The Week

‘Those Muslims’

The president of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr., has set what may be a new standard for provocative statements by college presidents. Two days after a pair of Muslim extremists killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., Mr. Falwell said at one of the university’s regular convocations that he had started carrying a gun on the campus, and he encouraged students to apply for concealed-carry permits so they could do the same. “I’ve always thought if more good people had concealed-carry permits,” he said, “then we could end those Muslims before they walked in. … “

Afterward, Mr. Falwell and the university scrambled to explain that by “end those Muslims,” Mr. Falwell “was in no way” referring to the “many good and honorable Muslims who do not come into public spaces armed to kill innocents.”

“His remarks were a call to arms for self-defense and a criticism of political leaders who see the answer to such tragedies as more gun control,” the university said in a statement. “Far from promoting an atmosphere of hate against Muslims, we are promoting an atmosphere of safety and self-defense.” To that end, the university announced that it would drop a 2011 rule that prevented students with concealed-carry permits from bringing their guns into the residence halls.

Meanwhile, gun-rights advocates in Texas had provocative plans of their own late last week, for a “fake mass shooting” with the University of Texas at Austin as its backdrop. What was being called the “Open Carry Walk and Crisis Performance Event” was to involve cardboard guns, fake blood, and recorded sounds of gunfire. Next year a new state law will force the university, which was the site of a horrific mass shooting in 1966 that killed 13 people, to begin allowing people with concealed-carry permits to bring weapons into campus buildings.

‘A Slower-Track School’

As if to demonstrate that the market for provocative remarks had not been cornered, Justice Antonin Scalia lit a social-media firestorm during the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in a long-running case about racial preferences in college admissions. Some people contend, he said, that “it does not benefit” black students to attend top-notch colleges, “where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.”

Citing a brief in the case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, he said that “most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas,” but instead from “lesser schools” where they do not feel “pushed ahead” in classes that are “too fast for them.”

The justice’s remarks proved to be the one attention-getting development of the hearing, which was otherwise notable chiefly for complaints by some of Mr. Scalia’s colleagues about the case, which they had sent back to a lower court two years ago with instructions that it be looked at more carefully. “We’re just arguing the same case,” said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. “It’s as if nothing had happened.”

At issue is the constitutionality of a policy under which applicants’ race is one factor among many considered for 25 percent of the spaces in the Austin campus’s freshman class. The rest of the seats are filled by a formula assuring admission to students graduating in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes — a formula that, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, brings diversity because so many Texas high schools enroll chiefly students of only one race. (Read more here.)

‘Black Male, Knit Hat’

Also notable on the Internet last week was a striking blog post by a black Massachusetts College of Art and Design professor, Steve Locke, who described being detained by the police while walking from his car to a burrito place before class. The officers said he “fit the description” of someone who had reportedly tried to break into a nearby house — “Black male, knit hat, puffy coat.”

In the course of the half-hour-plus encounter, during which Mr. Locke (left) was surrounded by officers, he was careful to ask for permission before reaching into his pocket for his driver’s license. He was wearing his faculty ID around his neck, with his photo visible, he wrote. When the officers gave him back his license, they said they wanted the person who had reported the robbery attempt “to take a look at you to see if you are the person.”

“It was at this moment that I knew that I was probably going to die,” he wrote. “I am not being dramatic when I say this. I was not going to get into a police car. I was not going to present myself to some victim. I was not going let someone tell the cops that I was not guilty when I already told them that I had nothing to do with any robbery. I was not going to let them take me anywhere because if they did, the chance I was going to be accused of something I did not do rose exponentially. I knew this in my heart.”

Mr. Locke says that his hands were shaking, and that he made eye contact several times with a black woman in a red coat who was watching from down the block. “Don’t leave, sister,” he remembers thinking. “Please don’t leave.” Eventually the officers let him go.

“I knew something was wrong,” the woman in the red coat told him moments later. “I was watching the whole thing. The way they are treating us now, you have to watch them.”

And that knit cap the officers said matched “the description”? Barbara Sullivan, an artist who teaches at the University of Maine at Farmington, knitted it for Mr. Locke “in pinks and browns and blues and oranges and lime green.” He writes: “No one has a hat like this.”

‘Concrete Steps’

Even as they began cramming for fall-semester finals, black students continued to press colleges and universities across the country for changes that the students said would make them feel less unwelcome. But at least one institution, the University of Kentucky, saw faculty and staff members take the lead in advancing suggestions for change.

More than 150 university employees signed an open letter to the president, Eli Capilouto, offering “concrete steps the university can take” to reduce what the letter calls “hostility and systemic racism” experienced not only by black students but also by black faculty and staff members. Among the suggestions: Hire more black faculty members, make all students take “a course on race and ethnicity,” and “embed inclusiveness in every aspect of campus life.” The letter continues a discussion prompted by depictions of slaves in a 1934 fresco representing the state’s history. (Read more here.)

At the University of Maryland at College Park, meanwhile, President Wallace D. Loh endorsed a request by black students that the name of a former president, Harry C. Byrd, be removed from the football stadium because he declined to admit black students until ordered to do so by the courts.

And a Yale lecturer, Erika Christakis, said she would stop teaching at the university in the wake of protests prompted by a letter she wrote asking whether the university really needed to police students’ Halloween costumes and wondering, “Is there no room anymore for a child to be a little bit obnoxious … a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” Ms. Christakis will not be leaving Yale, however: She is associate master of one of its residential colleges, Silliman, where her husband is master.

Also ...

A Drew University graduate student, Brian Shetler (right), discovered a first edition of the King James Bible in the university’s rare-book collection. The 1611 volume, which the university didn’t realize was so significant, includes a number of typos that were corrected later in the print run. … The University of Tennessee at Knoxville has taken down an online request from its Office of Diversity and Inclusion that holiday parties not be Christmas parties “in disguise.” The suggestion had enraged some in the state Republican party, including U.S. Rep. John J. Duncan, who told Fox News that it was “extremist” and that “the people on the far left who always claim to be tolerant seem to be tolerant of everything except traditional Christianity.”

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.