his past November, Kelly Xi, an artist and lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), was checking her emails when the school’s provost, Martin Berger, called her into a meeting. In a private office on campus, Berger told Xi she was being placed under investigation for misuse of school printing funds. Earlier that month, Xi had used a SAIC photocopier to produce a zine and other materials for an exhibition in one of the school’s student-curated art galleries. A week and a half later, Xi received an email from Berger informing her that she was being placed on administrative leave because, in addition to her use of the photocopier, she had provided several students an email list so they could distribute a petition among the student body asking them to support nontenured faculty, like Xi, as their union prepared to strike amid stalled contract negotiations with the administration.
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The student exhibition that Xi assisted espoused a pro-Palestine stance, advocated for divestment from Israel, and criticized the school’s handling of a protest encampment that developed from these activities, leading to the arrest of dozens of protesters in May 2024. By the time of those arrests, newly unionized nontenured faculty like Xi had been fighting for their first contract for more than a year. And, as last year progressed, the concurrent efforts of student-activists and faculty dovetailed in ways that may have lasting consequences for SAIC, and implications for other institutions.
Now, the school may face sanctions or censure from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a leading nonprofit organization that advocates for academic freedom and shared university governance. In the wake of more than a year of protest—and with the war in Gaza rumbling on after Israel broke a January ceasefire agreement—numerous students and faculty feel their academic and artistic freedom has been trampled.
AIC is one of several United States art schools that had Gaza-related encampments or walkouts last year. Others were staged at the Rhode Island School of Design, Cooper Union, Bard, and the School of Visual Arts. The actions at SAIC were organized by Students for the Liberation of Palestine (SLP), a group that formed shortly after October 7. (SAIC’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a national group with chapters at 350 schools, had been disbanded several years before.) Like students at the other universities, SLP’s main demand at SAIC was that the school’s board—and, by default, the Art Institute of Chicago’s, which oversees both entities—divest from board members and donors with financial ties to military operations in Gaza.
Their main target was A. Steven Crown, a trustee for AIC and a member of SAIC’s board of governors; Crown and his family are major Chicago-area philanthropists. Local activist group Behind Enemy Lines has campaigned for years for SAIC and other institutions to cut ties with the Crowns, largely because they own 10 percent of defense contractor General Dynamics, which manufactures bombs, armaments, and other equipment that has long been used by the Israel Defense Forces. The family, through its foundation, also donated $1 million between 2019 and 2023 to the Israel Action Network, an organization with a stated mission to “counter assaults on Israel’s legitimacy,” according to tax filings.
On May 4, SLP formed the encampment with sympathetic students from SAIC and nearby Columbia College Chicago in the Art Institute’s North Garden, in the shadow of iconic pieces by David Smith, Henry Moore, and Alexander Calder. Elsewhere in the city that day, students at the University of Chicago and DePaul also held protests. But the SAIC encampment, less than a block from Millennium Park and the city’s most famous tourist destination, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (aka “the Bean”), was the most visible.
The protests in Chicago were also among the country’s most fraught. The Democratic National Convention was to be hosted in Chicago that August, and protests were expected there too, especially given that the city’s Cook County has the largest Palestinian population in America, as well as a sizable—and powerful—Jewish population.
And so, in May, there were plenty of news cameras on hand in front of the museum from the moment chanting protesters set up that morning until that afternoon, when Chicago police raided the protest. By the time they cleared the encampment, police arrested more than 68 protesters on charges of criminal trespassing, many students telling news outlets they received “brutal treatment.” Activists and SAIC have conflicting accounts of how the day’s events unfolded, with the administration claiming that the demonstration was not peaceful, that they gave protesters multiple chances to leave the garden without consequences or relocate on nearby SAIC grounds, and that multiple warnings were given before police were called in. Student witnesses, meanwhile, argue that the protest was lawful, and contend that Berger, SAIC’s provost, agreed to give the student leaders time to consult with protesters before reneging, abruptly and without warning.
“We were lied to in a really interesting way,” Sam Anthem, a second-year MFA student and sound artist at SAIC, who was present for the negotiations, told ARTnews.
What no one disputes, however, is that the museum, rather than the school, called the police, and that students felt betrayed by how Berger, their de facto negotiating partner, managed the situation. What resulted, according to F News Magazine, a SAIC student newspaper, was a deep and persistent distrust between activist students and the administration. For some on campus, the arrests were a breaking point.
“I had a number of students who were afraid to speak” after October 7, Mary Patten, a longtime SAIC professor and artist-activist, told ARTnews. “In May, there were more students arrested than at any other university or college in Chicago. By that point, the principles on which higher education used to stand—the idea that faculty share governance with the administration—was exposed as a complete tissue of lies.”
The arrests galvanized a group of museum staff members to band together with student protesters. A few days after the raid, 43 AIC employees signed an open letter to museum president James Rondeau demanding divestment from Crown and any other board members with similar financial ties. (The letter has since been signed by an additional 142 SAIC students, lecturers, alumni, artists, and AIC members.) A few days later, dozens of protesters crowded the lobby of the school’s MacLean Ballroom during a retirement celebration for university president Elissa Tenny, criticizing her handling of the protests and calling for the school to disclose any investment from figures with ties to Israel.
The school and museum together share a $1.38 billion endowment. In 2023, SAIC held just $360.6 million (23 percent) of that pooled endowment, while $990 million went to the museum, which relies on donor funds: By contrast, 80 percent of the school’s operating revenue came from tuition. (RISD, for comparison, drew 65 percent of its operating revenue from tuition in 2023, according to public financial documents.)
Artist Dread Scott sits on the top of a building across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago, where a demonstration is going on outside protesting the display of his flag art, in March 1989.
Photo Keith Philpott/Getty Images)
SAIC’s response to the encampment also enraged influential artist Dread Scott, who in October delivered one of the school’s periodic Distinguished Alumni lectures. Scott chastised SAIC and AIC for its handling of the May protest. “Shame on the Art Institute for doing that,” he said. “Schools should not be doing the bidding of the US government in suppressing dissent. Even if standing up to it comes with risks, it’s actually pretty simple. Don’t call the cops on your students.”
ot long after the encampment arrests, a group of students started planning an exhibition for the school’s student-curated SITE gallery, a show that followed in a long history of political art and action at SAIC.
Ranked in 2020 by U.S. News & World Report as the number-two art school in the United States, SAIC is known for a conceptual approach to art-making (artist Jefferson Pinder, a professor there, recently called it “the best conceptual art school in the world”) that often leads to art intersecting with politics. Its most provocative alumnus in this vein is Scott, who made SAIC famous (or, depending on your perspective, infamous) after a work of his sparked a court case protecting one of the principles that has been most at issue on campuses over the past year: free speech.
In 1989, while a student at SAIC, Scott exhibited in one of the school’s galleries an artwork called The Proper Way to Display an American Flag that gave viewers the option to stand on an American flag. The piece was criticized all the way up to President Bush, the school received bomb threats, and the Illinois Senate cut SAIC’s funding. Further, Congress amended a 1968 statute to ban mistreatment of the flag regardless of any message being conveyed. In response, people defied that new law. Scott and three others were arrested for burning flags on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. They appealed the case right up to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in their favor: Flag desecration was protected free speech.
Decades later, like Scott, Kelly Xi was making art with a conceptual bent that was, in its way, political. She grew up in Mongolia, near the Baogang Tailings Dam, a body of water rendered toxic by chemical waste. As an MFA student at SAIC, she and a peer used mushrooms and silkworm cocoons to create a sustainable, biodegradable material that, they proposed, could replace single-use plastic packaging.
Xi came out of SAIC’s art and technology department, which, as it happens, had its origins in political protest—and a photocopier. Artist Sonia Landy Sheridan cofounded the department in the late ’60s, after she and her students used a 3M Thermo-Fax to quickly produce political posters and broadsides to hand out during the 1968 Democratic National Convention; held in Chicago, the event became infamous after Vietnam War protests there sparked widespread police brutality.
The exhibition for which Xi used the school photocopier to produce materials was “School as a Function of Empire,” organized by a group of students, many of whom were a part of SLP or otherwise involved in pro-Palestine activism. A description in the exhibition proposal, which ARTnews reviewed, described it as “anti-institutional” and aimed to reflect on violence and divestment, while also scrutinizing the AIC museum and school.
The mistrust between students and the administration engendered in the spring quickly spread to planning around the SITE exhibition, which was scheduled to open in November. According to student curators who spoke with ARTnews, SAIC initially accepted the exhibition proposal in August. (While the SITE galleries are student-run, exhibition proposals must be approved by administration.) Then, a few weeks later, the curators were informed that Art School Considerations (ASC), a 27-person committee of administrators and faculty members, would need to review it. The committee issued a warning to the students saying it believed the show might violate the school’s anti-harassment policies and requesting the removal of some works from the proposal. This was unusual, according to the student curators, who understood ASC’s function to be more advising on logistics than analyzing the content of an artwork or exhibition.
In a statement to ARTnews, a SAIC spokesperson said the students’ proposal was “approved in principle” in August, but that it is “standard practice” for SITE exhibitions to be reviewed by ASC before proceeding. The school maintains that ASC works with students every year to “achieve their objectives without creating unnecessary risk.”
“The School has an ethical and legal obligation to protect the SAIC community against discrimination, harassment, and other harms,” the spokesperson said.
The student curators and the school soon reached a kind of stalemate. The student curators wanted to know the names of the committee members, and the school refused to disclose them, besides noting that DEI, security, and student affairs officials were part of it.. The committee in turn wanted to know the names of the student curators, and the student curators refused to divulge them. (They’d been operating semi-anonymously for fear of reprisal, given SAIC’s handling of the May protests; ultimately, they ended up calling their group Curators Under Censorship.)
In emails reviewed by ARTnews, the committee made a series of requests: Among them was a request that curators not have a community wall, designed to allow viewers to tag it with their own messages, alleging it presented a “risk” that individuals “may post content or engage in conduct that could lead to discrimination, harassment, or physical conflict.” And they requested that two artworks be left out: Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, a book for young adults teaching Jewish traditions from an anti-Zionist perspective, and illustrated by artist Nicole Eisenman; and Say Their Names, a 2023 fabric installation by Ahmad Almahdi in which the names of 6,000 Palestinians killed as a result of the war in Gaza are transcribed onto suede strips and hung from the ceiling.
While a spokesperson for the school maintains that ASC and SAIC did not “require the removal of any works from the exhibition,” the student curators told ARTnews they felt that if they denied ASC’s requests, the show would not be approved to move forward.
That’s when Rima Kapitan, a labor attorney who often litigates civil rights cases involving academic issues, got involved. A Chicago-based professor who has confidentially contributed toward legal fees for Kapitan’s firm’s cases involving disputes around academic freedom referred Kapitan to the student curators. (Kapitan declined to name the professor per a confidentiality agreement).
Kapitan took over correspondence with SAIC, writing to the school’s general counsel, Leslie Darling, that ASC’s “requests” to remove certain artworks from the exhibition were actually “restrictions” resulting “not from universally applicable rules but rather animus” toward the exhibition’s political solidarity with Palestinians and its critique of SAIC. Kapitan called ASC’s conduct “discriminatory” and based on “unlawful stereotypes against Palestinians, Muslims, and their supporters as inherently violent and/or hostile to Jews”; she also wrote that ASC’s conduct violated Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin at any university or college that receives federal funding, which SAIC does. Further, Kapitan asserted that ASC’s “request” to omit the children’s book from the exhibition constituted “censorship based in stereotype,” as it suggests that Jewish SAIC students are only welcome to espouse “a particular Jewish viewpoint,” which is to say, a Zionist one.
“ASC continues to state baseless concerns about potential violations of SAIC’s Discrimination, Harassment, and Retaliation Policy without any objective basis for speculating that such violations will occur,” she wrote.
Pro-Palestine protesters march ahead of the Democratic National Convention on August 18, 2024 in Chicago.
(Photo Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
(Earlier that fall, 19 Jewish students cosigned two letters saying they supported the SITE show’s representation of “Jewish perspectives in solidarity with Palestinians.” The letter seemed to do little to ameliorate tensions.)
Though the show opened as scheduled, the community wall was excluded and trigger warnings stating that the exhibition included sensitive content were placed on the doors of the gallery. According to student curators, Kapitan’s help ensured that the rest of the proposed works were included.
A SAIC spokesperson challenged the student curators and Kapitan’s framing of the situation, telling ARTnews that the school “wholly rejects Ms. Kapitan’s insinuation” that the school “allowed” works to be included or excluded. The spokesperson further rejected the suggestion that ASC or the school’s actions were “discriminatory” or violated the Civil Rights Act.
Kapitan, however, told ARTnews she believes that the school treated “School as a Function of Empire” differently from past exhibitions. “What’s unusual about this case is that there seems to be discrimination by association, in the sense that some [exhibition participants] are not necessarily themselves Arab, but are associated with Arabs because of their advocacy,” she said.
The SAIC spokesperson disputed Kapitan’s notion that ASC treated the exhibition differently. (Though, in emails with Kapitan, Darling acknowledged that, in the past, alumni have participated in SITE exhibitions, which the school did not allow in this case.)
he SITE show did go forward, but had other consequences—ones that would soon intertwine with labor issues. A week before the show opened, a SAIC grad student who was one of its curators received an email from the school’s head of security, alerting him that he was under investigation for a “disturbance” at a career event he’d attended. The student, who asked to remain anonymous, told ARTnews that he had no idea what the “disturbance” might have been, and that he saw the investigation as reprisal for his activism and involvement in the SITE show. (It was not clear, at press time, what the outcome of the investigation was.)
Another SITE curator, a third-year graduate student from Pakistan in the school’s writing program, told ARTnews that she had long relied on a contracted position at the school’s writing center for funds, due to the difficulty in getting an off-campus job with her student visa. In May, and again in August, she was informed without explanation that her contract was not renewed for the summer or fall semesters, despite being told in the spring that she would get the role if she reapplied. The student said she believed the decision was retaliation for her involvement in the May encampment, and for her involvement in SLP. (The offer for the fall position ended up going to another SAIC student who had also participated in the protests, according to the Pakistani student—but whose connection was less direct.)
Amid all this, contract negotiations were ongoing with the recently formed union for nontenured, adjunct, and part-time professors, which make up 75 percent of SAIC lecturers. In September, the administration introduced a clause stipulating that the school could choose not to renew contracts for faculty they believe had engaged in “conduct harmful to the school’s reputation.”
Anders Lindfall, a representative for the AICWU (Art Institute of Chicago Workers United) union, told ARTnews that the “harmful conduct” clause was a warning sign.
“The administration could not, or would not, define those vague terms,” he said in an email. “Such a loophole could be exploited to dissuade faculty from taking part in activist causes, on campus or off. It goes without saying that our AICWU bargaining committee won’t agree to anything that threatens academic freedom or freedom of speech/expression by union members.”
(SAIC declined to comment on specifics around contract negotiations, except to say the school has a “long history” of support for “civic engagement and academic freedom.”)
The braiding of activism, free speech, and labor rights has crystallized for adjunct faculty since the October 7 attack. When Iymen Chehade, an adjunct lecturer of Middle Eastern history who focuses on the Israel-Palestine conflict, sent a letter that October to SAIC’s then president calling on her to condemn the ongoing destruction of Gaza and the killing of Palestinian civilians, other adjunct faculty reached out privately to express solidarity. They told him they felt they couldn’t do so publicly.
“When part-time people reached out to me, I never made the request for them to speak out publicly because I know the potential repercussions of losing one’s position,” he wrote in an email addressed to his colleagues that ARTnews reviewed.
(Chehade is one of an estimated 10 faculty, students, or alumni, including Scott, publicly listed by Canary Mission, a group that claims it “documents individuals and organizations that promote hatred” of Israel. The group has been widely criticized for characterizing criticism of Israel’s government or support of Palestinians as anti-Semitism.)
In the case of Xi, the labor issues came face-to-face with the Gaza protests. Around the time Xi was placed under investigation, the union began to talk openly of a strike. In an interview with ARTnews, Xi said that Berger declined her request to have a union representative present for her initial meeting with him, claiming that it wasn’t disciplinary in nature, a violation in her view of labor rights. Xi claims that the misuse of printing funds was a misrepresentation of the facts and believes the investigation was retaliation for her involvement in AICWU and for soliciting student support of the union. “The safety to practice academic freedom is only available to a small few here,” Xi said.
(A SAIC spokesperson declined to comment on “personnel matters” but said that the school has “never disciplined a student or employee for the simple expression of their political views provided that said expression remains peaceful, nondiscriminatory, and abides by our policies.” SAIC has “consistently adhere[d] to unionized faculty members’ Weingarten rights,” according to the spokesperson, adding, “we’ve honored all requests for union representation at disciplinary meetings, as required by law.”)
Two weeks after Xi’s meeting with the provost, on December 2, student-activists published a petition online calling for the student body to support a faculty strike. Xi provided two of the organizers with a list of email addresses for 500 students, to whom they sent the petition. As of publication, it now has 700 signatories.
The following day, Berger sent an email to Xi informing her that she was being placed on paid administrative leave until the end of the semester for sharing the email list. “If true,” Berger wrote, “this would be an egregious violation.” Xi was barred from campus and denied email access; she advised her students about the leave by personal email. When she looked into a course she had planned for the spring semester, she learned that it was cancelled, her access to research material had been blocked, and her access to campus was permanently blocked. By the end of December, she received notice from the school that she’d been terminated.
Xi got in touch with Kapitan, whom she had met while Xi advised students and alumni working on the SITE exhibition. With Kapitan’s help, Xi made a formal complaint to the school, alleging that Berger improperly initiated the investigation against her, removed oversight from her department heads, and, since the May encampment, had targeted her with “inordinate print surveillance.”
As the school remained closed for winter break, Kapitan sent another letter to Darling warning that SAIC’s decision to put Xi on administrative leave, and then ban her from campus, constitutes “illegal retaliation” in response to her union efforts.
i’s forced leave, along with investigations of several students, prompted a group of professors, including two tenured professors in SAIC’s Prints and Film, Video, and New Media departments, to meet with the AAUP in December; they spoke with ARTnews on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. According to AAUP guidelines, the removal of a professor or student from campus is permissible only when the individual poses an immediate threat of harm. “There was no threat in this case,” said Steve Macek, a Chicago-area media professor and vice president of the Illinois State Conference of the AAUP. The faculty senate, Macek said, was not involved in the December review of disciplinary action against Xi, which AAUP considers the proper procedure for such decisions
“To [dismiss] a lecturer within two weeks of the semester’s end, with no recourse or hearing, is flatly a violation of academic due process,” Macek said. “Even more troubling is that it appears to be punishment for her political views outside the classroom.”
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In February, the Illinois chapter of AAUP issued a formal letter to the school and AIC’s board regarding Xi’s firing, pointing to “violations of academic norms” and “serious and grievous concern about academic freedom.” The chapter recommended an investigation by its national arm, which can hand down stricter sanctions.
“Before spring [2024], no such actions occurred during my time here,” said Paul Elitzik, a retired professor who taught at SAIC for nearly 40 years, referring to investigations of communications between students and faculty. Elitzik, who still advises the school newspaper, wrote in an internal note to his colleagues ahead of the AAUP meeting: “We should challenge that the school should have a monopoly on communication to and between students, whether through email or other means. Prosecuting students for breaking this monopoly,” he wrote, referencing the petition sent to the student body, “is a violation of freedom of expression.”
A spokesperson for the school maintains that the school has acted lawfully in enforcing its academic policies and that the faculty senate is at work on a draft on academic freedom policy. “We look forward to its ratification,” the spokesperson said. “Members of our community hold a plurality of ideas and political positions, and we value civic engagement, including protest. We have never disciplined a student or employee for the simple expression of their political views, provided that said expression remains peaceful, nondiscriminatory, and abides by our policies.”
Students and AIC employees haven’t given up on their demands for divestment hearings, but the only art school board that has so far gone forward with them—RISD’s, in January—rejected a divestment proposal. Meanwhile, earlier this month, in a situation echoing that of SAIC, RISD students protested the relocation of a student art exhibition with a pro-Palestine stance.
(ARTnews reached out to five AIC board members, including the Crown Family Foundation for comment on this story; none responded.)
In the meantime, students and academics across the country fear being singled out for their political activities. As Xi wrote in her complaint to the school, “I believe that I have been retaliated against for my political activism alongside students, which I understand is my right as a person and in line with my duty in carrying out the curriculum I was hired to teach.”
That sense is unlikely to go away anytime soon: In early March, President Trump posted on social media that the government would block all federal funding for universities that allow “illegal protests,” adding that student protesters would be “permanently expelled” or arrested “depending on the crime.” And, just a week later, the Trump administration detained Mahmoud Khalil, a student activist and Columbia grad student, over his involvement in pro-Palestinian activism on campus. Deportations, the revoking of visas, and other actions against similarly involved student activists have followed.
