As the beginnings of a pro-Palestinian encampment formed on Northwestern University’s Deering Meadow in April 2024, Michael H. Schill, the president then, faced three choices: let the encampment continue; bring in the campus police to break it up; or negotiate with the student activists.
Letting the encampment stand for the six weeks left in the school year wasn’t feasible, Schill said in an interview last month arranged by the U.S. House’s Education and Workforce Committee. “Our students were very upset.” Schill said. “Our trustees were very upset.” The budding encampment was “a sore on our campus,” he added, “and so we knew we had to remove it to make our students feel safe.”
But that quickly ran into a snag. Schill was wary of sending in Northwestern’s small police force, so he asked the Evanston Police Department for help. The night they were going to take action, Schill said, “the mayor of Evanston called me and said he would not be sending in the police. I said to him, ‘We have a mutual-aid agreement.’ He said, ‘You know, you can sue me if you want.’”
So Schill took the third option: negotiation.
That choice, and the implementation of the terms of the agreement, were a major subject of Schill’s interview, a transcript of which was released on Thursday, just hours after Schill abruptly resigned as Northwestern’s president. It’s not clear whether the imminent release of the remarks had anything to do with his decision to step down. In a statement, Northwestern said Schill told the committee the campus took many steps to combat antisemitism. “President Schill’s words speak for themselves. As a university, our priority is moving our community forward.”
But Schill’s remarks reflect the inescapable fact that the encampments that sprung up a year and a half ago are still haunting college leaders, particularly as Republican lawmakers apply aggressive scrutiny to campuses’ handling of antisemitism.
In his interview, Schill told the assembled group of investigators and attorneys that negotiating was the only choice he had. “A lot of people find what we did distasteful. A lot of Jewish people in particular find what we did … distasteful,” said Schill, who is Jewish. “I then ask them what they would do. No one has given me — and I’ve had this conversation probably 300 times where we go through everything. I tell them, ‘What would you have done differently?’ And they just get frustrated because they don’t have another option, unless just let it go on forever, and they don’t like that either.”
Those negotiations led to a deal that became known as the Deering Meadow Agreement. In return for a series of concessions, the activists drew down the encampment to a single tent. But Schill’s congressional interrogators questioned the legitimacy of the deal. They pointed out that university statute stipulates that no “deal” or “agreement” be made on behalf of Northwestern without approval of members of its governing board. Schill answered that he believed “it was within my delegated authority.”
One questioner asked Schill why he hadn’t routed the student demands to the President’s Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate. Because he rejected the group out of hand, he replied, adding that “I’m never going to propose to the board that they do any boycotts, any BDS,” referring to the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement, which the group advocated for. “So why bother — why bring this group together and talk about something that’s not real? I’m not doing that.”
The investigators further zeroed in on other demands from the protesters — for instance, that the university hire an “anti-Zionist” rabbi. Had Schill considered it? “I don’t want to get into semantics with you,” he told the group. “When the students said it, did I think about it for a minute or two or five minutes? I thought about it, but I didn’t say no right there because I didn’t — I’m not — my experience is you don’t say necessarily yes or no to something that you’ve never heard of or thought about before. You hold back a little bit. But my feeling was — and I remember saying this to people — is I will never, I do not want to have anything that competes with Hillel for the hearts and minds of our Jewish kids.”
The university did agree to enroll a handful of Palestinian students as part of its Scholars at Risk program. Schill was asked in his interview whether that part of the deal violated the Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious admissions. The then-president, who is also a legal scholar, said he wouldn’t opine on its legality. But he said the program was “open to all, and we were going to look for three Palestinian folks as part of this program.”
Looming high over the August meeting was the threat of lost funding if the Trump administration concludes that campuses violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by tolerating discrimination against Jewish students. Critics have called the administration’s actions a bad-faith and illegal attempt to bring universities to heel, and a federal judge recently ruled in favor of Harvard University in its lawsuit against the administration. (The government has withheld roughly $790 million in research funds from Northwestern.)
The committee asked Schill whether he thought his campus had violated Title VI. “I think people did the best they could under the circumstances,” he answered. “I am not confident — I mean, this isn’t my area of law. I believe the standard under Title VI is, were we deliberately indifferent? We were not deliberately indifferent. We were doing the best that we could do. We were attentive to this. Did we make the right decision at every moment? I’m not going to say that. But were we always concerned about the welfare of our Jewish students? Yes. Were we always concerned about the safety of our Jewish students, the safety of our police, and the safety of the other students who were there? Yes.”
