Debate Primer: Morton Schapiro
This week, and for the final time this academic year, Political Union will debate whether outgoing President Morty Schapiro was a good steward of Northwestern University. This primer will necessarily be a little different from others; although Northwestern has at times received considerable regional and national news coverage, many campus issues are exclusively covered by the Daily Northwestern or primarily debated on social media. It can be conspicuously difficult to find reliable information about some of these issues - sometimes because university agencies, like in the case of CAPS, limit the amount of information they divulge, and other times because conversations on social media can simplify or misrepresent which decisions are made by Morty and the extent of his power over campus events.
All that is to say that each of these topics, links, and arguments needs to be taken with a larger-than-usual grain of salt. On specific campus topics there is a lower volume of public forum debate than on our typical national policy resolutions. As a result, it’s quite difficult for me to determine which takes are high quality and limit the primer to just those. Instead, I’ve put together an anthology of Morty’s greatest accomplishments (according to his supporters) and the university’s deepest flaws during his tenure (according to his detractors). For the most part, I’ve stuck to persistent trends rather than individual events, since they perhaps help us overcome a little recency bias in our evaluation of Morty’s performance.
Let’s begin with the university’s take on Morty’s achievements since he took office in 2009. This recent article from Northwestern Now is a good place to start.
Next, I’d like to highlight two recent interviews with Morty, one in the Daily last year and another with Times Higher Ed from February. In the latter piece, Morty discusses his willingness to engage in controversy with both conservatives and progressives through his written publications, and he comments briefly on the fall 2020 student protests that culminated in front of his home.
Now, let’s turn to common criticisms of Morty’s time at Northwestern. In 2013, the Daily Northwestern published a retrospective of Morty’s first term as university president. The article discusses Morty’s frequent absence from Northwestern’s campus, tensions with the Jewish student community, as well as debates over salaries of employees at the university.
Morty made headlines in spring 2019 when he revealed that he annually read and decided approximately 500 applications belonging to “Z-listed” students, or the children of donors or alumni.
Among the most salient events in Morty’s recent years in charge were the October 2020 anti-NUPD protests on and around the Evanston campus. One one occasion, protesters loudly demonstrated in front of Morty’s home and drew a public response the following day. Various Northwestern departments then published their own open letters rebuking Morty.
Other criticisms of note have included the university’s furloughs of employees at the beginning of COVID, as well as the budget surplus that the university retained after doing so. Faculty and staff retirement contributions were also cut at the time.
Although they have been inactive for several months, the Twitter accounts of both Northwestern University Community Not Cops (@copsoutofnu) and Fossil Free Northwestern (@fossilfreenu) have been sharply critical of the Northwestern administration over the last two years. The Instagram account for Reform CAPS (@reformcapsnu) contains student testimonials and demands for the administration as well.
For the last time this year, we hope that you’ll join us this Tuesday night at our debate! It’s been a pleasure for me to write these primers for you throughout this year and the years before.
"Morton Schapiro" by the1andonlycary is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
