Responses from university leaders

Immediately following the sit-in, Chancellor Daniel Diermeier sent a statement to the Vanderbilt community in which he acknowledged the protestors’ suspensions, reiterated the university’s commitment to free expression and civil discourse and promised to work with student protestors. In an interview with The Hustler on April 25, Diermeier claimed his staff was yelled at when asking student protestors if they wanted to hold a meeting during the sit-in, but VDC members said they were denied meetings prior to the demonstration.

Other university presidents decided to meet with protestors. President Michael Schill at Northwestern University and President Jonathan Holloway of Rutgers University both reached an agreement with student demonstrators, while Williams College President Maud Mandel released a statement in May saying that student protestors would present their demands to the Board of Trustees.

Diermeier continued to support principled neutrality in interviews with The Hustler and in national media. On April 2, Diermeier wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he said the university would not divest from any companies based on national affiliations. He claimed that free expression is “alive and well” at Vanderbilt. Diermeier has expressed his support for the idea of principled neutrality among institutions of higher education in various newspapers including Forbes, the WSJ, NPR and the New York Times. 

Diermeier publicly pushed for other universities to adopt this principle. Harvard announced on May 28 that it would refrain from taking any official position on controversial issues. The University of Chicago, Columbia and Stanford University already had existing policies of neutrality.

While Vanderbilt announced on May 30 that the Board of Trust had voted to extend Diermeier’s contract — which was slated to expire in 2027 — to 2035, other university leaders have left. On May 9, Cornell University President Martha E. Pollack resigned following a decision to suspend four student protestors, although Pollack has claimed her leaving is isolated from this spring’s events. Columbia President Minouche Shafik resigned on Aug. 13 following an April appearance in Congress in which she discussed antisemitism on campus and her calls to bring in the New York Police Department to respond to student protestors.