Northwestern President faces calls for firing after caving in to protestors; university faces lawsuit

Three days ago I reported that Northwestern University successfully bargained with the pro-Palestinian protestors who were encamped on its campus. As Zach Kessel reported in the National Review at that time:

After five days of anti-Israel demonstrators occupying Deering Meadow on Northwestern University’s campus, Northwestern president Michael Schill and the rest of the university’s leadership decided to accede to several of the protesters’ demands.

While not committing to divesting its endowment from companies that do business in Israel and ending partnerships with Israeli institutions, the university released a list of concessions in a celebratory statement Monday afternoon in exchange for the removal of the encampment on the lawn.

Most notable among those concessions is a promise to offer full-ride scholarships to Palestinian students and guaranteed faculty jobs for Palestinian academics.

“The University will support visiting Palestinian faculty and students at risk (funding two faculty per year for two years; and providing full cost of attendance for five Palestinian undergraduates to attend Northwestern for the duration of their undergraduate careers),” the document reads. “The University commits to fundraise to sustain this program beyond this current commitment.”

A pdf of these “concessions” can be found here. I find it sickening. What isn’t mentioned is that Northwestern also commits to this (“MENA students” are North African and Middle Eastern students):

• The University will provide immediate temporary space for MENA/Muslim students.
• The University will provide and renovate a house for MENA/Muslim students that is conductive to community building as soon as practicably possible upon completion of the Jacobs renovation (Expected 2026)

Now, as Kessel reports again, Northwestern’s promises may in fact be illegal, and there is already considerable pushback from Jewish organizations. The problem is that this is a concession to only one side of the controversy a concession designed simply to stop a disruptive protest, and it also earmarks both studentships and professorships for residents of a particular foreign territory. That’s a form of discrimination by nationality.

Click the link in first sentence of last paragraph, or go below to the archived version.

First, a chest-puffing announcement by Northwestern’s craven President, Michael Schill:

Schill released a video Tuesday in which he addressed the agreement with encampment organizers, saying he was “proud of our community for achieving what has been a challenge across the country: a sustainable de-escalated path forward.” He also noted the antisemitic posters, saying such messages should be “condemned by all of us.”

What he achieved was to give in to the pro-Palestinian students’ demands, while paying only lip service to anti-Semitism. Yes, Schill met the challenge by caving in to the protestors’ demands. But all is still not well, and for two reasons (Kessels’s words are indented):

The legal problem:

While Schill’s agreement with the encampment organizers has drawn condemnation, legal experts told NR that there is a great deal of uncertainty as to whether the measures to provide scholarships for Palestinian students and faculty positions for Palestinian academics are lawful.

Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told NR that, though Schill did not explain all the details of the press release, the scholarships and faculty positions may violate Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights act, respectively.

Title VI stipulates that entities receiving federal funding must not allow discrimination, exclusion, or denial of benefits on the basis of race, color, or national origin, while Title VII protects against employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.

“Even if they eventually paper the Palestinian scholarship in such a way that it purports to be something else, the fact that this is how they announced it will be very strong evidence of the intent behind the program,” Morenoff told NR. “And given that Title VI is primarily — or, as the Supreme Court has said, exclusively — a disparate-treatment statute focused on the intent of a program, it certainly looks like this is a violation.”

Morenoff said he could imagine the university arguing that Title VI applies to programs rather than scholarships but pointed to a 1994 United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruling stating otherwise.

On the Title VII issue, Morenoff said it is “very hard to see how having national origin-defined positions as part of this negotiation could be compliant.”

And the pushback:

In a joint statement published Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Brandeis Center, and StandWithUs urged Schill to step down from his leadership position.

“For days, protesters 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 three organizations wrote. “Their goal was not to find peace, but to make Jewish students feel unsafe on campus. 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. It is clear from President Schill’s actions that he is unfit to lead Northwestern and must resign.”

The three groups wrote that if Schill does not resign, they expect the board of trustees to “step in as the leaders the University needs and remove him.”

Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) president Morton A. Klein went a step further, arguing in a Wednesday statement that Schill, provost Kathleen Hagerty, and vice president for student affairs Susan Davis should each be relieved of their duties.

“President Schill, Provost Hagerty, and VP Davis should be fired immediately for this disaster — and this dangerous agreement must be rescinded,” Klein wrote. “If a group of white supremacists took over Deering Meadow and chanted for the deaths of blacks, the white supremacists would be immediately removed from the campus — not rewarded with scholarships, professorships, buildings, power over vendors, and investment powers. The same standard should apply here. The Northwestern officials who negotiated and entered into this agreement must be fired, and their agreement must be thrown in the dustbin. The student and faculty trespassers and promoters of anti-Jewish violence should be arrested and expelled or fired.”

There is more in the article, but the archived link will give you the details.  Still, there’s one more looming threat for President Schill:

Meanwhile, a group of Northwestern students met with members of the House Education and Workforce Committee, including Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) and Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) in Washington, D.C., Wednesday afternoon.

A committee aide told NR that the agreement between Northwestern’s leadership and the encampment organizers poses several problems.

“This really represents a craven decision to cave to the students who were disrupting university policy, violating rules, harassing Jewish students, and we heard really appalling and egregious accounts of that harassment directly from Jewish students in a meeting today,” the aide said, adding that the provisions in the agreement “are of significant concern to us because — while we’re still getting more information and looking into this — they appear to be violations of the law.”

Stefanik! We all know what she does to craven or double-talking professors. Not that I’m on her political side, or agree with her views on the First Amendment, but Schill does need to be grilled publicly on this.

And Northwestern students have sued their school for breaching promises to them. It’s all described in the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern; click the headline below to or the link in this sentence to read:

The complaint:

Three plaintiffs brought a breach of contract lawsuit against Northwestern Wednesday, citing a “dystopic cesspool of hate” present at the pro-Palestinian encampment on Deering Meadow.

The lawsuit — brought by two graduate students and one first-year undergraduate student at NU — alleges that NU breached a “modest core promise” to students when it opted to allow the encampment to continue throughout the weekend despite demonstration policies stating such encampments are prohibited.

“Northwestern’s refusal to enforce its own policies is thus a breach of contract, in addition to being a total embarrassment to the broader Northwestern community,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit, filed in the Cook County Circuit Court, alleges the University allowed the encampment to become “increasingly hostile to Jews” and that “the encampment featured open support for Hamas.” The plaintiffs seek class certification for Jewish students at NU who did not participate in the encampment.

. . .“Rather than enforce its express and implied promises to Plaintiffs that Northwestern is a place of civility where free expression is governed by transparent, content-neutral codes of conduct, Northwestern twisted itself into a pretzel to accommodate the hostile and discriminatory encampment, legislate around it, and ultimately reward it,” the lawsuit reads.

This is what I think the administrators at the University of Chicago have not considered: that their allowing our encampment to remain, despite its palpable violations of the “time, place, and manner” of speech codes, despite the protestors’ repeated vandalism and removal of the banners of Jewish students, despite their erection of illegal blockages of access, and despite their placement of Palestinian flags all over the quad—all of this constitutes a violation of the free speech (and restriction of its disruption) code that is contractually promised to our students by the University.  The persistence of the encampment despite our administration’s admission that it violates university regulations is, I think, grounds for a lawsuit against the University of Chicago. They cannot on one hand laud our tradition of free speech and on the other hand allow palpable and copious violations of free speech and of the time, place, and manner of its emission.