As an illegal encampment roiled campus, Kathleen Hagerty told a colleague that boycotting Sabra hummus sold on campus would be ‘pretty easy’
Northwestern University provost Kathleen Hagerty, who suggested she would be willing to boycott Israeli products to make a “deal” with student encampment organizers, will leave her post by the end of the academic year, Northwestern announced.
Hagerty, who has served as Northwestern’s chief academic officer since 2020, said she will “move on to the next phase of my career with full confidence that the University will continue to support world-class teaching and research.” Northwestern will “soon name a search committee” to identify her replacement, and Hagerty “will help with the transition to the new provost.”
The announcement comes in the wake of another top Northwestern leader’s departure: Michael Schill, who last spring became the first university president to strike a deal with encampment organizers. He faced intense scrutiny for doing so, including from the House Committee on Education and Workforce, which released a transcript of its August interview with Schill on September 4, the same day Schill resigned.
The interview centered on Schill’s response to the encampment, but Schill was not the only university leader implicated in the committee’s investigation. Text messages cited in the interview showed Hagerty texting the student encampment organizers’ faculty liaison, management professor Nour Kteily, who pledged to get those organizers “some amazing wins.”
Hagerty told Kteily that if the students “really cared about actual divestment” from Israel, one of their demands to end the encampment, “then they need the patience to actually do the work and make it happen.” She also told him it would be “pretty easy” to boycott the sale of Sabra hummus on campus, adding, “I’m all for making a deal.”
Schill defended Hagerty, telling the House committee that Hagerty viewed the encampment as a “teachable moment” and does not support a boycott against Israel. Advocacy groups like the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern disagreed, calling for her resignation. The group applauded Hagerty’s stepping down, saying in a Friday statement that it “caps years of institutional decline at a university now facing federal investigations, frozen research funding, and mounting congressional scrutiny for its handling of antisemitism.”
The Trump administration froze nearly $800 million in federal funding for Northwestern in April amid a Department of Education investigation into anti-Semitism at the school. The Department of Health and Human Services launched its own civil rights probe of Northwestern one month later, citing “systemic concerns” about the school’s ability “not to discriminate against Jewish students.”
Illegal anti-Israel protests have continued at Northwestern this year. Activists vandalized the building that houses the school’s Holocaust center as Jewish students observed Passover in April, writing messages like “Death to Israel” and “Intifada Now!” in red spray paint. Around the same time, the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter held an anarchist training session in which members studied propaganda from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group, urging them to “build an Intifada” and “destroy amerika.”
Northwestern maintains a satellite campus in Hamas-friendly Qatar, which opened in 2008. Its contract with Qatar effectively forbids students and faculty from criticizing the Qatari regime, Schill’s House interview revealed.
