Kathleen Hagerty

Kathleen M. Hagerty is an American academic and the Provost of Northwestern University, serving since September 2020.^[1] Prior to that, she was dean of the faculty in the Kellogg School of Management.^[2][3] She is the first woman provost of the university.^[4]

Hagerty earned her B.A. in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975, her M.S. in operations research at Berkeley in 1977, and her M.B.A. in finance at Berkeley in 1979. She was awarded her Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University in 1985.^[5][6]

Hagerty has worked for 30 years at the Kellogg School of Management previously and held a Professorship of Finance, focusing her research on the field of disclosure regulations, micro structure of security marketing, and insider trading regulations.^[7]

In October 2025, Northwestern University announced that Provost Kathleen Hagerty would step down by the end of the academic year following mounting concerns over the university’s handling of Jewish students and recent campus activism. ^[8]

Text-message evidence revealed that Hagerty had communicated with a faculty liaison to a pro-Palestinian student encampment, stating that if the students “really cared about actual divestment” from Israel, “they need the patience to actually do the work and make it happen.” Free Beacon.^[9]

In the same exchanges, Hagerty commented that it would be “pretty easy” to boycott the sale of Sabra hummus on campus, adding “I’m all for making a deal.” ^[10]

While Hagerty and the university maintain that she did not endorse a formal boycott of Israel and described the encampment as a “teachable moment,” congressional investigators and Jewish advocacy groups sharply disagreed, concluding that her remarks exhibited a degree of support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and amounted to insufficient protection of Jewish students.^[11]