On Thursday’s edition of WBUR’s “Here and Now,” Northwestern University President Michael Schill discussed the deal the school struck with demonstrators on campus and said police didn’t move in and make arrests because “we have a relatively small police force and we didn’t feel that we could adequately protect our police force if they went in and protect the students. And so, we decided that that was probably not a great option.”
Schill said, “Well, we started from having certain principles: One, health and safety for the entire community, both our Jewish and our Muslim students, police, faculty, and staff. Secondly, we needed to bring the protests into compliance with university rules, along with consequences for people who violated those rules. And thirdly, we needed to be committed to freedom of expression and have no tolerance for antisemitism or anti-Islamic intimidation or harassment. And we were guided by those principles and then the results that we ended up with are following from those principles.”
Co-host Peter O’Dowd then asked, “And just to be clear, I understand the university police were present during the protests on your campus over the past week or so. What kept them from moving in and making arrests?”
Schill answered, “So, we have a relatively small police force and we didn’t feel that we could adequately protect our police force if they went in and protect the students. And so, we decided that that was probably not a great option. We were also looking at what was happening at other universities, and even when they went in with force, it typically wasn’t successful. And so, we thought the best way to sustainably de-escalate the situation was to actually talk with our students. We have a good, sustainable agreement now, which provides a number of things that the students wanted and that we wanted to do.”
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