The president of Northwestern University has become the latest leader of a highly selective research institution to topple in the face of federal pressure.

Michael H. Schill announced his resignation on Thursday following more than a year of intense scrutiny from Republican lawmakers and the loss of $790 million in federal research funding, which forced the university to lay off hundreds of employees.

Generally referencing the trying times ahead for the university, Schill said in a message to the campus on Thursday that he had decided it was time for new leadership. In his three-year tenure, he wrote, “our community has made significant progress while simultaneously facing extraordinary challenges.”

Schill drew particular scrutiny for negotiating an agreement last year with pro-Palestinian protesters who had set up an encampment calling for the university’s divestment from Israel. Conservative critics argued that the protesters should have been punished because some of their conduct was antisemitic.

Last year, Schill was grilled by members of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce about that agreement and the university’s overall response to activism over the Israel-Hamas war. Schill repeatedly questioned the premise of questions and defended the university’s decision to peacefully end protests through negotiations.

Schill joins a small group of campus leaders who have left at least in part because of fierce opposition from Republican politicians, which has amped up considerably since the Trump administration has declared war on universities seen as being out of line with the president’s priorities. Other presidencies were toppled at Harvard and Columbia Universities and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, touted the resignation in a statement. Walberg said Schill “will leave behind a legacy of not only failing to deter antisemitism on campus but worsening it. These students not only deserve better, but the law requires it.” He added that the university’s next president “must take prompt and effective action to protect Jewish students from the scourge of antisemitism.”

Walberg released a transcript of testimony recorded last month in which Schill explained to the committee why he felt that negotiating with the protesters was a better option than risking the safety of a small number of campus police officers by sending them in to break up the crowd. He said the mayor of Evanston had informed him that the city wouldn’t be dispatching police to help out, even though they had a mutual-aid agreement. The committee grilled Schill about the details of those negotiations and why protesters weren’t punished.

“We were not deliberately indifferent. We were doing the best that we could do,” Schill assured them.

Schill will remain in the president’s role until an interim president is installed and will help with the transition. He’ll also continue working with the Board of Trustees to try to get the university’s frozen federal funding restored. After a sabbatical, Schill will return to the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law to teach and conduct research, which he called his “first and enduring passion.”

Schill took office in September 2022 after serving as president of the University of Oregon.

“From the very beginning of my tenure, Northwestern faced serious and often painful challenges,” Schill wrote in his message to the community. “In the face of those challenges and the hard, but necessary choices that were before us, I was always guided by enduring values of our University: protecting students, fostering academic excellence, and defending faculty, academic freedom, due process and the integrity of the institution.”

Peter Barris, chair of the Board of Trustees, said the board “is enormously grateful to President Schill for his leadership during a period of unparalleled challenges at Northwestern and across higher education.”