The Daily sat down with University President Michael Schill earlier this month to discuss his rapid transition into the Northwestern presidency, his relationship with student activists and his general priorities for his first few months in Evanston. This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity. The Daily: How has your experience been navigating.
Content warning: This story contains mentions of sexual assault and death. Students at Northwestern University in Qatar protested earlier this month for increased student wages, better support services and concrete steps to address discrimination against the University’s South Asian, East Asian and Black students. The event came exactly two years after NU-Q students’ last major.
A professor at Northwestern University in Qatar has withdrawn from a $700,000 research project after members of the NU-Q community voiced concerns about a racist and sexist article she reposted online.
NU-Q announced in January that political science Prof. Jocelyn Mitchell and two of her colleagues had received a grant from the Qatar National Research Fund to study women entrepreneurs in Qatar. In 2008, two years before she began teaching at NU-Q, Mitchell reposted an email on her blog which said “the ratio of ugly women to not so ugly women (in Qatar) is 9:1.”
Screenshots of the post circulated online in November 2019, and Mitchell apologized in a community town hall and subsequently took part in anti-racism training under supervision of the University. After the post resurfaced online this month, NU-Q released a statement on Feb. 5 acknowledging that the incident “continues to cause pain in our community both within NU-Q and the wider Qatari community.”