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

The university senate criticised her 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 July 1.

When her appointment at Yale was announced, Dr McInnis’ 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-19 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 the Gaza Strip, critics say, she emphasised policing and security, which can be a frequent source of tension on college campuses. In her four years at Stony Brook, Dr McInnis’ administration repudiated a professor who had criticized the local police. And she created an expanded safety department, complete with intelligence capabilities.

Dr Robert Chase, a professor of history who specialises in policing, said he was worried that the department, with its far-reaching authority, could become a model. “My concern is that this elevation of police to an executive-level authority in the university is one that’s going to be adopted nationally,” he said in an interview.

Professors said they first became concerned in 2021, when Dr McInnis created the Division of Enterprise Risk Management, a security office with broad powers and oversight over nearly 400 employees, including the campus police department.

She has said that she established the office because of her experiences as provost at the University of Texas in 2017, when a mentally ill student, brandishing a machete-like knife, attacked four students, one fatally.

“There was chaos on campus, and none of us in central administration knew what was going on,” she said, describing how students had locked themselves in campus buildings as rumours spread on social media.

The idea behind the risk management office at Stony Brook is to oversee university services that could pose risks, and find ways to mitigate them – a broad portfolio that includes campus shuttle buses, faculty travel, use of hazardous chemicals and policing. The concept began in the corporate world, but has gradually caught hold in academia as well, with a growing number of colleges adopting it in some form.

Yale, Dr McInnis’ new home, has its own office of enterprise risk management with some of the same functions as the Stony Brook office. At Stony Brook, though, the unit has raised suspicions, partly because of its sweeping authority, including direct jurisdiction over the campus police department.

Stony Brook pointed to four other universities with similar structures, including Colorado State and the University of North Carolina. Even so, Bruce Branson, associate director of the Enterprise Risk Management Initiative at North Carolina State University, called it unusual for the campus police to report to such an office.

To run the Stony Brook division, Dr McInnis chose Mr Lawrence Zacarese, a former interim campus police chief who made headlines as an NYPD K-9 officer. In 2017, he ran for sheriff of Suffolk County, New York, and was defeated despite backing from the Guardian Angels leader Curtis Sliwa and from former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who donated US$10,000 (S$13,560).

In an interview, Mr Zacarese said that historically, universities did not pay attention to broad risks.

“It all comes back to safety,” said Mr Zacarese, who also serves as Stony Brook’s chief security officer. Ms Dawn T. Smallwood, a former FBI agent who serves as police chief for Stony Brook’s main campus, is also part of the risk management office.

The office has prompted unease. A few professors, for instance, began worrying that the department was monitoring their social media posts.

Dr Josh Dubnau, a professor of neurobiology, said that Mr Zacarese had recently approached him on campus to say, “That tweet you sent last night wasn’t helpful.”

He seemed to be referring to Dr Dubnau’s reposting of a message on social media about an NYPD corrections bus that was seen on campus. Dr Dubnau said that he asked Mr Zacarese not to talk to him about his social media posts “ever again”.

Mr Zacarese said in the interview that the university monitors social media in an effort to protect its brand, but does not target the individual social media posts of professors. “That’s simply not happening,” he said.

At a meeting shortly before she was named to lead Yale, Dr McInnis offered a forceful defence of her decision to remove the pro-Palestinian encampment.

The protesters, she said, were asked to relocate on May 1 to make way for a previously scheduled event by Hillel, a campus Jewish organisation. “The speech of one group cannot cancel speech for another group,” Dr McInnis said.

The decision to arrest the protesters, who included Dr Dubnau, followed their refusal to move.

“We had really serious concerns about ensuring that we could keep the campus safe,” Dr McInnis said. She added that social media posts were indicating that outsiders were headed to the campus to confront the protesters.

Ms Ella Engel-Snow, one of the protesting students, said the gathering was entirely safe and peaceful until the police arrived.

“Hordes of police just came rushing in, creating chaos where there hadn’t been,” she said.

As a member of the core group of protesters, she was held at the campus police headquarters for more than seven hours, and her phone was held for a week and a half, she said, as “evidence.”

Noting that the resulting disorderly conduct charges were no more serious than a traffic citation, a lawyer for the protesters Peter Brill accused the police of using excessive force and said the retention of their phones amounted to an unlawful warrantless seizure.

At the senate meeting, Dr McInnis compared the arrests to events at other campuses around the country, where security officers used “tear gas, pepper spray, mounted police, dogs, riot gear, rubber bullets,” she said. “None of that happened here.”

In a vote that illustrated her mixed legacy at Stony Brook, Dr McInnis narrowly avoided a censure at the May 6 senate meeting, by a vote of 55-51 against censure. But the senate overwhelmingly approved a plan to investigate the enterprise risk management office and to develop a way to oversee its activities. NYTIMES