Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss Defends Free Speech, Rejects Northwestern President Michael Schill's 2024 Demand for "Mass Arrests"

Northwestern University students and staff lock arms during a confrontation with school security officers at the scene of a pro-Palestinian protest at Deering Meadow on April 25. (Betsy Wilson), patch.com

In a 2024 Chicago Tribune op-ed, then President Michael Schill claimed he negotiated an agreement with faculty and students protesting NU's entanglements with Israel because of "core value of universities to engage in dialogue and seek to bridge differences peacefully."  Referring to the "Deering Meadow Agreement" struck April 29, 2024, Schill wrote, "This resolution -- fragile though it might be -- was possible because we chose to see our students not as a mob but as young people who were in the process of learning. It was possible because we tried respectful dialogue rather than force."

Since then, Schill has admitted, bragged in fact, that this was bullshit, and that he had wanted to bring in the police, according to his statement to Congressional staff in August, 2025:  

The mayor of Evanston called me and said he wouldn’t be sending in the police. I said to him, ‘We have a mutual aid agreement.: He said, ‘You know, you can sue me if you want.’ … We talked again the next morning, and he was consistent, and the police chief was consistent. So, we lost the ability to use force to remove the tents.

Schill claimed he could have ordered the 32 UP officers to remove the tents, but decided against it: “We weren’t going to send in a tiny police force.”

That was just a lie.  The Northwestern University Police did indeed try to break up the encampment, shortly after it began on Thursday, April 25, 2024.  Schill sent in the NUPD, as he did on other occasions as well.  But the NUPD didn't have the numbers to disperse the protestors and withdrew.   

Records recently released to me under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act show Schill repeatedly pressured Mayor Daniel Biss to bring down the encampment. In an email time stamped Friday, April 26, 1:34 a.m., Biss told his staff of his recent phone call with Schill and Northwestern's Chief Operations Officer Luke Figora,  "their best option at this point is to clear the encampment and make mass arrests first thing in the morning," they told Biss.   Biss disagreed. "The way I left it was that I would talk with our team and get back to them, but that I was skeptical of their ask. Because I wasn't able to catch Luke [of the City of Evanston], I haven't gotten back to them. I was, however, able to speak with Chief Stewart who shares my view that mass arrests of peaceful protesters would escalate the situation and is nothing we should participate in."

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Email from April 25 makes it clear that Schill saw the students as a "mob" meriting "mass arrests" from day one.

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 Schill later rationalized his negotiations and promises in the Deering Meadow Agreement, many unkept, as in keeping with a view of student protestors as "young people in the process of learning."  

The email from Biss to his staff on his phone call in the early morning hours of Saturday, April 26 states in full:

Please do not share any aspect of or information from this email with anyone.
Tonight around 10am I had a relatively lengthy call with Mike Schill and Luke Figora.
The purpose of the call was for them to explain that:
(1) their best option at this point is to clear the encampment and make mass arrests first thing in the morning;
(2) [REDACTED covering vulnerability assessments, security measures, and tactical response]
(3) EPD should participate in this clearing/arresting operation.
They were well aware that this is not what EPD would like to do; essentially they were calling me to ask Evanston to change its position.
I found their points very unpersuasive and pushed back pretty hard. They were unmoved. I would describe the conversation as respectful but tense
(and at some moments quite pointed).
The way I left it was that I would talk with our team and get back to them, but that I was skeptical of their ask. Because I wasn't able to catch
Luke, I haven't gotten back to them. I was, however, able to speak with Chief Stewart who shares my view that mass arrests of peaceful
protesters would escalate the situation and is nothing we should participate in.
So, my expectation is that as soon as I'm able to connect with Luke in the morning, I'll call Northwestern back and say that EPD is not prepared to
participate in their clearing and arresting operation.
There are several unknowns here:
(1) I don't know if they actually would refuse to try this without our help, or if that was just a bluff;
(2) Either way, I don't know what their public statements will be;
(3) Nobody knows how the protests will evolve, with or without arrests.
I'm really worried that things could spiral in a bad way, especially if NU continues down this path. We're going to need to be careful to make good
decisions and to communicate very well. 

 Biss's text messages with Schill track these events.  (Biss text in blue.)  

 

I also found of interest the email from Rabbi Dov Hillel Klein to Schill, forwarded to First Ward representative Clare Kelly on April 25 - "For your eyes only."  The email was heavy on his emotions and those of certain Jews shared with him, but, save one exception, the statements he found offensive are boilerplate political slogans objecting to U.S. foreign policy toward Israel and the mass slaughter of civilians by an ethnocracy.  These include Klein's concerns about "hearing a faculty member who is on the faculty senate get up in a microphone and not only criticize Israel, Jews, for what is taking place in Gaza in a very violent tone."  A "violent tone"?  Meaning the tone of someone deeply disturbed and angry by war and apartheid?  Klein is not worried about Israel's actual slaughter targeting non-Jews, or the cycle of violence engendered by attachments to the nation-state, but someone's "tone" in a faculty meeting at a university where he does not teach?  And so, Rabbi Klein is entitled to instruct Schill on faculty speech?  

Also offensive to Rabbi Klein, this same faculty member "shouted at the NU Police officers who were there to protect everyone... 'Why are you here?'  The meaning was very clear: leave. All the protestors started shouting with such disrespect and disdain 'Why are you here?'"   I hope Rabbi Klein's pearls survived his clutching, on hearing protestors express the same concern to the NUPD held by Mayor Daniel Biss, about the incompatability of a peaceful demonstration with police interference -- and of course it is very clear now that Schill did not intend the police to "protect everyone," but rather to make mass arrests of those protesting.

The only alarming chant was one Klein did not personally observe: "What got me was when a student who was very shaken up shared with me a video where the crowd was screaming 'How many Jews did you kill today?'"  I asked colleagues on a chat thread who spent time at the encampment if they were familiar with such a chant and no one could recall it, although they did recall the chant, "how many kids did you kill today?" referencing Israel's destruction of children in Gaza.  Another colleague wrote: "No one leading chants wanted to call for 'killing of Israelis and Jews' because Jewish students were right there, leading chants."

I have sent an email to Rabbi Klein requesting documentation and will update if it is forthcoming.  Absent this, the big takeaway is that the calls for dismantling and fears of antisemitism brought to Schill's attention were unfounded.  (Other emails also are alleging antisemitism untethered to any specific antisemitic statements or events.) 

There is a lot more that can be said about these records.  My own takeaway is that they provide further evidence of NU's leadership appropriating a nonprofit university to advance their personal agendas using secrecy, lies, and force.  Schill's op-ed claims that the Deering Agreement "was possible because we sought to follow a set of principles, many of which I would argue are core to the tenets of Judaism."  The Hebrew Bible does include a lot of meshuggeneh ideas, and no small amount of deceit and people smoted; but does Schill really believe that secrecy, lies, and force are "core to the tenets of Judaism"?  

These releases provide further grounds for the Illinois legislature to pass a law that would obligate the same transparency for records held by private institutions of higher education as is required for public universities in Illinois.   

Mayor Biss and the City of Evanston protected free speech in 2024 by refusing Schill's demand for "mass arrests" and are allowing for sunlight today.  If it were not for the state legislature enacting freedom of information laws, and Evanston abiding by them, we would not know of these communications.  We need to pass laws today to insure trustees and officials running Illinois nonprofits do so to benefit the public, and not their profits or their political agendas.      

The full trove of emails responsive to my request are available here, though most pages are repeats of threads.

I requested these records in my capacity as a political science professor who publishes on public policy as well as the current president of the Northwestern University chapter of the American Association of University Professors.  

If you are a faculty member, please feel free to join our chapter (or that of another institution) via aaup.org .

If you are a journalist and wish further comment, I may be reached at jackiestevens AT protonmail DOT com.  

Northwestern AAUP Executive Committee Calls on Northwestern to Rollback Propaganda and Support Education

From Northwestern Email sent to Students Feb. 20, 2025
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NU AAUP Executive Committe Responds to Assault on Higher Education 
This year I am honored to serve as the president of the Northwestern University chapter of the American Association of University Professors.  In that capacity, I worked with my colleagues to draft an op-ed for the Daily Northwestern and a petition opposing Northwestern's support for the Department of Education's controversial definition of antisemitism.  We also explained our concerns about NU's quiet obedience to (other) autocrats, including orders to report international students for their exercise of the right to free speech.  

Please consider reading, signing, and also circulating.  (The petition includes links to government and other documents on the Trump administration's efforts to destroy higher education the student paper would not publish due to hacking concerns.)

Two days after our letter was published, Northwestern's Big Brother emitted its latest directive:  Factually accurate criticism of Israel's apartheid policies will be construed as "antisemitic" and a violation of Title VI.  "Horrifying!" as one Jewish scholar of the catastrophe wrote after I shared a screenshot from the new mandatory indoctrination module. [Update: shortly thereafter NU rolled out its new IHRA definition of antisemitism.]

Examples on the slide providing so-called examples of antisemitism include: "The Zionists have used the Holocaust as a weapon to deny the rights of the Palestinians and cover up the crimes of Israel." Well, this is just a fact, for which Norman Finkelstein sacrificed his career.  Are facts, including those in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Antisemitism and the Abuse of History (UC Berkeley, 2005) and The Holocaust Industry now antisemitic?  

Of course some may disagree with the emphases or certain inferences of Finkelstein and other critics of Israel, including Professor Lila Corwin Berman, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion Dollar Institution and, of course, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt.  But that does not mean analyses and positions antagonistic to Israel's domestic and foreign policies toward non-Jews are antisemitic, much less amenable to enforcement under Title VI or any other law compatible with the U.S. Constitution.  

Northwestern has spent tens of millions on lawsuits and settlements precipitated by greed and poor judgment about financial aid, the football program, and our retirement fund management.  Yet when it comes to low fruit First Amendment litigation to defend the core mission of education, Northwestern's legal counsel is nowhere to be found.

I personally have interviewed a survivor whose letter narrating an example of Latvian collaboration with the Einsatzgruppen was rewritten by an outfit in London hired by the Israeli government to collect accounts of war crimes for purposes of obtaining reparations from the German government.  When the for-hire organization received accounts that did not have phrases like "I saw with my own eyes..." they rewrote them, embellished the content to make it more grotesque, and submitted them to Israel per the contract, without revealing the fraudulent alterations either to the Israeli partner or the survivors. Correspondence indicates Israel at some point realized the documents were not authentic and cancelled the contract, but did not retract the statements and has relied on them in various political and legal contexts.   

(The Latvian survivor had resettled in NYC and responded to an ad in a Yiddish newspaper soliciting accounts of encounters with the Nazis; he was stunned when I shared the version published in a book by former Mossad agents to justify their 1965 assassination of a Latvian war criminal in Uruguay.) 

My own assessment: Latvian aviation hero Herbert Cukurs was a war criminal AND the accounts Mossad used to justify his assassination were invented.  (Like OJ: Simpson killed Nicole AND the police planted evidence.)  

The London inventions, also referenced in war crimes indictments, ended up in an archive in Yad Vashem later digitized and sold to libraries.  When I reviewed with the director of a Yiddish archive the evidence that the testimonies were fake her response was not that of defensive incredulity I anticipated.  "We paid $10,000 for access to these," she said, as she shook her head.  This was in 2006.  I then learned that insiders knowledgeable about the witness testimonies also had questioned the authenticity of this collection, but had not produced the evidence I had.  

Here's another statement that our fearless anonymous "administration" says could get one punished: "First and foremost, I condemn the conflation of Zionism a political identity, and Judaism, a religious identity.  The state of Israel has attempted to conflate both in order to garner support for its apartheid policies."  Leaving aside disputes about how to interpret an Abrahamic religion specific to the Israelites-- no "Jews" in the Hebrew Bible -- First Amendment jurisprudence in the United States does not second-guess disparate interpretations groups and individuals have as to what is and is not content required by religious doctrine, including whether a religion does or does not require allegiance to the notion of a nation-state as integral to the Jewish religion.

To the extent the government adopts a definition of antisemitism to the exclusion of those preferred by anti-Zionist Jewish groups and individuals, the government is violating both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, not to mention good old fashioned freedom of speech:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In short, the founders wanted religious organizations and individuals of conscience to decide themselves as to their group's parameters, not Donald Trump or reckless ideologues at AIPAC or other pro-Israel organizations.

That said, the EO administration cites for its biased training does not obligate the use of the wrong-headed examples in the NU module.  I've heard, but cannot document, that the group behind these slides is the Jewish United Fund, supported by "former General Dynamics chair and megadonor Lester Crown," a Northwestern trustee and donor for Northwestern's Israel Innovation Project.  The IIP is run by a director appointed without a national search and who thanks Lester Crown personally for the endeavor.  

Also, those who have reviewed the module say it is hugely biased toward antisemitism, which reflects the recent Title VI mandate and disregards the statute's larger purpose, which would require equal time for bias training on all groups that might face discrimination based on national origins, including students from China and Iran, who face huge obstacles to education because of U.S. government policies, some of which are mere rules or regulations that conflict with the Title VI statute, or so it seems.   

What does all this mean?  
Would Hannah Arendt, who cut short her teaching gig at Northwestern in 1961 to cover the Adolf Eichman trial in Israel for The New Yorker, be charged by administration with bias? 

click to enlarge, from The Jewish Writings

In "Zionism Reconsidered" (1946), an essay exploring the nuanced challenges facing Jews in the wake of the catastrophe, and expressing concerns about a Jewish state in a region previously controlled by the Ottoman Empire and then colonized by Britain, Arendt expresses principled and practical objections to the vision of Theodor Herzl.  Here and in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she attacks the ressentiment driving the agenda, especially the collaboration with Nazis such as Albert Eichmann, with whom ghetto leaders helped organize the transfer of Jews from Europe to Palestine.  (At one point Arendt calls the Zionist vision of an exclusively Jewish nation-state an ambition once viewed by most Jewish intellectuals as an objective of the "feeble-minded.") 

Arendt, herself a refugee from Germany and active in some Zionist refugee efforts during WWII, understands Jewish fears and preferences, but anticipates the disastrous political consequences of pursuing a Jewish nation-state, including the apartheid policies that would ensue and the antagonisms this would entail.  (That said, Arendt endorses the intergenerational attachments of the nation, a widely held sentimental blind spot to the nation's harms my own work rejects, for Israel and every other state-nation.  She and many others want nations without nationalism, which is like wanting to eat only dessert and avoid diabetes.)  

When I teach Arendt's essays on Zionism, will administration charge me with antisemitic bias?  I guess I'll find out.  Meanwhile, please do consider reviewing and supporting our petition.  (After hearing from our anxious colleagues, especially those who who are not tenured, we added an option for indicating only your affiliation and not your name.)