Northwestern University president Michael Schill announced his resignation on Wednesday, saying in a statement that “now is the right time for new leadership to guide Northwestern into its next chapter.”
That is certainly true. Schill’s departure clears the way for the elevation of a leader committed to ensuring Northwestern’s Jewish students receive the safe learning environment to which they are entitled.
Schill’s record speaks for itself. He was the first university president to strike a deal with student radicals who took over parts of campus after Oct. 7, rewarding them for their disruptions. As a part of that deal, Northwestern hired a Palestinian professor who sits on the board of a Gaza-based organization tied to Hamas.
Schill was less supine when it came to Northwestern’s beloved football coach, Pat Fitzgerald, whom he summarily fired in 2023, accusing him of complicity in a rotten culture that included hazing. Fitzgerald in turn sued the school for $130 million. That wrongful termination lawsuit was settled in late August. We are reliably informed that Fitzgerald walked away flush and Northwestern cleared his name.
Not satisfied with beclowning himself in Evanston, Schill trekked to Capitol Hill and did it again in 2024. Pressed on Northwestern’s satellite campus in Qatar, underwritten by hundreds of millions of dollars from the Hamas-allied Qatari regime—and, in particular, its formal partnership with Al Jazeera, the regime-funded propaganda outlet—Schill told lawmakers he “just found out about that last week.”
When the Trump administration announced in February that Northwestern was a target of its Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism and froze the school’s research funding, the university’s most distinguished scientists had had enough. Thirty-three of the school’s professors are members of the National Academy of Sciences and, sources tell us, over 20 of them called for Schill’s resignation in a letter to the board of trustees in July.
It was the last straw. That’s a win for Northwestern and a win for the Trump administration, whose theory of the case in choking off federal funding to scientific research programs has been that it is the only lever to force change. In Northwestern’s case, it dragged the sensible scientists off the sidelines. We welcome them to the good fight.
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