Just weeks before Yale University announced that Maury McInnis would be its new president, he had narrowly avoided criticism at Stony Brook University, where he had led for four years.
The University Board of Trustees criticized Dr. McInnis' decision to call police on May 1 to disperse a pro-Palestinian protest camp on the Stony Brook campus on Long Island.
The arrest marks the culmination of a growing feud between Stony Brook faculty and its soon-to-be-departing president over policing and free speech, an issue he will likely confront again at Yale, where he took over as president on Monday.
When his Yale appointment was announced, McInnis' supporters cited his many accomplishments at Stony Brook, including raising the public university's profile, raising millions of dollars in endowment funds and skillfully leading the flagship school of the State University of New York system through the COVID-19 pandemic. McInnis, a former president of the University of Texas, is known academically for his work on early American art history, with a particular focus on art depicting the slave trade.
But like many university presidents, Dr. McInnis has had to navigate a volatile political environment, especially after protests against the Israeli-Hamas war engulfed many college campuses, a crisis that is likely to continue into the fall.
Even before the war in Gaza, Critics say McInnis emphasized policing and security, which can often be a source of tension on college campuses. During McInnis' four years at Stony Brook, the administration rejected professors who criticized local police, and she created an expanded security department with intelligence capabilities.
Robert Chase, a history professor who specializes in policing, said he worries that broad police powers could become a model. “My concern is that this effort to elevate police to executive-level authority on universities is going to be adopted across the country,” he said in an interview.
Professors said they first became concerned in 2021 when Dr. McInnis created the Department of Enterprise Risk Management, a security office with broad authority and oversight over about 400 employees, including the campus police department.
Dr. McInnis said he created the office after he was chancellor at the University of Texas in 2017 when a mentally ill student wielded a machete-like knife and attacked four students, one of whom died.
“There was chaos on campus and no one in central administration knew what was going on,” she said, describing how students holed themselves up in campus buildings as rumors spread on social media.
The idea behind Stony Brook University's risk management office is to monitor university services that may pose risks and find ways to mitigate them. These range from campus shuttles, faculty travel, the use of hazardous chemicals, security, and more. The concept started in the corporate world but has slowly made its way into academia, with more and more universities adopting it in some form.
Dr McInnis' new employer, Yale, has an enterprise risk management office that has some of the same functions as Stony Brook's office, but its broad powers, including direct authority over the campus police department, have raised concerns in some quarters.
Stony Brook University cited four other universities with similar structures, including Colorado State University and the University of North Carolina. Still, Bruce Brunson, associate director of enterprise risk management initiatives at North Carolina State University, said it's unusual for campus police to report to such an office.
He cited examples of classic risk-management responsibilities, such as predicting and preventing enrollment declines.
Dr. Branson said, Directors of these offices often have backgrounds in internal audit or finance, risk management experts say.
To lead the Stony Brook chapter, Dr. McInnis selected former interim campus police chief Lawrence Zakarese, who made a name for himself as a K-9 officer with the NYPD. In 2017, Zakarese ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Suffolk County, New York, despite the support of Guardian Angels leader Curtis Suliawa and Rudolph Giuliani, who donated $10,000 to his campaign.
Zakarese said in an interview that historically universities have not paid attention to the broader risks.
“It really 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 is now Stony Brook's main campus police chief, is also a member of the risk management office.
The office has caused some anxiety: Some professors, for example, have begun to worry that the department is monitoring their social media posts.
Neurobiology professor Josh Dubnow said Zacarese approached him on campus recently and said, “That tweet you sent out last night wasn't helpful.”
He appeared to be referring to a social media repost by Dr. Dubnow of a message about an NYPD corrections bus that had been spotted on campus. Dr. Dubnow said he had asked Mr. Zacarese not to speak about the social media post “ever again.”
In an interview, Zakarese said the university monitors social media to protect its brand, but is not targeting individual social media posts by professors. “That's not what's happening at all,” he said.
Professors also expressed disgust at recent job advertisements seeking intelligence professionals.
“When I saw the ad, I was just stunned,” said Dr. Chase, the history professor. “They're looking for someone with expertise in homeland security, intelligence analysis, travel surveillance, data collection and analysis. For what?”
Professors became even more alarmed after the university criticized social media comments made by a professor who harshly questioned the actions 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 he was behaving erratically. When police arrived, the man lunged at police with a knife and stabbed two people before being shot and killed by officers.
After Stony Brook Medicine, which operates the university's teaching hospital, posted an update on Instagram that the officers were recovering from the attack, social work professor R. Anna Hayward 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 happened to the man they killed?”
Dr. Hayward's post did not identify her as a professor at Stony Brook University, but the powerful police union, the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association, called on the university to “condemn Dr. Hayward's hateful comments.”
“I woke up to hundreds of threatening emails,” Dr. Hayward said in an interview, adding that he had received phone calls from strangers asking: “Say, 'Are you the same Anna Hayward who hates the police and lives in –' and give me my address.”
What happened next, she said, was even more shocking: “All of a sudden, Stony Brook University issued a statement publicly denounced me.”
A statement emailed to the entire university community called her comments “inflammatory” and “inappropriate,” and was signed by both the president and the dean of the university's medical school.
In response, some Stony Brook faculty members held “teach-ins” to defend Dr. Hayward's right to criticize the police and criticized the university for failing to resist outside pressure.
At the February 2023 Senate meeting, Dr. McInnis said the administration's primary concern was keeping Dr. Hayward safe.
The statement also said Dr Hayward's comments, made in response to the university's Instagram account, had been interpreted by many to be the university's views. “We have never restricted her free speech and she has remained in the classroom and has not faced any discipline,” Dr McInnis said.
At a recent meeting, shortly before he was appointed president of Yale University, Dr. McInnis forcefully defended his decision to remove the pro-Palestinian camp.
She said protesters were asked to relocate to an event scheduled by Hillel, a Jewish organization on campus, on May 1. “One group's speech cannot cancel another group's speech,” Dr. McInnis said.
The decision to arrest the protesters, including Dr Dubnow, was taken after they refused to move.
“There were very real concerns about whether we could keep the campus safe,” Dr. McInnis said, adding that social media posts indicated outsiders were heading to campus to confront protesters.
Ella Engel Snow, one of the students who took part in the protest, said the rally had been completely safe and peaceful until police arrived.
“Police came in in droves and created chaos where there had been nothing before,” Engel Snow said.
As part of a core group of protesters, she was held at campus police headquarters for more than seven hours, and her cell phone was held as “evidence” for a week and a half, she said.
Peter Brill, a lawyer for the protesters, noted that the resulting disorderly conduct charges were no more serious than a traffic ticket, accused police of using excessive force and said the seizure of cellphones amounted to an illegal seizure without a warrant.
During the senate meeting, Dr McInnis compared the arrests to incidents at other universities across the country where security guards have used “tear gas, pepper spray, mounted police, dogs, riot gear, rubber bullets,” she said. “Nothing like that has happened here.”
Zakarese said Stony Brook University police followed legal requirements regarding the seizure of property. The protesters' cellphones were returned to them and the disorderly conduct charges were dropped.
In a vote that illustrated Dr. McInnis's complicated record at Stony Brook University, he narrowly escaped censure by a 55-51 vote at the Senate meeting on May 6. But the Senate overwhelmingly approved a plan to investigate the Office of Enterprise Risk Management and develop ways to oversee its activities.