A reply to President Schill:

We are a group of 51 Northwestern faculty who write to express concern and provide counterpoints to select statements made by President Schill in a recent interview with the Daily Northwestern. As student and faculty attention understandably drifts away from campus affairs over the Summer, we fear that consequential decisions will be taken without adequate consultation with the relevant stakeholders. It is imperative that President Schill work with the NU community to establish clear processes for dialogue to involve faculty and other community members in those decisions. 

Our concerns are as follows: 

Listen to the Faculty Assembly 

The Faculty Assembly is, according to its by-laws, “the ultimate legislative body of the faculty at Northwestern University,” and the University President, as Chair of the Faculty Assembly, is explicitly called upon to represent the resolutions of the Faculty Assembly to the Board of Trustees. At its Spring meeting, the Assembly achieved a quorum, which it had never done before. Yet President Schill declined to preside over the Assembly and has disregarded its authority — asserting the Assembly’s resolutions simply “go into the mix” with the “90% of faculty that didn’t take the time to go to the meeting.” This is a frontal assault on shared governance. The resolutions that President Schill casually dismissed are designed to protect the rights of many NU constituencies and to ensure more transparent procedures relating to the future of faculty governance and other issues that matter to NU. We call on President Schill to respond to the Resolution passed by the Assembly this Spring and to take his role as Chair of the Assembly more seriously in the future.

More police is not the answer 

NU’s leaders — including faculty, students and staff — facilitated a peaceful and commendable resolution to a historic anti-war encampment on Deering Meadow in the Spring of 2024. Students have held events and activities on Deering freely and without punishment for years. At the time, NU was praised as a model among universities and colleges nationwide for its nonviolent handling of the encampment. Would President Schill have preferred a greater show of police violence, such as occurred at some of our peer institutions? Campus police were present at the earliest stages of the Deering encampment, and it is unclear to us what additional security would have accomplished other than perhaps generate more violence. At this moment in our nation’s history, as we watch masked ICE agents engaging in rampant kidnappings, police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters and the U.S. Marines lawlessly deployed against them, we counter that more policing of students, staff and faculty is not the answer. 

Acknowledge that federal law is being weaponized 

We understand that President Schill has to follow federal law. We would like to caution him, however, that in the present circumstances it is often unclear what is legal and what isn’t. The law has now been weaponized to punish institutions and groups the federal government wishes to target. This is a political and constitutional crisis. The U.S. administration has wielded the law to punish universities and “bring them to heel” with the administration’s far-right ideology. In such circumstances of democratic backsliding, the law becomes an instrument of the powerful and may remain uncertain and in flux as the courts work to adjudicate disputes. There may come a time when President Schill’s statement that “we’re going to comply with the federal law” is insufficient to meet the moment. It may be the case that like other universities, such as Harvard, NU will be forced to take legal action against the government to protect our interests and values, and to ascertain what is and is not “legal.” In these extraordinarily trying circumstances, let us not preemptively comply with federal attempts to dismantle American democracy. Rather, we urge President Schill to be a standard bearer in the face of this administration’s repeated authoritarian attempts to flout the rule of law.

Ensure transparency in decision-making and policy changes 

Over the past year, President Schill’s administration, working with the Board of Trustees and the Office of General Counsel, has quietly and with very little consultation with faculty, students and staff, put into place policies that limit and shape possibilities for teaching, learning and research at NU. In addition to the “scrubbing” of websites, these policies include the discrete institutional adoption of the widely contested IHRA definition of antisemitism, new policies and practices involving required anti-bias training for students and faculty, and new guidance addressing purported “illegal DEI” in research, which affects researchers regardless of whether they receive federal grants. These steps represent a major blow to academic freedom.  

We remind readers of The Daily that the U.S. President and his party have threatened to declare any organized dissent from U.S. policies on university campuses as “illegal protests.” All our constitutional rights are on the line, including free speech, due process, assembly, legal representation and the right to dissent. 

We call on President Schill to stand by his claim that he will advocate “against policies that shut us off from the rest of the world.” We too aspire to always act in a way “consistent with our values.” We are committed to the values of free speech and open debate and insist that President Schill and the administration foster greater transparency and work together for a stronger and more democratic NU.

Written by and signed,

Helen Tilley, Associate Professor of History

Laura Beth Nielsen, Professor of Sociology

Michael Peshkin, Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Rebecca Zorach, Professor of Art History

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Professor of Religious Studies & Political Science

Helen Tilley is an Associate Professor of History at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at [email protected]. Laura Beth Nielsen is a Professor of Sociology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and can be reached at [email protected]. 

If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.