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

Bathroom Brawl

Chances are pretty good that if you’re reading this, you may be a regular user of bathrooms on a college campus. Even so, they may not be a topic you’ve spent much time thinking about. You go in, do what you need to do, wash your hands, leave. Unless someone in another stall takes a cellphone call — which can be hard to ignore — you’re probably not focused on who else is in there at the same time you are.

So you, too, may be mystified by all the fuss in North Carolina and elsewhere over public bathrooms and who is allowed to use which of them. Let’s face it — until quite recently, that wasn’t the kind of issue that had ever prompted a state legislature to convene in special session and pass an emergency law. But transgender people — and which bathrooms and locker rooms they use — are suddenly the focus of an enormous amount of attention.

After the U.S. Justice Department warned that the state measure, known as HB2, violated federal anti-discrimination laws and that it could cost the state’s public colleges their access to federal funds, the state sued, the federal government countersued, and the University of North Carolina called an emergency session of its Board of Governors to try to steer a course between what appear to be contradictory laws. The back-and-forth was followed by a much-publicized joint letter from the Justice and Education Departments reminding elementary and secondary schools nationwide not to discriminate against transgender students.

To judge by Facebook memes predicting that all this will bring about the collapse of our democracy, who can and cannot use which bathroom has become a monumental issue.

Supporters of HB2 insist that privacy and safety justify requiring people to use only the public bathrooms marked for the gender they were born with. Opponents counter that the law is, at best, a solution in search of a problem. It’s worth remembering, after all, that for several decades plenty of colleges have had gender-neutral multistall bathrooms in older dormitories, and that most of the students in those buildings have had no difficulty with them. Those bathrooms weren’t meant as social-engineering experiments — it was just too expensive to rebuild them when dorms that had been single-sex became coed. Nonetheless, they demonstrated that people, or at least young people in liberal-arts colleges, could easily accustom themselves to nontraditional bathroom-sharing arrangements.

That said, politicians and advocacy groups on both sides have a lot riding on the bathroom debate, and it clearly resonates with the public. It’s a good bet we’ll be hearing a lot more about it, at least until the elections in November.

Neither a Borrower Nor ...

Last week Burlington College, in Vermont, threw in the towel. With enrollment down in the vicinity of 200 and its lender unwilling to extend its credit, the college said it would close at the end of May.

The liberal-arts institution traces its history to 1972, when a group of what the college calls “nonmainstream” students — among them, Vietnam War veterans and single parents — began meeting in the living room of Steward LaCasce, who became the first president (and spoke at the final commencement). Eventually, it established itself as a small but going concern. But in 2010 — while Jane O’Meara Sanders, wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders, was president — the college acquired a new campus and, with it, debt that the closing announcement described as “crushing.”

Yves Bradley, chair of the Board of Trustees, said that the college had attempted to merge with another institution (he declined to say which one) and that the lender, People’s United Bank, had worked closely with the college for some time. But, he said, “I think the lender lost faith that we’d get to where we said we were going. They said, ‘We don’t believe it anymore.’”

Also last week, an annual survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers found that private colleges’ average discount rate reached another all-time high in the 2015-16 academic year. The discount rate — essentially, the difference between the “sticker price” of tuition and what the average student pays after receiving grants — climbed to 48.6 percent for full-time freshmen, up from 47.1 percent in the previous year, with 88 percent of freshmen receiving discounts. The discount rate was 42.5 percent for all undergraduates.

Thanks, Grandma

To hear President Obama tell it, a three-year campaign by Rutgers University administrators to lure him as the 2016 graduation speaker didn’t really pay off until the student-government president’s grandmother sent her third message asking him to come.

Letters from the university’s president, videos about Rutgers’s 250th anniversary, and an online petition had brought no response, so the university announced in early April that it had invited the television journalist Bill Moyers to be the graduation speaker. A few days later, though, the White House called to say Mr. Obama would speak — in addition to Mr. Moyers, as it turned out. When the president’s turn came, he took care to mention getting “three notes from the grandmother of your student-body president.”

“I have to say that really sealed the deal,” Mr. Obama told some 50,000 people gathered in a university stadium. “That was smart because I have a soft spot for grandmas.” The grandmother with the magic touch, Dianne Totten, was on hand to watch Mr. Obama congratulate her grandson, Matthew Panconi, on his own speech to the crowd.

Click (Cont.)

An investigation by the American Association of University Professors concluded last week that the University of Missouri had violated Melissa Click’s due-process rights when it fired her, without a faculty hearing, in response to videos showing her shouting at a student journalist during protests last fall on the university’s Columbia campus. The findings could help set the stage for an AAUP vote to censure the university’s Board of Curators.

The board, meanwhile, responded to the findings with a point-by-point rebuttal and said it stood by its decision to fire Ms. Click, who was an assistant professor of communication. “The university, like many other institutions, faces challenges related to diversity and inclusion,” the board said, but those don’t excuse Ms. Click “from the responsibility to conduct herself in a professional manner befitting a faculty member.”

Wait! There’s More!

The Kentucky Community and Technical College System has laid off 45 faculty members and 125 other employees in the face of a $26-million budget shortfall. A state judge, meanwhile, ruled that Gov. Matthew G. Bevin can cut public colleges’ budgets without approval from the legislature. … George Washington University laid off more than half of the faculty members of its Corcoran School of the Arts and Design last week, with the school’s director citing enrollment projections and a changing curriculum. The university took over the art school in 2014. … Virginia’s State Council of Higher Education decided that it has no authority over whether George Mason University renames its law school in honor of Justice Antonin Scalia, since the school’s mission remains unchanged by either the new name or the two donations that prompted it: $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation and $20 million given anonymously. … Michael Vaudreuil, a 54-year-old Worcester Polytechnic Institute custodian, earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering — and a round of applause at graduation this month — after nearly a decade of attending classes before his 3-p.m.-to-11-p.m. shift.

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