'Piggy Morty' Chants By Anti-Police Protesters Prompt Controversy

EVANSTON, IL — Protesters calling for the abolition of Northwestern University's private police force rejected claims that it was anti-Semitic to call Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro "Piggy Morty" after the school's president said the chant had come "dangerously close to a longstanding trope" against Jewish people.

"Whether it was done out of ignorance or out of Anti-Semitism, it is completely unacceptable," Schapiro said Monday in a response to the protestors who marched to his house early Sunday morning and repeated their demands for the school to disband the Northwestern Police Department. "I ask them to consider how their parents and siblings would feel if a group came to their homes in the middle of the night to wake up their families with such vile and personal attacks."

While Schapiro said the university supports free expression and protests that do not break the law, he said those who showed up at his house and damaged property should be ashamed of themselves.

"What started as peaceful protests have recently grown into expressions that have been anything but peaceful or productive. Crowds blocked the streets of downtown Evanston and nearby residential areas, disrupting businesses and local families, defacing property and violating laws and University standards. Some of the instigators appear not to be Northwestern students at all, but rather outside activists," Schapiro said.

Nightly protests organized by the group NU Community Not Cops began on Oct. 12. Representatives of the group have promised to continue until university officials commit to eliminating its security force.

Though it is a private agency and not subject to the same accountability as taxpayer-funded law enforcement, a mutual cooperation agreement with the Evanston Police Department first executed in 1992 gives the university's officers full police powers off campus and within city limits as far west as Green Bay Road and Asbury Avenue and as far south as Lake Street — without requiring approval from an Evanston Police Department supervisor.

The university president suggested the nightly protests seemed aimed at escalating matters to provoke the university into a response. Officers from across the north suburbs have been called in to assist with the nightly protests via members of the Northern Illinois Police Alarm System's crowd control team.

About 300 students took to the streets Saturday night during the sixth night of protests, the Daily Northwestern reported. Demonstrators burned a banner that had been hanging from the campus's arch and spray painted anti-police messages on it, various sidewalks and the Whole Food Market.

"I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the overstepping of the protesters," Schapiro said. "They have no right to menace members of our academic and surrounding communities. When students and other participants are vandalizing property, lighting fires and spray-painting phrases such as 'kill the pigs,' we have moved well past legitimate forms of free speech."

Schapiro said university officials have "absolutely no intention to abolish" its security force, although though have "every intention to continue improving NUPD."

In a statement responding to Schapiro's message, the abolitionist group said it was fighting for a world free of violence against all persecuted groups — Black, Brown, Indigenous, Jewish, poor and others. It rejected the idea there were any anti-Semitic undertones behind its porcine epithets for the university president.

"The term ‘pig’ has been used by Black radical movements for generations to invoke the structural violence that police officers present. In the context of our protests, which are very clearly in response to anti-Black police violence on campus and in Evanston, this was the meaning invoked. Morton Schapiro was called a pig by members of our campaign because he aligns himself with law enforcement and prioritizes police and private property over the lives of Black students," it said.

"We’ve learned that Morton Schapiro is suggesting that ‘pig’ is an anti-Semitic term because of the 'Judensau' trope, wherein some European countries in the 14th century, Jewish people were depicted as engaging in lewd relations with pigs. We find it absurd for Morton Schapiro to suggest that protestors were invoking an anti-Semitic trope derived from the European Middle Ages and not the word ‘pig’ as it refers to the racist United States police. Regardless of our intent, we apologize to our Jewish community, to individuals both inside and outside of the campaign who may have been harmed by language utilized at the protest.

"However, we do not apologize to Morton Shapiro," the statement continued. "False claims of anti-Semitism have been used throughout Northwestern’s history to shut down student activists, especially Palestinian activists, and to divide coalitions by falsely claiming that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism."

In response, the pro-Israel campus group Wildcats For Israel issued a statement lamenting that the conversation had shifted from one of focused on abolishing the private university security force to "one that is riddled with anti-Semitic discourse." It said the NU Community Not Cops should not act as the arbiter of what qualifies as anti-Semitism and condition its condemnation of anti-Semitism by bringing Zionism into the discourse.

"Without solicitation, the group decided it was appropriate to inject matters well beyond the scope of the conversation, including mentions of Zionism and Palestinian Liberation. While we believe there is a time and place for these discussions, this was neither the time nor the place," the groups executive board said in a joint statement. "We want to be clear: if you qualify your denunciation of anti-Semitism, your denunciation is incomplete and counterproductive."

A group of more than 90 Jewish members of the Northwestern community penned an open letter to "unequivocally reject President Schapiro’s accusations of antisemitism and stand in solidarity with the abolitionists leading NU Community Not Cops." The students said Schapiro had erased and delegitimized Black Jews.

"There is a long, sordid history of White Jewish leaders using antisemitism as a cudgel to denigrate Black radical protest and sow divisions among communities otherwise allied in the fight against White supremacy," they said. "Schapiro’s weaponization of his Jewish identity is no different, and is meant to distract us from the cries for justice currently being led by Black abolitionists at Northwestern and to legitimize anti-Black sanctions against them."

The university has 45 sworn officers and 30 community service officers, according to Bruce Lewis, the senior associate vice president at the university who serves as the chief of the force. But Northwestern representatives have cited its immunity from state transparency laws to withhold information about the its basic policies, the identities of people its officers arrests and other data that public police departments in Illinois provide.

Schapiro emphasized that students who violate the law will be held accountable under it. Likewise, it would take a change to state law to hold Northwestern University police officers to the same legal standards of accountability as municipal police officers, sheriff's deputies, correctional officers, courtroom security officers and other public employees.

"An essential aspect of education is the discernment of actions and consequences. If you, as a member of the Northwestern community, violate rules and laws, I am making it abundantly clear that you will be held accountable," Schapiro said. "If you haven’t yet gotten my point, I am disgusted by those who chose to disgrace this University in such a fashion."