ATLANTA — An Emory professor and department chair, who Thursday became one of the most widely-broadcast faces of the exploding nationwide student protest movement over Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, said Friday she was first concerned "that this would escalate" as Atlanta police and Georgia troopers responded, and "this would become bedlam, and mayhem -- and it did immediately."
Noëlle McAfee, the chair of the Emory Philosophy Department, spoke to 11Alive's Brittany Kleinpeter about her arrest that, in the last 24 hours, has been broadcast worldwide.
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She said she first saw a young protester thrown to the ground by officers, who were "pummeling them, just pummeling and pummeling."
"The mother in me said 'stop. Stop.' And I made sure to stand four feet away from them, standing still, nonconfrontational, I said, 'stop' -- one of the cops stood up and got right in front of me and said, 'Ma'am, you need to step back, you need to step back,'" McAfee, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said. "And I was watching them pummel somebody, I said, 'no.' And they arrested me."
The professor said it seemed "like it went on forever."
"Punching and rolling and knocking and punching, this child was just - their head was like this, trying to protect themselves. I don't know how long it went on," she recounted.
Her reaction, she added, was just "a human being saying 'stop it.'"
"And when they said, 'ma'am you need to step away,' no human being is going to step away," she said.
McAfee raised several other points in her interview with 11Alive about what transpired on the Emory campus the day before. One of the things the professor highlighted was the administration's contention, expressed in a letter Friday by Emory President Greg Fenves, that the demonstration was sparked by "highly organized, outside protesters."
McAfee said she was there "standing up for students and their freedom of expression" and that there was an "issue of higher education administrators clamping down on free expression and delegitimizing any dissent."
One way the protests are often delegitimized, McAfee said, was to "say they were outside agitators -- and that's false."
"There were perhaps some students here from other universities," she said. "But the students I've spoken with who are organizing it are Emory students that I've known for years."
McAfee added: "They said outside agitators, I think the outside agitators were the Atlanta police and the Georgia state troopers. They were the agitators."
The professor said she had also gotten lots of messages thanking her for taking a stand, which she said partly reflected a "misconception."
"The misconception is that they say 'thank you for standing up for Gaza' -- I have my own complicated sets of views about the conflict. And I think what is happening is horrific, with the conflict, at the same time I was here standing up for students and their freedom of expression," McAfee said. "And I wanted an opportunity for peaceful expression of their views, peaceful dissent. That was my concern."
She said she felt what unfolded Thursday could have been avoided.
"What's really bad here is the president of the university, or his office, did this," she said. "The police will do their thing, but the president of the university called them... so the larger issue is not about police, because police will be police, but an administration that called police onto our campus."
Cheryl Elliott, Emory's vice president for public safety, said in a statement Thursday that police were initially called after "a few dozen protesters arrived on campus" around 7:40 a.m. and "pushed past (Emory Police Department) officers stationed on the Quad and set up tents in an area where equipment and materials were staged for Commencement."
"Based on their actions and refusal to confirm their connection to Emory, EPD made the assessment that these individuals were not Emory community members. Officers with the Atlanta Police Department and Georgia State Patrol were then called to provide further assistance," Elliott's statement said. "Around this time, several social media accounts announced a protest and occupation of the Quad and issued a public call for non-Emory community members to join them."
McAfee granted the protesters might have seriously disrupted Commencement, could still even into Friday continue demonstrating -- but she feels that potential disruption is not outweighed by the concern for free expression.
"They might still be here, they might be an annoyance, they might be violating a rule about private property or something," she said. "But this is a moment in the world, because of world history, that students are occupying campuses to call for attention to this, what they find to be an egregious horrific issue."
McAfee said she was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, and that she'll have a court date next month.
"Just to even question the police power was a violation. My disorderly conduct was that I stood there," she said. "I stood on my campus, I stood to prevent somebody being beaten to death, so that was disorderly conduct."
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