The Week

Say You’re Sorry

This fall black-student groups have delivered lists of demands to college presidents all across the country. The lists make for compelling reading, both as distillations of anguish and anger and because they seek a remarkable mix of concrete and symbolic changes.

Many of the groups want more black faculty and staff members, and they often set specific targets — “We demand that by the academic year 2017-18, Guilford increases the percentage of black faculty and staff members campuswide by 10 percent,” for instance, or, at Purdue, “We demand that there be a 20-percent increase of underrepresented minority faculty and staff by the 2019-2020 school year.” At the University of Michigan, demands include increasing the number of black students to 10 percent of total enrollment.

Many lists also include demands for better facilities and funding for black student organizations. Increasing the number of black staff members in campus health and counseling centers is another common request. And at Emory, students are seeking “alternative methods of counseling for black students if they prefer to receive them,” including “black spirituality methods.”

Other items on the lists concern campus police forces, such as a demand at Occidental for an “immediate demilitarization of campus safety” that would include “removal of bulletproof vests from uniform” and “exclusion of military and external police rhetoric from all documents and daily discourse.” Suggestions that colleges respond to hate speech more aggressively appear on several lists, including one from students at Amherst College who want its honor code to “reflect a zero-tolerance policy for racial insensitivity and hate speech.”

A number of lists, including Purdue’s, ask that students and faculty and staff members be required to take courses exposing them to minority history and culture. Graduate students at Brown want the university to “hold itself accountable for the past, accepting its burdens and responsibilities along with its benefits and privileges,” in part by “integrating the history of Brown’s role in the slave trade into orientation for both graduate and undergraduate students.” And at several colleges, groups “demand that black bodies be removed from diversity marketing campaigns,” as the group at Johns Hopkins put it, until the institutions improve their records on diversity issues. The group called out Hopkins for “the low quality of life here that many black students experience and the problems with retaining black students.”

But many of the demands are also for apologies or other statements that would appear to have little practical effect. The top item on the list at Purdue, for instance: “We demand that administrators, specifically President Mitch Daniels, acknowledge the hostile environment caused by hateful and ignorant discrimination on Purdue’s campus. We also demand that he apologize for his erasure of the experiences of students of color in his email to the student body, where he asserted that Purdue is in ‘proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri or Yale.’”

The list at Amherst seeks apologies from both the president and the chair of the Board of Trustees for “injustices including but not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latinx racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism.” The group at Wesleyan was equally specific, demanding “within 48 hours” a statement that “should highlight the administration’s inaction and lack of dedication to adequately support students of color and acknowledge the ways that the senior administrators have failed the SOC community” — including by sending condolences to French students after the Charlie Hebdo massacre but sending nothing “in response to Kenyan tragedy at Garissa University” in April.

And then there’s the matter of names. Students at Yale want John C. Calhoun’s removed from one of the university’s residential colleges because Calhoun — in case you’ve forgotten, the U.S. vice president under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson — was a defender of slavery. Students at Princeton held a rally last week outside Nassau Hall, which houses the university president’s office, to insist that Woodrow Wilson’s name be removed from buildings and the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs because of his “racist legacy.” Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, met with the demonstrators but refused to endorse their demand, although the same day the masters of Princeton’s residential colleges decided to call themselves “heads” instead — with Mr. Eisgruber noting that the switch “does away with antiquated terminology that discomfited some students.”

At the University of Alabama, students are demanding that the university “remove the names of white supremacists, klansmen, Confederate generals, and eugenicists from classroom buildings or include a visual marker to indicate the history of racism that the building’s namesake was associated with.” Meanwhile Georgetown University students (above) successfully pressed that institution to strip two buildings of the names of former Georgetown presidents involved with the 1838 sale of 272 slaves to pay the university’s debts.

Fighting ... Hawks

Officials at the University of North Dakota last week announced that at long last the institution has a new nickname for its sports teams. A runoff election for a team name to replace “Fighting Sioux” saw “Fighting Hawks” beat out “Roughriders” after three other candidates had been eliminated — Nodaks, North Stars, and Sundogs. The winning name had 15,670 votes, and the runner up 11,708. The victory brings to an end — or so one hopes — a controversy that dates back to 1999 and pitted tribal leaders, students, and others calling for a new name against diehard fans determined to keep the old one at all costs.

In 2005, the NCAA threatened the university and 17 other institutions with sanctions if they didn’t stop using depictions of Native Americans that the organization called “hostile and abusive.” At one point, the state had a law on the books forbidding the university from changing the name, but a statewide referendum in 2012 showed 67 percent of voters in favor of a rechristening.

Cuts in Missoula

After watching enrollment decline from a peak of nearly 13,000 to just under 11,000, the University of Montana at Missoula said last week that it would eliminate jobs so that “expenses align with revenues.” The cuts will include 52 faculty positions, 25 of them currently vacant, and 149 staff jobs.

The university’s president, Royce C. Engstrom, said in an open meeting in a university auditorium that the enrollment declines were the result of “recruiting challenges in the face of increasing competition,” demographic shifts, the improving economy, and what he referred to, obliquely, as “our ongoing visibility around the topic of sexual assault.” Departments that are teaching fewer students now, he said, will be “targets for staffing adjustments.”

Plus All This ...

An annual tuition survey by Moody’s Investors Service shows that both public and private colleges expect tuition revenue to remain relatively flat in the 2016 fiscal year. Based on survey responses from about 170 institutions, Moody’s forecasts a net increase of about 2 percent in tuition revenue. … Gary Pinkel, the University of Missouri football coach who backed a boycott by black players that helped bring down the university’s president and chancellor, is quitting to focus on his health. He has lymphoma. … Education Management Corporation, which runs the Art Institutes, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College, and South University, will pay $95.5 million to settle a lawsuit charging that it illegally based pay for recruiters on how many students they enrolled.