Yale’s New President Pushed Policing as Head of Stony Brook University

A few weeks before Yale announced that Maurie McInnis would be its new president, she narrowly avoided censure at Stony Brook University, which she led for four years.

The university senate criticized Dr. McInnis’s decision to call in the police on May 1 to take down a pro-Palestinian protest encampment on the Stony Brook campus on Long Island.

The arrests marked the culmination of growing discord between Stony Brook’s faculty and its soon-to-be-departing president over policing and free speech, issues that she is likely to confront 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 public university’s profile, 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. A former provost at the University of Texas, Dr. McInnis is known academically for her research on the history of early American art, with a particular focus on art depicting the slave trade.

Like many university presidents, though, 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 in the fall.

Even before the war in Gaza,critics say, Dr. McInnis emphasized policing and security, which can be a frequent source of tension on college campuses. In her four years at Stony Brook, Dr. McInnis’s administration repudiated a professor who had criticized the local police. And she created an expanded safety department, complete with intelligence capabilities.