The House Education and Workforce Committee released the transcript of its interview with Michael Schill, president of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., after Schill announced his resignation on Thursday.
The Trump administration froze $790 million in federal funds from the private university in April over the university’s handling of Jew-hatred.
In the Aug. 5 interview, committee members pressed Schill about the university’s response to the anti-Israel encampment at the school in spring 2024. The House panel redacted the names of those asked questions.
Asked about protesters surrounding a Jewish student at the encampment and shouting “shame” repeatedly, Schill said he couldn’t recall such an incident, per the transcript.
Schill acknowledged that there was an alleged assault of a Jewish student at the encampment, but he wasn’t sure if the allegation “was ever substantiated in our discipline and investigation,” per the transcript.
The Northwestern president was shown a chart stating that no students were disciplined for their conduct in the encampment and asked to clarify his May 2024 congressional testimony that “discipline has been meted out to many of the students.”
Schill said that he was likely “conflating investigation and discipline” and that the testimony was a month after the encampment.
Asked why no students were disciplined after he testified before Congress that the encampment was “the major antisemitic event on our campus,” Schill said he was referring to a poster at the encampment depicting him “with horns and blood” and an image of a Star of David “with an X through it.” (Schill is Jewish.)
The university was unable to determine who was behind those images, he said.
Schill said that he was also referring to a spitting incident, which involved a staff member who was terminated.
Asked about the university’s deal with the encampment, Schill said that Northwestern planned to ask police to clear it out, but the Evanston mayor refused to dispatch officers. The only option was to strike an agreement with the encampment, he said.
Schill said that he didn’t consult with Northwestern’s committee on preventing antisemitism and hate about the agreement, because it wasn’t in the committee’s purview.
Reminded that encampment organizers called for Northwestern to divest from Israel, Schill said that he was never going to consider that demand, so there was no need to involve the committee.
One of the things to which Northwestern agreed was to support visiting Palestinian faculty and to fund two faculty members annually for two years.
Schill was asked if he knew that the first Palestinian professor hired was vice chair of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose director was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terror group.
The Northwestern president said that he would need “a lot more information about these affiliations.”
Schill said in the interview that he hasn’t considered repealing the agreement.
Northwestern has made “tremendous progress” addressing Jew-hatred, and antisemitic incidents have declined by 83% over the past year, he said, per the transcript.
He was asked about a survey conducted in April that found that more than 60% of Jewish students think Jew-hatred is a problem on campus and 58% said that “they or someone they know has experienced antisemitism on campus.”
Schill said that those findings could be consistent with his statement, since “incidence of antisemitic acts has gone way down on campus” but he doesn’t know “what’s in people’s hearts and minds” and whether “the feeling of antisemitism has gone down.”
