The latest university leader to resign under pressure by the Trump Administration is Northwestern University President Michael Schill, who made his announcement Thursday amid a freeze in federal research funding for the school. Some of President Trump’s demands of colleges are over the top, but Mr. Schill was one of the biggest appeasers of last year’s anti-Israel campus mobs.
Northwestern’s campus was occupied by an encampment in the spring of 2024, and in exchange for partially removing it, Mr. Schill gave in to the protesters. The school agreed to new scholarships for Palestinian students, new Palestinian faculty, and a new “safe space” on campus for Middle Eastern and Muslim students. That was a big win for the campus agitators, who got real results from their flagrant breach of university norms.
Mr. Schill’s agreement stands as a monument to the lunacy that governed college campuses across the nation during that moment, which included coddling protesters and failing to protect students from blatant antisemitism. After decades of focus on microaggressions and decolonization narratives, many of these universities found themselves lacking coherent moral leadership to address the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. The heads of America’s liberal institutions lost their nerve to stand down the mob.