Yale’s new president championed policing as head of Stony Brook University
A few weeks before Yale announced that Maurie McInnis would become its new president, she narrowly avoided censure at Stony Brook University, which she had led for four years.
The University Senate criticized Dr. McInnis’ decision to call in police to break up a pro-Palestinian protest camp on the Stony Brook campus on Long Island on May 1.
The arrests are the culmination of a growing spat between Stony Brook faculty and the soon-to-be president over policing and free speech, a sentiment she is likely to face again at Yale, where she took over as president on Monday.
When her appointment at Yale was announced, Dr. McInnis’s supporters cited many accomplishments at Stony Brook, including her success in raising the profile of the public university, attracting millions of dollars in donations and deftly leading the school, a flagship of the State University of New York system, through the Covid pandemic. Dr. McInnis, a former provost at the University of Texas, is academically known for her research on the history of early American art, with a particular focus on focus about art depicting the slave trade.
Like many other university presidents, Dr. McInnis has had to deal with a volatile political environment, especially after protests broke out on many campuses over the war between Israel and Hamas. This crisis is likely to continue into the fall.
Even before the war in Gaza, Critics say Dr. McInnis emphasized policing and security, which can be a common source of tension on college campuses. In her four years at Stony Brook, Dr. McInnis’s administration dismissed a professor who had criticized local police. And she created an expansive security department, complete with intelligence capabilities.
Robert Chase, a history professor who specializes in policing, said he worries that the department, with its sweeping authority, could become a model. “I worry that this elevation of the police to an executive authority at the university is one that will be replicated nationwide,” he said in an interview.
Professors said they first became concerned in 2021, when Dr. McInnis created the Division of Enterprise Risk Management, a security department with broad powers and oversee nearly 400 employees, including campus police.
Dr. McInnis has said she founded the office following her experience as provost at the University of Texas in 2017, when a mentally ill student wielding a machete-like knife attacked four students, one fatally.
“There was chaos on campus and none of us in central administration knew what was going on,” she said, describing how students had locked themselves in campus buildings as rumors spread on social media.
The idea behind Stony Brook’s risk management office is to oversee university services that could pose risks and find ways to mitigate them — a broad portfolio that includes campus shuttles, faculty travel, use of hazardous chemicals and policing. The concept began in the corporate world but has gradually taken hold in academia, with a growing number of colleges adopting it in one form or another.
Yale, Dr. McInnis’ new home, has its own office enterprise risk management with some of the same functions as the office at Stony Brook. At Stony Brook, however, the unit has aroused suspicion, in part because of its broad powers, including direct jurisdiction over campus police.
Stony Brook pointed to four other universities with similar structures, including Colorado State and the University of North Carolina. Still, Bruce Branson, associate director of the Enterprise Risk Management Initiative at North Carolina State University, called it unusual for campus police to report to such an office.
He gave examples of typical risk management responsibilities, including trying to predict and prevent a decline in enrollment.
Dr. Branson, whose office sponsors conferences for According to risk management professionals, the directors of these firms often have a background in internal auditing or finance.
To lead the Stony Brook department, Dr. McInnis chose Lawrence Zacarese, a former interim campus police chief who newspaper headlines like a NYPD K-9 officer. In 2017, Mr. Zacarese ran for sheriff of Suffolk County, NY, and was defeated despite the support of the leader of the Guardian Angels Curtis Sliwa and from Rudolph Giuliani, who donated $10,000.
In an interview, Mr. Zacarese said that historically, universities have not paid attention to broad risks.
“It all comes down to safety,” said Mr. Zacarese, who also serves as Stony Brook’s chief security officer. Dawn T. Smallwood, a former FBI agent who serves as Stony Brook’s main campus police chief, also serves in the Risk Management Office.
The office has caused some unrest. For example, a few professors began to worry that the department was monitoring their social media posts.
Josh Dubnau, a professor of neurobiology, said Mr. Zacarese recently approached him on campus to say, “That tweet you sent last night was not helpful.”
He appeared to be referring to Dr. Dubnau’s repost of a social media post about an NYPD corrections van seen on campus. Dr. Dubnau said he had asked Mr. Zacarese to “never again” speak to him about his social media posts.
Mr. Zacarese said in the interview that the university monitors social media to protect its brand, but does not target professors’ individual social media posts. “That just doesn’t happen,” he said.
Professors were also put off by a recent vacancy for a intelligence specialist.
“When I saw that ad, I was just stunned,” said Dr. Chase, the history professor. “They want someone with expertise in homeland security, intelligence analysis, travel monitoring, data collection and analysis. For what?”
Professors were further alarmed after the university criticized social media comments from a professor who had sharply criticized the conduct of Suffolk County police officers during an off-campus incident.
In December 2022, a social worker asked Suffolk police to monitor a man with a history of mental illness after his roommate complained that the man was behaving erratically. When police arrived, the man attacked them with a knife, stabbing two of them, before officers shot him dead.
After Stony Brook Medicine, which operates the university hospital, Posted An Instagram update about the officers’ recovery after the attack prompted R. Anna Hayward, a professor of social services, to comment on the post: “This was a welfare check. Why didn’t they de-escalate the situation? Why did a man have to die? And what about the man they killed?”
Although Dr. Hayward did not mention in her post that she was a professor at Stony Brook, the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association, a powerful police union, called at the university to “condemn Hayward’s hateful comments.”
“I woke up to hundreds of emails threatening me,” Dr. Hayward said in an interview. She said strangers called her and asked: “’Are you the same Anna Hayward who hates the police and lives in —’ and then gives my address.”
What happened next, she said, was even more disturbing: “All of a sudden, Stony Brook issued a statement publicly condemning me.”
The rackwhich was emailed to the entire campus community, calling her comments “inflammatory” and “inappropriate” and was signed by both the university’s provost and head of the department of medicine.
In response, some Stony Brook faculty members held a “teach in” defending Dr. Hayward’s right to criticize the police, and accused the university of being unable to withstand outside pressure.
In a senate meeting in February 2023, According to Dr. McInnis, the government’s primary concern was protecting Dr. Hayward’s safety.
And in a statement, she said that comments by Dr. Hayward, who responded to the university’s Instagram account, were interpreted by many people as university opinion. “We never restricted her freedom of expression, she remained in class and was not disciplined,” Dr. McInnis said.
At a more recent time meetingShortly before she was appointed to lead Yale, Dr. McInnis vigorously defended her decision to delete the pro-Palestinian camp.
The protesters, she said, were asked to move on May 1 to make way for a previously scheduled event by Hillel, a Jewish organization on campus. “One group’s speech cannot cancel another group’s speech,” Dr. McInnis said.
The decision to detain the protesters, including Doctor Dubnaufollowed their refusal to move.
“We really had serious concerns about keeping the campus safe,” Dr. McInnis said, adding that social media posts indicated outsiders were coming to campus to confront protesters.
Ella Engel-Snow, one of the student protesters, said the gathering was completely safe and peaceful until police arrived.
“There were hordes of police officers running in and creating chaos where there wasn’t any,” said Ms. Engel-Snow.
As a member of the core group of protesters, she was held at campus police headquarters for more than seven hours, and her phone was confiscated as “evidence” for a week and a half, she said.
The protesters’ attorney, Peter Brill, noted that the misdemeanor charges were no more serious than a traffic violation and accused police of excessive force. He said the seizure of their phones amounted to an unlawful seizure without a warrant.
During the Senate meeting, Dr. McInnis compared the arrests to events on other campuses around the country, where security officers used “tear gas, pepper spray, mounted police, dogs, riot gear, rubber bullets,” she said. “None of that happened here.”
Mr. Zacarese said Stony Brook University Police followed the legal requirements regarding confiscation of property. The protesters’ phones were returned to them and the disorderly conduct charges were dropped.
In a vote that illustrated her mixed legacy at Stony Brook, Dr. McInnis narrowly avoided censure during the May 6 Senate meeting, voting 55-51 against censure. But the Senate overwhelmingly approved a plan to investigate the enterprise risk management office and develop a way to oversee its activities.
