 years, student demand has moved sharply toward engineering and natural sciences, while humanities majors have shrunk by nearly a third.
• Despite 45% overall faculty growth, the distribution by discipline has barely changed. Humanities still hold 34% of undergraduate-facing faculty while engineering, despite surging demand, rose only slightly from 18% to 22%.
• Engineering and social science faculty are overstretched, serving far more majors per professor than their humanities counterparts—thus creating a structural imbalance. Non-tenure-track hiring has grown fastest in fields with declining student interest.
• Columbia’s undergraduate academic structure still reflects the student body of 2004. As student interests evolve, there’s an opportunity to gradually rebalance faculty resources—while still upholding the Core and supporting the humanities—to better reflect where intellectual energy is moving.

A quiet revolution has taken place inside Columbia College. In 2004, just 14 Columbia College seniors majored in computer science. By 2014, that number had more than doubled to 33. By 2024, it had grown to 171. No, that is not a typo.

The most popular major today is economics at 187. The second most popular major—at the home of the world-renowned humanities and philosophy-based Core Curriculum—today is not political science (147), or psychology (also 147), or English (73), or history (54). The second most popular major is computer science, which is offered by an engineering department, i.e. outside of Columbia College.

This is a remarkable fact. And it raises an equally pressing question: what happens when student interest evolves, but faculty allocation and tenure structures remain fixed, creating structural imbalance?

First, what are we looking at?

Each Columbia undergraduate is affiliated with one of three schools: Columbia College (CC), the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), or the School of General Studies (GS). Each student majors in a department that falls into one of two faculties: the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (“A&S”) and the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science (“SEAS”). A&S is further subdivided into divisions that house these departments: Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social Science. These departments and divisions are how Columbia tracks both students and faculty, and how resources—courses, classrooms, tenure lines—are ultimately allocated. As a historical aside, the A&S divisions and SEAS faculty are direct descendants of the 19th century Faculties of Philosophy, Pure Science, Political Science, and Mines.

When we speak of “engineering majors” in Columbia College or General Studies, we are almost always talking about the departments of Computer Science or Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics. (SEAS students, by contrast, are all engineering majors by definition.)

We were curious so we dug into data collected and published by the Office of Planning and Institutional Research (one of our favorite offices on campus, second only to the University Archives.) The findings below explore how these disciplinary groupings have shifted over the past 20 years. The short version? Students have moved decisively. Faculty have not.

What happened with students

Between 2004 and 2024:

• The number of students majoring in engineering topics grew more than tenfold in Columbia College. The combined graduating cohort from CC, GS, and SEAS went from 24% engineering in 2004 to 32% in 2024.
• Natural science majors across all schools grew by half.
• Social sciences shrank from 40% to 35%, but stabilized.
• The humanities shrank by nearly a third, from 27% to 19% share.
• The undergraduate student body also also grew by ~15% and there is some noise in the data from double majors, but the trend far outstrips those effects.
• Excluded from this analysis, but also striking, is Barnard, which similarly went from 6 computer science majors a decade ago to 74 last year.

Put simply: the intellectual center of gravity is shifting. Columbia’s undergraduate students are choosing different questions to ask, and different tools to ask them with.

What’s happened with faculty

The faculty story is very different. Columbia’s total number of full-time faculty has grown by 45% over two decades, but the proportional distribution has barely changed.

• Humanities remain a consistent 34% of all faculty.
• Social science declined by a fifth, from 25% to 19%.
• Engineering rose from 18% to just 22%, despite dramatic enrollment growth.
• Natural sciences held steady.

Structural imbalance

This has created a stark and growing mismatch when paired with student affiliations.

This has impacts on workloads. Engineering faculty are now serving 3.15 graduating majors per professor, while humanities faculty serve just 1.22. The humanities are the only faculty division where the ratio has decreased, perhaps reflecting its constant share paired with a shrinking student base. Social science, meanwhile, appears overstretched on both sides of the ratio—with 3.94 majors per faculty member in 2024 and no meaningful hiring growth.

These are, of course, limited observations that exclude other years and graduate students—notably the large Masters programs at SEAS; but as longitudinal observations the trends are interesting to see.

The result is structural imbalance. Some divisions are being asked to do more with less. Others are preserving stable staffing for a shrinking student base. Meanwhile, with the exception of engineering, a growing share of full-time faculty are non-tenured, over 60% in the humanities, most of which are non-tenure track. We are also witnessing “compression” in the share of tenure-track faculty across the board, when the shift in demand suggests there should be selected growth in investment.

Columbia’s undergraduate identity has evolved from a predominantly liberal arts institution with a modest engineering wing into a pluralistic academic ecosystem. Today, STEM and the social sciences occupy the center of intellectual and enrollment energy, while the humanities increasingly serve a supportive role. Over the past two decades, student interest has shifted away from classical liberal arts toward applied, quantitative, and career-oriented fields, a shift we regard with both regret and equanimity.

What’s driving this shift? It may reflect the growing allure of technology, fueled by rapid advances in fields like artificial intelligence. It may also stem from the rising cost of higher education, which has prompted students (and their families) to adopt a more utilitarian, return-on-investment mindset when choosing a major. These are potential hypotheses, but regardless of the reason, there is a broader realignment in the relationship between universities, knowledge, and work.

What should Columbia do?

Let’s start with what we should not do: we should not allow student demand alone to determine the future of knowledge. A great university carries forward disciplines even when there is little student interest, sometimes even when there is none. Columbia’s Core Curriculum gives us a distinctive responsibility in this regard, especially for the humanities and social sciences. The Core is not just a set of requirements. It’s a statement of institutional identity. That identity must be lived.

Right now, Columbia’s faculty is still configured for the undergraduate student body of 2004, if not earlier. That student body no longer exists. Our students are still brilliant, curious, searching, but they are searching in different places, and for different things.

A forward-looking institution must honor these questions and equip itself to answer them.

What would it look like to build Columbia for 2044?

That’s the question this moment demands. The shift in student interest is not a crisis. But it is a signal. And like any signal, it can be ignored, or it can be used.

If we ignore them, the growing mismatch between students and structure will lead quietly, but inevitably to waste, burnout, and lost opportunity. If we use them, they could become the basis for generational renewal, as we have called for since the beginning.

This is not about choosing one discipline over another. It is about building a university that is alive to the moment and prepared for what comes next.

Now is the time to ask: where are we overbuilt? Where are we underbuilt? Where are we sustaining capacity that no longer reflects student need, and where are we asking too few to carry too much?

Inertia is the easiest path forward. But it’s also the worst. We should use this moment to retool wisely and deliberately, not reactively or defensively. We should aspire to build the Columbia University for the next twenty years, not the last. After all, the students are already here.

News Roundup

– June 13, 2025. The Lawfare Project reports that Columbia University has reached a confidential settlement in a civil rights lawsuit brought by The Lawfare Project and Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP on behalf of Jewish student Mackenzie Forrest. The suit alleged that Columbia’s School of Social Work failed to protect Forrest from antisemitic harassment and retaliated against her after she requested religious and safety accommodations. The case drew federal attention, including a DOJ investigation and congressional inquiry, and marks a major flashpoint in the ongoing debate over antisemitism on college campuses. Advocates say the outcome affirms that Jewish students’ civil rights must be upheld.

– June 13, 2025. NBC News reports that despite ruling earlier this week that national security grounds cited by the Trump administration were likely unconstitutional, the same federal judge on Friday allowed the continued detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and prominent pro-Palestinian activist. The government has now pivoted to an immigration fraud charge, sparking objections from civil rights groups who say Khalil is being punished for protected political speech. Khalil, a Syrian-born legal U.S. resident, was arrested in March and missed the birth of his son while detained. His case has drawn nationwide attention.

– June 12, 2025. The Spectator reports that Columbia has changed its disciplinary hearing process without first getting it approved by the University Senate. Students have been removed from the University Judicial Board (UJB), and the UJB itself has been moved to the Office of the Provost. Columbia says they took students off the UJB because of “the risk faced by participants.” Professor Joseph Slaughter said that, “It’s about wanting a shorter cut between the desires of the trustees, the desires of the president, and a result. And so anything that can shorten that pathway, it seems to me, is what they’re interested in. It’s a concentration of authority, right? And a concentration of power.” This article unfortunately repeats a misunderstanding that the Charter of 1810 (which charge the Trustees to “direct and prescribe the course of study, and the discipline to be observed in the said college”) and the Statutes (which creates and empowers the University Senate) are at the same level. In reality, as we have explained, the Charter supersedes the Statutes as a “higher law”. The term “discipline” here, by the way, refers not to religious observance but to conduct, as Myles Cooper’s Black Book talked about “the strictest Discipline in the College” with respect to conduct, and religious tests were forbidden a few clauses later in the same Charter of 1810. In other words, discipline means time, place, and manner, not transubstantiation.

– June 11, 2025. The New York Times reports that Harvard’s leadership is gaming out “what if” scenarios after a barrage of Trump-era measures—blocking international students, stripping $686 million in federal research funds, and floating a steep endowment tax—threaten to gut the university’s talent pipeline and research clout. Contingency plans on the table range from mass layoffs to courting corporate sponsors and slashing lab budgets by half. Former president Larry Summers warns that without global scholars and federal dollars, Harvard could tumble from world-pre-eminent to “just another school,” while tuition and aid pressures risk making an already elite institution even more exclusive.

– June 11, 2025. Bloomberg reports that the US Treasury Department is thinking about tweaking its rules to remove tax-exempt status for schools that factor race into scholarships, admissions, etc. This would take the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against race-based admissions a step further, scrutinizing many different processes in over 1,500 universities, including the entire Ivy League. 

– June 11, 2025. The WSJ reports that at Harvard’s own ‘nondenominational’ church, Harvard Memorial Church, Israel is being challenged. The minister there is chosen by the Harvard Corporation. The church refers to itself as “a community of social critique and human compassion.” The reverend there, Matthew Ichihashi Potts, who also teaches at the Divinity School, believes that the current Israel-Palestine conflict is “built along long traditions of both settler colonialism and antisemitism.” 

– June 11, 2025. Columbia reports that this week, in a Summer Session Class trip to the National Museum of Mathematics, students “were gathered around giving our reflections when I noticed Mark Hamill walk in,” student Michael Atlas Sanchez shared, “I immediately recognized him and kept trying to get people to look where I was pointing. Eventually, I was forced to interrupt Dr. Bega to inform her that Luke Skywalker was standing 10 feet away.” They took an incredible photo.

– June 11, 2025. TIME Magazine reports that a Columbia doctor, Zev Williams, director of the Columbia University Fertility Center, has accomplished the world’s first AI-assisted pregnancy. Dubbed STAR (Sperm Track and Recovery), the algorithm scans millions of microscopic images, siphoning off the rare viable sperm hidden in samples from men with azoospermia—a condition once considered a near-total barrier to biological fatherhood. In March, STAR located just enough healthy sperm to produce a viable pregnancy for an Orthodox Jewish couple who had endured 19 years and 15 failed IVF cycles. Four months on, their pregnancy is progressing normally, and researchers are eyeing broader infertility applications for the technology.

– June 10, 2025. Spectator reports that Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, has voiced hope that Columbia will regain funding and expressed that Columbia has made “great progress” towards keeping its accreditation after the administration put its accreditation status under threat. She said, “It would be my goal that if colleges and universities are abiding by the laws of the United States doing what we were expecting of them, that they could expect to have taxpayer-funded programs.” Slightly more detail is added on the topic in this piece from Bloomberg. 

– June 5, 2025. The Washington Post reports on a recurring theme, that Harvard could possibly win in court against Trump but still lose the overall war with his administration. The school filed a new complaint this week in its lawsuit trying to prevent Trump from stopping Harvard from enrolling international students. Even if Harvard wins every single court case, Trump’s administration still holds a lot of power concerning how visas are “actually granted” or denied. This could lead to a loss in top talent and research coming to the school, the hallmark of the Harvard brand.

– June 3, 2025. A fascinating paper by Prashant Garg of Imperial College London and Thiemo Fetzer of the University of Bonn linked nearly 100,000 academics’ tweets (2016-22) to their publication records and found that the loudest academic voices online are not always the most cited in real life. A tiny, often less-credentialed minority generates an outsized share of content, and U.S. scholars’ tweets lean markedly more pro-climate, culturally liberal, and economically collectivist than the broader U.S. Twitter population. Tone matters too: academics are less toxic but more self-referential than non-academics, with notable differences by field, gender, rank, and country. The authors warn that this skewed, highly political subset may shape public perceptions of “what academia thinks” in ways that do not mirror the broader scholarly community.