Zach Kessel writes for National Review Online about one major university’s disappointing response to anti-Israel protesters.
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.”
As National Review reported in March, over 70 percent of Palestinians support Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel and 75 percent support Hamas as the governing body of the Gaza Strip.
Northwestern will also provide a “house for MENA/Muslim students” and will “advise employers not to rescind job offers for students engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment.”
Other concessions in the deal Schill and the rest of Northwestern’s leadership struck with the encampment occupants — one of whom assaulted a student journalist attempting to take video — include student oversight of the university’s partnerships with suppliers and the investment of its endowment.
“The University will include students in a process dedicated to implementing broad input on University dining services, including residential and retail vendors on campus,” Northwestern’s leadership wrote, as well as forming a committee on “investment responsibility” with “representation from students, faculty, and staff.”
