The Week: What You Need to Know About the Past 7 Days

Follow the Money

So the good news is that American colleges and universities raised $40.3 billion in 2015, according to an annual report by the Council for Aid to Education. The less-good news, at least for the vast majority of colleges, is that close to a third of that haul went to only 20 institutions. Stanford alone pulled in $1.63 billion, followed by Harvard, with $1.05 billion, and the University of Southern California, with $653 million.

Meanwhile, an annual study of endowment performance turned up lackluster results for the 2015 fiscal year. The average return on investment was just 2.4 percent, a big drop from the 15.5-percent return the year before. But don’t panic yet about next year’s budget: Many colleges anticipate the vagaries of markets by basing endowment-income spending on a three-year average of investment returns, cushioning the impact of both lean and fat years.

Role Reversals

Faculty members so often think of themselves as resolute free-speech advocates that it was big news when Melissa A. Click, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Missouri at Columbia, was seen in a video shouting for “some muscle” to keep reporters away from protesters gathered on a campus quadrangle.

Ms. Click (above) was in the news again last week, when she was suspended by the university’s Board of Curators. The board’s vote came shortly after a local prosecutor charged her with misdemeanor assault for her role in the November confrontation, during which she and other supporters of a protest begun by black students sought to bar student journalists from what was being called a “media-free safe space” on the quad. The charge arose because one of the student reporters, Mark Schierbecker, had filed a municipal complaint alleging that Ms. Click had grabbed at his camera in a way that made him “fear he was in danger of immediate physical injury.”

Ms. Click apologized for her actions within days of the incident. But more than 100 Republican Missouri state legislators — not necessarily the first people you’d think of as strong advocates for reporters’ rights — called on the university to fire both her and a student-affairs administrator also involved in the incident. That, in turn, prompted the release of a letter in which fellow faculty members came to Ms. Click’s defense, saying she had made “at most a regrettable mistake.”

The curators, who are appointed by Missouri’s governor, ordered the university’s general counsel to investigate the incident and report back so the board “may determine whether additional discipline is appropriate.”

Blame Game

The same Missouri protests, of course, led quickly to the resignation of Timothy M. Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri system, and R. Bowen Loftin, chancellor of the Columbia campus. Last week an astonishing “confidential” letter from Mr. Wolfe turned up in The Columbia Missourian. In the letter, dated January 19, Mr. Wolfe complains about “specific unconscionable behaviors” that led to his being forced out and that prompt “grave concerns over the future of the university.”

For instance, Mr. Wolfe says Mr. Loftin shifted protesters’ focus “to me from him once he discovered his job was in jeopardy.” And when black football players joined the protest, Mr. Wolfe says, it was “the equivalent of throwing gasoline on a small fire.” He adds that their coach, Gary Pinkel, “missed the opportunity to teach them a valuable life lesson” and that “the end result could be financial catastrophe for our university” because, he says, the university will lose “more than $25 million” in revenue from reduced enrollment next fall.

And speaking of assigning blame: John E. Coyne III, chair of the Board of Trustees at Mount St. Mary’s University, in Maryland, released a scorching statement late last month in the wake of a student-newspaper article alleging that the university’s president, hoping to bolster retention numbers, had sought quick dismissal of freshmen he thought weren’t ready for college. The controversy was initially inflammatory because the president, Simon P. Newman, was quoted as talking about drowning bunnies.

Mr. Coyne threw gasoline on that little fire by writing on the university’s website that the board and its lawyers had conducted “a forensic investigation” that “found incontrovertible evidence of the existence of an organized, small group of faculty and recent alums working to undermine and ultimately cause the exit of President Newman. This group’s issues are born out of a real resistance to positive change at Mount St. Mary’s.” He said the investigation also found “that President Newman continues to be the right kind of talented leader to be at the vanguard of Catholic higher-education growth.”

No Moose Need Apply

Lord Jeffery Amherst doesn’t get much press these days — he died in 1797 — but there he was last week in The New York Times, losing his job as Amherst College’s unofficial mascot. Lord Jeff is being retired at the insistence of students (right) taking part in a group called Amherst Uprising, who last fall began calling on the Massachusetts college to condemn “the inherent racist nature of the unofficial mascot.”

Lord Jeff, the British commander who drove the French out of Canada, is now also remembered for a particularly ignoble suggestion: He recommended trying “to send the small pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians” during an uprising in the 1760s. By then Amherst, Mass., had already been named for him by a colonial governor; when the college was founded, in 1821, it took its name from the town. Students seem to have adopted Lord Jeff as a mascot “roughly a century ago,” the chair of the Board of the Trustees, Cullen Murphy, said last week in a refreshingly thoughtful statement.

Mr. Murphy, an editor at large for Vanity Fair, said Lord Jeff had many defenders among alumni. But he said: “Amherst College finds itself in a position where a mascot — which, when you think about it, has only one real job, which is to unify — is driving people apart.”

After what he called a “wide-ranging and intense conversation,” the trustees voted to rename the college’s inn — the one official use of the Lord Jeff name — and otherwise just avoid referring to him. “This is not about political correctness; it is about present community,” Mr. Murphy wrote.

Meanwhile, Yale said that the master of the residential college named for John C. Calhoun would take down three portraits of him, two in her house and one in the dining hall, and would also stop using a ceremonial cane that once belonged to him. (Calhoun, as you doubtless remember, was a defender of slavery who served as vice president under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.) But whether the university will rename the college, as demanded last fall by a group called Next Yale, is still up in the air.

Also up in the air, by the way, is whether Amherst should finally adopt an official mascot. “There is strong sentiment in favor of the idea,” Mr. Murphy noted. A campaign in its favor notwithstanding, he added, “there is also strong sentiment that it should not be a moose.”

But Wait, There’s More

North Korea arrested Otto Frederick Warmbier, a University of Virginia student visiting with a tour group, and said he was being questioned about “antistate activity.” … The Federal Trade Commission sued DeVry University, alleging that the for-profit institution’s claims about graduates’ employment rates are deceptive. The company said they’re not, adding that there is “no national standard for calculating employment statistics” among colleges. … Jordan E. Kurland, longtime associate general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, died on January 23 at the age of 87. The association said Mr. Kurland, who joined its staff in 1965, “was a tireless champion of academic freedom” for more than 50 years.

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