Faced With Extreme Demands From Defiant Protesters, What’s a President to Do?

But as he read through the stridently worded document, with its threat of “a full and forceful response” if all of the demands weren’t met, he knew there was no room for negotiation.

“Part of our job as educators is to encourage students to find their voices and help them channel them productively to bring about change or improvement,” Mr. Krislov said in an interview on Friday. The manifesto they’d presented to him didn’t open the door to discussion, he said, but shut it.

While the demands were among the most ambitious that have landed in the laps of college presidents in recent months, the defiant tone was familiar.

In November student protests helped topple both the president and the chancellor of the University of Missouri, as well as the dean of students at Claremont McKenna College. Last month a Yale University lecturer whose email had provoked a frenzy over racism and free speech stepped down from her teaching role. And Thomas R. Rochon, president of Ithaca College, announced this month that he would retire next year after coming under pressure from students and faculty members for mishandling several racially charged incidents.

Elsewhere, college presidents, whom many see as reluctant to upset activists, have promised changes or at least scheduled meetings to talk with them. Some of the more extreme demands have softened as more voices have joined the conversation and compromises hammered out.

Demands, Not Suggestions

Mr. Krislov saw no hint of flexibility in the Oberlin students’ demands.

They included granting immediate tenure to three faculty members, firing nine faculty and staff members, and creating designated safe spaces for black students in at least three buildings.

“These are demands and not suggestions,” the document concluded. “If these demands are not taken seriously, immediate action from the Africana community will follow.”

In the past, the Oberlin administration has worked successfully with students to deal with concerns about race, among other issues, Mr. Krislov said. He expects that to continue after students return next week from their winter break.

“I do think there is an educational benefit in having students be part of the discussions,” he told The Chronicle, “but they also need to understand how the institution works, about shared governance, and the important role of the faculty in issues like promotion and tenure.”

His response, posted on the college’s website on Wednesday, called some of the proposals “deeply troubling,” even though many of the concerns were valid.

“I will not respond directly to any document that explicitly rejects the notion of collaborative engagement,” Mr. Krislov wrote. “Many of its demands contravene principles of shared governance. And it contains personal attacks on a number of faculty and staff members who are dedicated and valued members of this community.”

Oberlin is committed to offering an inclusive, welcoming environment, the president wrote. It has made progress, but still can improve through a “consensus-driven process that involves dialogue in which dissenting voices are heard.”

Because of the winter break, attempts to reach students were unsuccessful. Several members of Oberlin’s black-student union (which goes by ABUSUA) were reportedly involved in formulating the demands, which aren’t signed. An accompanying document includes several hundred signatures of endorsement.

‘A Level of Unreality’

Mr. Krislov is facing a situation that many college presidents have found themselves in over the past couple of months: How does one respond to student activists when some of their demands are outside of a president’s power, or simply unrealistic?

When Timothy J.L. Chandler, interim president of Towson University, saw students’ demands for the first time last November, his reaction was, “Oh, my goodness. There’s a level of unreality here that requires some education and discussion.”

The students staged a sit-in at his office, and he agreed to meet with them. Unlike the Oberlin students, the Towson activists seemed to want a conversation, he said. “That was really what was most important to them, to be heard,” he said. After going through the demands, line by line, with the students for eight hours, he signed off on a revised list.

“The dialogue showed that we were actually much closer together than it appeared from the way in which those demands were stated originally,” Mr. Chandler said. “But I’d never have known that if I hadn’t sat down and discussed it with them, and they would never have known either.”

Part of that process, he said, involved telling students that some of their demands were unreasonable and explaining what shared governance and academic freedom meant. He also brought several other administrators into the meeting with him, including some who knew the activists well.

“When things got a little difficult, someone was able to step in and say, Let’s go back down, let’s go to another point, let’s come back to this,” he said. “That was just such a helpful way of doing business.”

Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, president of Amherst College, met with students but refused to address their demands line by line. One of the demands implored Ms. Martin to issue “a statement of apology to students, alumni, and former students, faculty, administration, and staff who have been victims of several injustices, including but not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism,” and a dozen other forms of prejudice.

In a long letter to the campus, Ms. Martin said she supported taking steps to combat racism and prejudice at the college. But she said meeting demands for such apologies would be “misleading, if not downright dishonest,” because she and the college could not make promises about “things that are much larger than a single institution or group of people.”

Reacting immediately “to strict timetables and ultimatums, and speaking in the names of other people and for all times,” she added, “would be a failure to take our students seriously.”

Whittling Down Demands

Sometimes students have tempered the requests themselves in response to internal debate and external pressure. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a group of activists drew widespread criticism for a list of 50 demands, which included “the elimination of tuition and fees for all students” and “divestment from policing” altogether.

But before the activists even met with senior administrators, they had talked among themselves and with other students and whittled down the demands to a handful of priorities, said Carol L. Folt, the chancellor. “They said, What can we bring back to them that’s really possible?” Ms. Folt said.

That approach, Ms. Folt said, helped bolster the productivity of their eventual meeting, which included a range of campus organizations; many students made practical proposals there and have continued to do so. “It doesn’t feel strident to me,” she said. “It feels much more impassioned.”

“You don’t assume that in every meeting everybody’s happy with the outcome,” she added. But she wants to keep the discourse going, and she plans to meet with the protesters and other student groups again in the next couple of weeks.

Mr. Chandler, the interim president at Towson, faced a backlash for signing a pledge at the bottom of the revised demands that he would resign if he could not meet the goals. He acknowledged that the university’s governing board wasn’t thrilled with his decision and that he might have put the new president, Kim E. Schatzel, in a tough spot.

“My successor here is probably going to be asked the same question: Would she be willing to do so?” he said. As an interim leader, he said, it was an easier promise for him to make.

Still, he felt his signature was important. “If you’ve spent nearly 10 hours negotiating and navigating this, and then you come to the end and say, Yeah, but I’m not willing to put my name to this,” he said, “what does that say about you and what you believe in?”

‘Dialogue Is Always Better’

After President Krislov’s response was published on Oberlin’s website, hundreds of people posted comments, many praising him for insisting on a more collaborative approach. Among them was William M. Chace, a former president of Wesleyan University and Emory University. His office at Wesleyan was firebombed in 1990 during a period of racial unrest, student occupations, and hunger strikes.

He praised Mr. Krislov “for the clarity, force, and reason of your message. No college or university can function if it jettisons collaborative discussion and a commitment to shared principles,” Mr. Chace wrote.

Mr. Chandler said he wasn’t familiar with all of the context at Oberlin, though he had “some understanding of the Oberlin president’s response.” He said he had been criticized by some observers for hearing out the Towson students. He also heard some students on the campus voicing their displeasure with the activists’ strategies.

But he believes that, in a university setting, “dialogue is always better than not if you can manage a way to do it.” That approach, he said, “gives you a better chance of changing people’s minds and educating them than by refusing to have those conversations.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.

Clarification (2/5/2016, 5:35 p.m.): This article has been updated to further clarify the nature of a response by Amherst College’s president to a series of student demands on her campus.