Schill claimed he made a deal with an anti-Israel encampment in the interest of protecting Jewish students

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(L-R) Mr. Michael Schill, President, Northwestern University, Dr. Jonathan Holloway, President, Rutgers University and Mr. Frederick Lawrence testify at a hearing called "Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos" before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Capitol Hill on May 23, 2024, in Washington, D.C.
Northwestern University President Michael Schill found himself on the defensive on Thursday throughout a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on campus antisemitism, repeatedly providing nonspecific answers, in some cases refusing to answer specific questions and occasionally becoming combative.
Schill said that he had made a deal with an anti-Israel encampment — which he acknowledged was dangerous and engaged in antisemitic activity — in the interest of protecting Jewish students. By the end of the hearing, he faced calls from Republicans for his resignation or ouster.
He declined to answer various specific questions about incidents on campus, including whether Jewish students were assaulted, harassed, stalked or spat on, citing ongoing investigations; when those investigations might be completed; whether it was acceptable for faculty to obstruct police officers; and whether he would have made a similar deal with an encampment of Ku Klux Klan members.
Asked whether it’s acceptable for students or faculty to express support for terrorism, Schill responded, “are you saying, OK meaning, is it something that I would do?… Our professors and our faculty have all of the rights of free speech.”
He said that there have so far been no students suspended or expelled in connection with antisemitic activity but that investigations are ongoing and that some staff had been fired.
The Northwestern president, who is Jewish, indicated he’s proud of the university’s deal with protesters, which has been widely condemned in the Jewish community, describing it as a “hard decision” with a “good result.”
“The danger posed grew every day it stayed up,” he said. “Every day brought new reports of intimidation and harassment,” as well as “antisemitic behavior that was making our Jewish students feel unsafe.”
He said that he saw three options for dealing with the encampment: allowing it to remain indefinitely, which was not an option; sending in police and staff to make arrests, which he said was impractical because of a lack of personnel and “too high a risk to our students, staff and police officers”; or negotiating with demonstrators.
He downplayed the nature of the concessions the university had made to the demonstrators, claiming that many of the agreements made had already been in the works before the encampment or were connected to preexisting programs. He claimed the university had not actually conceded to any of the demonstrators’ demands.
Pressed on details, Schill downplayed the deal as “just a framework of an agreement that was reached with the students at 4 o’clock in the morning” and at one point told committee members to consult Northwestern’s website for specifics.
And he said that “nothing in the agreement… specifically addressed the interests of Jewish students, other than getting rid of that encampment.” He claimed that the deal “gave them the ability to feel safe on campus.”
Local and national Jewish groups have said that the deal instead normalized and rewarded those engaging in hateful activity, without any support for the Jewish community.
Schill acknowledged that no Jewish or Israeli students, nor the university’s antisemitism task force, nor the full university Board of Trustees, were consulted before he made the agreement, claiming that would have been “impractical.” But a professor who is an outspoken promoter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was consulted.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the committee chair, argued that Schill’s deal had created a poor precedent for other university chairs, in effect encouraging them to also make concessions.
“President Schill’s testimony today clarified his leadership imperils Jewish students and that he has failed at virtually every turn to take antisemitism on Northwestern University’s campus seriously,” the Anti-Defamation League Midwest said in a statement.
Northwestern’s antisemitism task force collapsed, with the resignations of seven members, after Schill’s agreement, though he said the school plans to implement a new task force.
Lawmakers highlighted a series of concerns about the initial task force, including the fact that it had no members who were experts on antisemitism, and some who were openly anti-Israel and supported antisemitic slogans.
Schill responded that the task force’s focus was intended to be broader than antisemitism, a mission he concluded was “impossible.” He also claimed the members had resigned in part because the task force was “unable to reach a consensus on what antisemitism was.”
The Northwestern president downplayed the significance of the hundreds of millions in funding Northwestern has received from the Qatar Foundation, saying that all of that funding went to support the Northwestern campus in Qatar.
He said he was unaware until recently that Northwestern’s journalism school had partnered with the Qatari state-run media outlet Al Jazeera, that he was “concerned” about it and would review the partnership.
Schill appeared at the hearing alongside Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway and University of California, Los Angeles Chancellor Gene Block; Schill took the brunt of the questioning, but the other two presidents also came under the committee’s microscope.
Holloway, who also struck a deal with protesters, offered a similar justification as Schill, characterizing his decision as a quick and proactive move to prevent disruptions to exams.
“We made a choice. That choice was to engage our students in dialogue as a first option, instead of police action,” he said. “If ever there was a time to dialogue and focus on civil discourse, it is now… It was made clear that we were going to allow the encampment and consider it a speech act in the spirit of First Amendment free expression” unless it disrupted university business.
Holloway was also pressed on Rutgers’ Center for Security, Race and Rights, whose leader and featured speakers praised Hamas and spread Oct. 7 denialism; the center also hosted a speaker convicted of providing material support for terrorism.
Holloway described the activity as “wildly offensive” and said “there is very little I find easy about the center. I personally disagree deeply with a lot of the ideas that come from that center.” But he said that there are many events on campus of which he is not aware and that he has no plans to shutter the center.
He was also pressed on Rutgers’ relationship with Birzeit University in the West Bank; the school has glorified terrorists, Hamas won a recent student election, several students were arrested for planning terrorist attacks and Jews are banned from the campus.
Holloway said Rutgers “partner[s] with institutions all around the world” and said he was unaware of the details about the university and would look into the issue further.
Holloway said that four students have been suspended and 19 others received other forms of discipline.
Block, unlike the other two presidents, did not make a deal and ultimately called in police assistance to clear the encampment after a violent clash between encampment members and counterprotesters.
He struck a somewhat different tone than the other presidents, acknowledging that the school had mishandled the situation and acted too slowly.
“With the benefit of hindsight, we should have been prepared to immediately remove the encampment if and when the safety of our community was put at risk,” he said.
Yet, as Block was testifying to the committee, demonstrators reestablished an encampment on UCLA’s campus.
Block said no UCLA students have been suspended or expelled, but that more than 100 investigations into antisemitism and islamophobia are ongoing, in addition to police probes into the violence.
In another notable moment, Block pushed back on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) attempts to downplay the severity of anti-Israel activity on campus.
Omar described the encampment as “peaceful” and protected by the First Amendment, characterized the encampment members as the ones being harassed and ultimately blamed Block for the attack on the encampment by counter protesters. She also brushed aside an incident in which a Jewish student was blocked from walking down a public pathway on campus to a class building.
“This encampment was against policy, it violated time, place, manner [restrictions],” he said, before being cut off. He also said it’s “really inappropriate” for students to be blocked from any part of campus, regardless of whether other pathways were available.
In the Senate, Bernie Sanders has been resistant to holding a hearing spotlighting antisemitism at universities

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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks during a press conference at Columbia University on April 24, 2024 in New York City.
Congressional Republicans are vowing action to address antisemitism on college campuses nationwide, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) launching “a House-wide effort” this week to crack down on universities unable to control anti-Israel protests that on some occasions have grown violent.
Johnson said at a press conference on Tuesday that House Republicans would expand the ongoing efforts to tackle antisemitism beyond the House Education and Workforce Committee, which has investigations into six universities underway.
The chairs of the House Energy and Commerce; Oversight; Judiciary; Ways and Means; and Science, Space, and Technology Committees will separately investigate “the billions of federal taxpayer dollars that go to these universities,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) said at the press conference.
“Antisemitism is a virus and because the administration and woke university presidents aren’t stepping in, we’re seeing it spread,” Johnson said. “We must act, and House Republicans will speak to this fateful moment with moral clarity. We really wish those in the White House would do the same. We will not allow antisemitism to thrive on campus and we will hold these universities accountable for their failure to protect Jewish students on campus.”
“That’s why today we’re here to announce a House-wide effort to crack down on antisemitism on college campuses,” he continued. “Nearly every committee here has a role to play in these efforts to stop the madness that has ensued. The federal government plays a critical role in higher education, and we will use all the tools available to us to address this scourge.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who chairs the Education and Workforce Committee, revealed that in addition to her ongoing probes, she will have the presidents of three other schools testify next month on their responses to protests and instances of antisemitism on their campuses. The presidents of the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Michigan; and Yale University will be brought in to testify before Foxx’s committee on May 23.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, noted that her panel “oversees agencies that dole out massive amounts of taxpayer funded research grants… We will be increasing our oversight of institutions that have received public funding and cracking down on those who are in violation of the Civil Rights Act.”
“Imagine being a Jewish American, knowing that part of your hard-earned paycheck is going to fund an antisemitic professor’s research, while they threaten students and actively indoctrinate and radicalize the next generation,” McMorris Rodgers said.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) said that his panel was reaching out to the State Department and Homeland Security Department to find out “how many students on a visa have engaged in the radical activity we’ve seen now day after day on college campuses.”
“The overriding question is real simple: Are individuals advocating for the destruction of our dearest and closest ally, the State of Israel, and engaged in this antisemitic behavior, is that a national security threat? We think it is,” Jordan said.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) hasn’t directly addressed the expanded GOP investigations, but is pushing for the House to consider a bipartisan antisemitism bill in response to the campus incidents.
Jeffries said Wednesday he has no current plans to visit colleges that have been plagued by unrest and anti-Israel encampments. He said he also hasn’t looked at proposals for cutting funding to colleges that are not cracking down on antisemitism, but slammed Republicans for pushing to cut funding to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which investigates antisemitism accusations on campuses.
“Ultimately, it was House Democrats led by [Rep.] Rosa DeLauro [D-CT], that were able to restore the proposed extreme MAGA Republican cut that would have adversely impacted the ability of the Department of Education to combat antisemitism and all other forms of hatred on college campuses,” Jeffries said. “We don’t need rhetoric from some of my Republican colleagues, we need real action.”
The New York congressman expressed support for Columbia University and the New York Police Department’s response to anti-Israel demonstrators who broke into and took over an administrative building on campus.
“As far as I can tell, the efforts by the NYPD were thorough, professional, and they exercised a degree of calm in a very tense situation that should be commended,” he said during a press conference, adding that he did not see any incidents of excessive force.
The Democratic leader said that peaceful protest and civil disobedience are “an important part of the fabric of America” but that protests that threaten others or engage in antisemitism or other bigotry are unacceptable.
He said he had no comment on Democratic lawmakers who have visited the encampments at Columbia to offer support. He also declined to comment on remarks by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) accusing some Jewish students of being “pro-genocide,” noting that he hadn’t spoken to Omar directly.
On the Senate side, where Democrats are in the majority, Republicans have been largely unified in calling for consequences for schools that cannot get their campuses under control, but otherwise lack the power to force any action.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) organized a press conference on Wednesday for a group of GOP senators to condemn the encampments, which he referred to as “Little Gazas.”
“These ‘Little Gazas’ are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate full of pro-Hamas sympathizers, fanatics, and freaks,” Cotton said. “President Biden needs to denounce Hamas’s campus sympathizers without equivocating about Israelis fighting a righteous war of survival.”
“The State Department needs to yank the visas of foreign students in these ‘Little Gazas’ and DHS needs to deport them,” he added. “The Justice Department should investigate the funding sources behind these ‘Little Gazas,’ and the Department of Education needs to withhold funding for colleges that won’t protect the civil rights of their Jewish students.”
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), the No. 3 Senate Republican, similarly called for revoking federal support for universities that fail to uphold civil rights laws.
“We have laws in this country to protect against violence, to protect students. Students have a right to be protected. Jewish students, all students on campus, from harassment, from discrimination,” Barrasso said at the weekly leadership press conference. “If not, those colleges should lose their federal funding.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered two floor speeches on the matter within two days. His Tuesday speech likened Columbia protesters to ‘student Nazis of Weimar Germany’ in a call to restore order on the university’s campus, while his Wednesday remarks urged the Biden administration to not focus “on virtue-signaling and political theater to appease the leftist agitators of their base.”
While Republicans have generally been more vocal about their concerns on the matter, there have been some bipartisan calls for action in the upper chamber.
Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and James Lankford (R-OK) have asked Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to hold a hearing on antisemitism on college campuses in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the top Republican on the committee, has requested the same.
Asked by JI in the Capitol on Wednesday about organizing a hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, Sanders replied, “Well, the issue of bigotry on campus is something that we are concerned about,” before abruptly entering a senators-only elevator.
Cassidy told JI in November that Sanders had declined to call a hearing on campus antisemitism. Sanders delivered a Senate floor speech on Wednesday largely expressing support for anti-Israel protests on college campuses and rejecting many of the accusations of antisemitism leveled at anti-Israel demonstrators.
Sanders’s office did not respond to JI’s subsequent request for comment on the matter, nor did a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

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Students and residents camp outside Northwestern University during a pro-Palestinian protest, expressing solidarity with Palestinians with banners in Evanston, Illinois, United States on April 27, 2024.
Good Wednesday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we look at how administrators are addressing protests, encampments and clashes on campus, and report on today’s expected vote on the Antisemitism Awareness Act. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Sheryl Sandberg, Ofir Akunis and Amy Schumer.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken is in Israel today for meetings with top officials, including President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Blinken’s visit to Israel follows a two-day trip through the region that included meetings in Jordan and Saudi Arabia aimed at discussing cease-fire negotiations and a day-after plan for Gaza. The trip comes as Israel prepares for a Rafah operation, following Netanyahu’s comments earlier this week that such a move was imminent, “with or without a deal” to reach a cease-fire and free the remaining hostages. More on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s comments about a potential Rafah invasion below.
“Bringing the hostages home is at the heart of everything we’re trying to do,” Blinken tweeted earlier today. “We will not rest until every hostage — woman, man, young, old, civilian, soldier — is back with their families, where they belong.”
Thousands of miles away from high-level diplomatic conversations aimed at ending a monthslong war, American college administrators are conducting their own negotiations — with anti-Israel student protesters — in an effort to restore calm on campuses across the country in the waning weeks of the spring semester.
With final exams and commencements around the corner, this time of year is usually one of packed libraries, graduation celebrations and senioritis. Not so this year on a number of campuses, where student protesters from Columbia to Northwestern to the University of North Carolina to UCLA continued to sow chaos on campus, in some cases moving from the encampments they constructed last month to take over university buildings, as they did with the takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. In other cases students commandeered university property, as students at UNC did when they took down an American flag and hung a Palestinian flag in its place.
At UCLA, overnight protests turned violent, with clashes between pro- and anti-Israel student demonstrators breaking out in the area around the encampment. At Columbia, police with riot shields arrested dozens of protesters in Hamilton Hall, effectively bringing an end to the protesters’ siege of the administrative building. Overnight, the campus encampment was cleared after two weeks.
Administrators from Evanston, Ill., to New York to Chapel Hill, N.C., have varied in their approaches to the demonstrators and their demands. Read below for more on the concessions that administrations have made to campus protesters below.
Following Columbia protesters’ takeover of Hamilton Hall earlier this week, White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates released a statement condemning antisemitism and the extreme tactics of the students.
“President Biden has stood against repugnant, antisemitic smears and violent rhetoric his entire life. He condemns the use of the term ‘intifada,’ as he has the other tragic and dangerous hate speech displayed in recent days,” Bates told JI. “President Biden respects the right to free expression, but protests must be peaceful and lawful. Forcibly taking over buildings is not peaceful — it is wrong. And hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America.”
Bates did not say whether Biden planned to speak about the issue publicly, or to meet with Jewish students. In a proclamation announcing Jewish American Heritage Month, which begins today, Biden addressed the situation on many campuses.
“Here at home, too many Jews live with deep pain and fear from the ferocious surge of antisemitism — in our communities; at schools, places of worship, and colleges; and across social media. These acts are despicable and echo the worst chapters of human history,” Biden said in the proclamation.
Meanwhile, a new Harvard/Harris poll found that 80% of Americans support Israel in its war against Hamas; that number drops to 57% among the 18-24 year-olds surveyed. Those numbers are perhaps best reflected in a statement released by College Democrats of America on Wednesday, showing support for the encampments and anti-Israel protesters.
Today in Washington, Jewish students from Northwestern will meet with legislators to discuss their experiences on campus in recent days, ahead of a House vote on the Antisemitism Awareness Act. More on the legislation from JI’s Marc Rod below.
The events on campus are raising concerns among congressional lawmakers. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday called on Columbia administrators to “bring order to their Manhattan campus” and compared the behavior of Columbia’s student protesters to the “brand of aggressive lawlessness” shown by “the student Nazis of Weimar Germany.”
A day prior, a group of 21 pro-Israel House Democrats sent a letter blasting Columbia and accusing administrators of failing to break up the campus’ anti-Israel encampment. The legislators alleged that failing to do so constitutes a violation of Jewish students’ civil rights. The letter, led by Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Dan Goldman (D-NY), describes the encampment as “the breeding ground for antisemitic attacks on Jewish students, including hate speech, harassment, intimidation, and even threats of violence.”
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) is preparing a measure to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for her comments last week referring to Jewish students as either “pro-genocide or anti-genocide”; the Minnesota congresswoman made the comments while visiting Columbia University.
House Education and Workforce Committee Chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) invited the heads of Yale, UCLA and the University of Michigan to speak at a hearing later this month focused on “Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos.”
Meanwhile, House and Senate Republicans’ campaign arms are planning to use footage that has emerged in recent days in ads targeting vulnerable Democrats who have not condemned the protests. Among those the NRSC and NRCC plan to target: Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Bob Casey (D-PA) and Jon Tester (D-MT), as well as Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who is mounting a Senate bid in Michigan.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said yesterday at a Senate hearing that “what is happening on our campuses is abhorrent.”
“Hate has no place on our campuses and I’m very concerned with the reports of antisemitism,” Cardona said. He added that “unsafe, violent” protests and attacks on students are not protected by the First Amendment.
Cardona said that support for Hamas, the “from the river to the sea” slogan and calls for Jews to go back to Poland or be killed are “absolutely not” acceptable. He told lawmakers the department needs additional funding and investigators for its Office of Civil Rights to respond to the spike in incidents and investigations.
northwestern negotiations
Jewish leaders slam Northwestern agreement with anti-Israel protesters

After an anti-Israel encampment was erected at Northwestern University last week, the school’s president on Monday reached an agreement with protesters to end the encampment — acceding to several of their demands in the process, which drew strong condemnation from many in the Chicago and national Jewish communities, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.
Message received: In a letter to university President Michael Schill, the Jewish United Fund — Chicago’s Jewish federation, which also oversees Northwestern Hillel — excoriated the administrator for embracing “those who flagrantly disrupted Northwestern academics and flouted those policies. The overwhelming majority of your Jewish students, faculty, staff, and alumni feel betrayed. They trusted an institution you lead and considered it home. You have violated that trust,” the letter said. “You certainly heard and acted generously towards those with loud, at times hateful voices. The lack of any reassuring message to our community has also been heard loud and clear.”
Resignation call: The Anti-Defamation League, StandWithUs and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law joined together to call for Schill’s resignation after the agreement was announced. “For days, protestors openly mocked and violated Northwestern’s codes of conduct and policies by erecting an encampment in which they fanned the flames of antisemitism and wreaked havoc on the entire university community,” the groups said in a statement. “Rather than hold them accountable – as he pledged he would – President Schill gave them a seat at the table and normalized their hatred against Jewish students.”
Notes from New England: Brown University administrators reached an agreement with encampment organizers to put the issue of divesting from Israel up for a vote when its largest governing body, the Corporation, meets in October.