The Week

Threat Report

Colleges have faced many threats to the relative peace of their campuses this fall, but they seem to be facing more-literal threats as well.

The University of Chicago shut down classes for a day last week after someone vowed online to “execute approximately 16 white male students and or staff” on the campus. Federal agents arrested Jabari R. Dean, a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been charged with “transmitting a threat in interstate commerce.” Authorities said Mr. Dean did not have any firearms.

Western Washington University also canceled classes for a day after someone made threats against black students on Yik Yak, the anonymous social-media application. Police arrested Tysen Campbell, a student who is suspected of posting the threats. He faces a felony charge of malicious harassment and has been suspended from the university.

There will continue to be much discussion of the causes and significance of these incidents. The most prominent issue is sure to be the racial tensions that have inflamed many campuses for the past few weeks (and had simmered for decades).

Mr. Dean is said to have made his threat amid protests over the death of a young black man, Laquan McDonald, at the hands of the Chicago police. The number of “white devils” mentioned in the threat was meant to equal the number of times Mr. McDonald was shot. The threats at Western Washington are reported to have been motivated by controversy over whether the university’s mascot, the Viking, is racially exclusive. (Read about Western Washington’s response here.)

Online threats against black students at Kean University two weeks ago resulted in the arrest last week of Kayla-Simone McKelvey, an alumna. Ms. McKelvey, who is black, purportedly stepped away from a rally against racism on campus and created a Twitter account to broadcast the threats. She has been charged with creating a false public alarm.

But whatever inspired these threats, the messages themselves, and the reaction to them, carry portents for the future of campus safety. With mass shootings now commonplace, college administrators are compelled to treat anonymous threats to safety with utmost gravity. Research has shown that mass shooters often study and learn from their predecessors. Making threats online is undoubtedly a more impulsive process than plotting a massacre, and the record of speedy arrests in these recent incidents may be a deterrent to copycats. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that an environment sensitized to aggressions, micro- and otherwise, and beset by the kinds of tensions and arguments that embroil higher education today, might inspire more threats of violence in the weeks, months, and years to come.

Publisher Perish?

Academic publishing was rattled last week by the news that the American arm of Ashgate Publishing, a venerable source of books and journals, was being shut down by its new owner, Informa. A publicly traded publishing-and-events conglomerate, Informa bought Ashgate in July. Ashgate’s British offices were unaffected by the closure, but some observers have expressed concern that the surviving part of the 48-year-old publishing house may soon be subsumed into its corporate parent in the name of operating efficiency. An Informa representative declined to comment.

Worries over the fate of Ashgate add to larger worries over the fate of independent scholarly publishing on a continuing march toward corporate consolidation. Last month the staff and editorial board of Lingua, a linguistics journal, resigned en masse after its corporate owner, Elsevier, declined to make the journal’s content open-access. (Read more here.)

Dismissed at Rutgers

Several Rutgers football players were arrested on charges of assault and home invasion this fall. Separately, an internal investigation found that the coach, Kyle J. Flood, had violated athletic-compliance policies by trying to get a player’s grade changed. Mr. Flood was suspended for three games and fined $50,000 earlier in the season.

Julie Hermann (right) took over as athletic director in 2013 amid a scandal over how the men’s basketball coach treated players. Mike Rice Jr., the coach, was soon fired. Ms. Hermann’s arrival at Rutgers was itself accompanied by a minor scandal, after athletes she had coached at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville made allegations about her treatment of players.

Robert L. Barchi, Rutgers’s president, said in a statement that the football team’s “continued struggles on the field combined with several off the field issues” required new leadership for the program. That decision led to a change regarding Ms. Hermann’s role as well. “We need a fresh start,” Mr. Barchi said.

And Now Some Good News

If less-than-ideal enrollment numbers or fund-raising worries have college administrators down, they can keep in mind that things are, ostensibly, looking up. According to a report from Moody’s Investors Service, the financial outlook for 2016 is stable for colleges. The bond-rating firm’s analysts expect colleges’ aggregate operating revenue to grow by about 3 percent, buoyed by slight increases in net-tuition revenue and state funding. The continued good health of the stock market is also expected to lead to further help for the bottom line, from investment income and giving.

Not all of the news from the Moody’s report is so relatively sunny. A 3-percent increase just barely beats inflation, and analysts estimate that as many as 30 percent of the more than 500 colleges it rates will have trouble meeting that mark. And those institutions that do enjoy an increase in revenue will do so only at the expense of continuing to contain expenses and continuing to reinvest in order to remain competitive.

The report also reiterated the findings of a Moody’s report released in September that projected a slight increase in the number of colleges that will close or merge by 2017.

Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce has better news to offer, especially for students and recent alumni. According to a report, the rate of underemployment for recent college graduates is 6.2 percent, down from 10 percent during the recession. (“Underemployment” is defined as being without a job and looking for one, or working part time and looking for a full-time job.) The underemployment rate for those with only a high-school diploma is 13 percent, more than double the percentage of workers with a college degree.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and assorted other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.