‘It’s been really hard on my wife. It’s been really, really hard on my kids, especially my 10-year-old, who was woken up by the glass breaking.’
University of Michigan regents and some top executives are receiving 24-hour-security amid persistent threats and harassment from anti-Israel protesters.
The Detroit News reported this week that the University of Michigan “has assigned 24-hour security to its regents and executive officers in response to harassment, property damage and personal threats that began last fall and have continued through June.”
“UM regents Jordan Acker, Mark Bernstein and Sarah Hubbard said during separate interviews that the university, on the advice of legal counsel, security experts and local law enforcement, assigned them around-the-clock protection in response to serious, ongoing threats to their personal safety,” the newspaper reported.
As recently as June, protesters plucked the heads off hundreds of flowers at the University of Michigan, leaving a sign saying people should not enjoy the peony garden when Palestinians are “dying and starving right now.”
But the targeting of top officials began last May, when activists went to regents’ homes, posting a list of demands to their front doors.
“Nobody should ever encounter a masked and hooded man on the front porch of their home in the early morning making demands that the university divest from Israel and defund the police,” Regent Mark Bernstein reportedly said at the time.
Regent Sarah Hubbard also had about “30 protesters put tents and other objects on her front lawn and used bullhorns to disrupt the neighborhood at around 6 a.m.,” NPR reported at the time.
In June 2024, the front of Jewish Regent Jordan Acker’s law office was spray-painted with the words “free Palestine” and “divest or f*** off.” In October 2024, then-President Santa Ono’s home was spray-painted with the words “intifada,” “coward,” and “divest.”
Regent Acker was again targeted in December when his car was spray-painted with the words “divest” and “free Palestine” and a window in his home was smashed. Acker said both his and his wife’s vehicles were vandalized, and someone threw a jar with a “foul-smelling liquid” through a window of their house.
In March, the home of University of Michigan Provost Laurie McCauley was vandalized; the protesters broke a window and spray-painted the words “free Palestine,” “divest,” and “no honor in genocide” near the front of the home, according to ABC News Detroit.
Acker told the Detroit News he even received a death threat as recently as June 9, “after the University of Michigan was accused of using plainclothes investigators to surveil pro-Palestinian campus groups.”
“It’s been really hard on them. It’s been really hard on my wife. It’s been really, really hard on my kids, especially my 10-year-old, who was woken up by the glass breaking,” Acker told the news outlet.
“…I think they’ve gotten used to the fact that there’s security and that’s just part of life right now, but I think it’s been emotionally very jarring for them,” Acker said. “I didn’t sign up for this job to make foreign policy or to be involved in foreign policy, and for this somehow to become the central part of what people (focus on) is, it’s quite bizarre.”
Hubbard told the outlet she is saddened by the need for security.
“I feel that I can have this civil debate with people who have a different opinion than I do, and so it’s too bad that it has ramped up to this point where we’re concerned for our safety,” Hubbard told the Detroit News.
“It’s not a concern I have every moment of every day, but it’s certainly something I worry about because we see it going beyond the vandalism in so many areas around the country and in the world, and we don’t want to suffer that same result.”
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Regent Acker’s vandalized car / Courtesy of the University of Michigan