Just weeks before Yale announced that Maurie McInnis would be its new president, she narrowly avoided impeachment at Stony Brook University, which she led for four years.
The university senate criticized Dr. McInnis’ decision to call the police on May 1 to break up a pro-Palestinian protest encampment on the Stony Brook campus in Long Island.
The arrests were the culmination of a growing rift between the Stony Brook faculty and its soon-to-depart president over policing and free speech, issues he is likely to face again at Yale, where he took over as president on Monday.
When her appointment at Yale was announced, supporters of Dr. McInnis cited many accomplishments at Stony Brook, including her success in raising the profile of the public university, attracting millions of dollars in endowment and deftly guiding the school, the flagship of the State University of New York. system, through the Covid pandemic. A former professor at the University of Texas, Dr. McInnis is known academically for her research in early American art history, with a particular focus on art depicting the slave trade.
Like many university presidents, however, Dr. McInnis has also had to navigate a volatile political environment, especially after protests over the Israel-Hamas war engulfed many campuses, a crisis that is likely to continue into the fall.
Even before the war in Gaza, Critics say Dr. McInnis has emphasized policing and security, which can be a frequent source of tension on college campuses. In her four years at Stony Brook, the administration of Dr. McInnis dismissed a professor who had criticized local police. And he created an expanded security department, complete with intelligence capabilities.
Robert Chase, a history professor who specializes in policing, said he worries the department, with its expansive authority, could become a role model. “My concern is that this elevation of the police to an executive-level authority at the university will be adopted nationally,” he said in an interview.
The professors said they first became concerned in 2021, when Dr. McInnis created the Division of Enterprise Risk Management, a security office with broad powers and oversight of nearly 400 employees, including the campus police department.
Dr. McInnis said she founded the office because of her experiences as a professor at the University of Texas in 2017, when a mentally ill student, brandishing 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,” he said, describing how students had barricaded themselves in campus buildings as rumors spread on social media.
The idea behind the risk management office at Stony Brook is to oversee university services that could pose risks and find ways to mitigate them — a broad portfolio that includes campus buses, faculty travel, use of hazardous chemicals and policing. The idea started in the corporate world, but has gradually taken hold in the academic world as well, with a growing number of colleges adopting it in some form.
Yale, the new home of Dr. McInnis, has its own enterprise risk management office with some of the same functions as the Stony Brook office. At Stony Brook, however, the unit has raised suspicions, in part because of its sweeping authority, including direct jurisdiction over the campus police department.
Stony Brook pointed to four other universities with similar structures, including Colorado State and the University of North Carolina. Even so, 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 enrollment declines.
Dr. Branson, whose office sponsors conferences for risk management professionals, said the directors of these offices often have backgrounds in internal auditing or finance.
To lead the Stony Brook division, Dr. McInnis chose Lawrence Zacarese, a former interim campus police chief who made headlines as an NYPD K-9 officer. In 2017, Mr. Zacarese ran for sheriff of Suffolk County, New York, and was defeated despite support from Guardian Angels leader Curtis Sliwa and from Rudolph Giuliani, who donated $10,000.
In an interview, Mr. Zacarese said that historically, universities have ignored big risks.
“It all comes back to safety,” said Mr. Zacarese, who also serves as Stony Brook’s chief safety officer. Dawn T. Smallwood, a former FBI agent who serves as police chief for Stony Brook’s main campus, is also a member of the risk management office.
The office has caused concern. Some professors, for example, began to worry that the department was monitoring their social media posts.
Josh Dubnau, professor of neurobiology, said Mr. Zacarese approached him on campus recently to say, “That tweet you sent out last night was not helpful.”
He appeared to be referring to the reposting of a message from Dr. Dubnau on social media about a New York City Corrections bus seen on campus. Dr. Dubnau said he asked Mr Zacarese not to talk to him about his social media posts “again”.
Mr. Zacarese said in the interview that the university monitors social media in an effort to protect its brand, but does not target individual professors’ social media posts. “That’s just not happening,” he said.
The teachers were also put off by a recent job posting for an intelligence specialist.
“When I looked at that ad, I was amazed,” said Dr. Chase, the history professor. “They want someone with expertise in homeland security, intelligence analysis, travel monitoring and data collection and analysis. Why;”
Professors were further alarmed when the university criticized comments made on social media by a professor who harshly questioned the conduct of Suffolk County police officers in an off-campus incident.
In December 2022, a caseworker asked Suffolk police to check on a man with a history of mental illness after his roommate complained the man was behaving erratically. When police arrived, the man lunged at them with a knife, stabbing two of them, before officers shot and killed him.
After Stony Brook Medicine, which operates the university hospital, posted an update on Instagram about the officers’ recovery from the attack, R. Anna Hayward, a professor of social services, responded to the post: “This was a wellness check. Why didn’t they de-escalate the situation? Why did a man have to die? What about the man they murdered?’
Although Dr. Hayward’s post did not identify her as a Stony Brook professor, the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association, a powerful police union, called on the university to “denounce Hayward’s hateful comments.”
“I woke up to hundreds of emails threatening me,” Dr. Hayward said in an interview. She said she would get calls from strangers asking, “You’re the same Anna Hayward who hates the police and lives in —” and then tell me my address.”
What happened next, he said, was even more troubling: “Suddenly, Stony Brook issued a statement publicly denouncing me.”
The statement, which was emailed to the entire campus community, called her comments “inflammatory” and “inappropriate” and was signed by both the professor and the university’s chief of medicine.
In response, some Stony Brook faculty members staged a “teach-in” in defense of Dr. Hayward’s right to criticize the police and accused the university of failing to resist outside pressure.
At a Senate meeting in February 2023, Dr McInnis said the administration’s primary concern was protecting Dr Hayward’s safety.
And in a statement, he said Dr Hayward’s comments, which were in response to the university’s Instagram account, were interpreted by many as the university’s view. “We never once restricted her freedom of speech, she stayed in class and received no discipline,” Dr. McInnis said.
In a more recent meeting, shortly before she was appointed head of Yale, Dr. McInnis offered a strong defense of her decision to remove the pro-Palestinian camp.
The protesters, he said, were asked to relocate on May 1 to make way for a prearranged event by Hillel, a Jewish organization on campus. “One group’s speech cannot cancel out another group’s speech,” Dr McInnis said.
The decision to arrest the protesters, including Dr. Dubnau, followed their refusal to move.
“We had really serious concerns about making sure we could keep the campus safe,” Dr McInnis said. He added that social media posts indicated that outsiders were heading to the campus to confront the protesters.
Ella Engel-Snow, one of the student protesters, said the rally was completely safe and peaceful until the police arrived.
“Hordes of police just rushed in, creating chaos where there was none,” Ms Engel-Snow said.
As part of the core group of protesters, she was held at campus police headquarters for more than seven hours and her phone was seized for a week and a half, she said, as “evidence.”
Noting that the resulting disorderly conduct charges were no more serious than a traffic citation, the protesters’ lawyer, Peter Brill, accused police of using excessive force and said keeping their phones amounted to an illegal seizure without a warrant.
At 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 the university police at Stony Brook followed legal requirements regarding the seizure of property. The protesters; their phones have been returned and charges of disorderly conduct are being dropped.
In a vote that reflected her mixed heritage at Stony Brook, Dr. McInnis avoided impeachment at the Senate meeting on May 6, with a 55-51 vote against impeachment. However, the Senate overwhelmingly approved a plan to investigate the enterprise risk management office and develop a way to oversee its activities.
