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

Another Campus Shooting

Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In what the police described as a murder-suicide, William S. Klug, a 39-year-old associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles, was killed by one of his former graduate students, Mainak Sarkar, who then killed himself. The police say that Mr. Sarkar had a “kill list” and that another UCLA professor, whom they did not name, was on it. (A woman whose name was on the list has been found dead in Minnesota.) The shootings put the UCLA campus on lockdown for two hours, during which some students barricaded themselves into classrooms when they found they could not lock the doors. UCLA has extended counseling services to students, whose exams and graduation are scheduled for this week.

A Reset in Akron

After two tumultuous years as president of the University of Akron, Scott L. Scarborough became for many the personification of a divisive debate over where American higher education should be heading. Should colleges be, as he said in a speech at the Cleveland City Club last year, career focused, connected to industry, experiential, and technology infused, “in both the sciences and the arts”? Or, as many faculty members have insisted, are institutions’ responsibilities to their students and society broader than was suggested by his campaign to rebrand the institution as “Ohio’s Polytechnic University”?

Mr. Scarborough’s abrupt resignation last week doesn’t answer that question. That’s because his critics repeatedly faulted not only his vision for the institution — for instance, he looked seriously at a partnership with ITT Educational Services Inc., which operates for-profit technical schools — but also his leadership and his personal style, to say nothing of the $950,000 renovation of the president’s home that took place just before 215 jobs and the baseball team were cut.

It didn’t help his case, of course, that Moody’s Investors Service last month downgraded its forecast for the university’s financial outlook from “stable” to “negative,” citing “multiyear enrollment declines” and an “anticipated smaller entering class in fall 2016, resulting in negative revenue pressure and need for extensive expense containment.” A statement from the university’s Board of Trustees said the decision to part ways was “mutual,” and it was effective immediately.

Also Out: Ken Starr

In recent years, higher education has become awkwardly accustomed to reading about campus sexual assaults in general and assaults involving athletic teams in particular, so in a sense there was nothing overly surprising in a report by the law firm Pepper Hamilton on assault allegations at Baylor University. Nonetheless the report, commissioned by Baylor’s Board of Regents, was damning on every page, almost in every sentence.

“The investigations reviewed were wholly inadequate to fairly and reliably evaluate whether sexual violence had occurred. … Administrators engaged in conduct that could be perceived as victim-blaming, focusing on the complainant’s choices and actions, rather than robustly investigating the allegations, including the actions of the respondent. … Once aware of a potential pattern of sexual violence, the University failed to take prompt and effective action to protect campus safety and protect future victims from harm. … The choices made by football staff and athletics leadership, in some instances, posed a risk to campus safety and the integrity of the university. In certain instances, including reports of a sexual assault by multiple football players, athletics and football personnel affirmatively chose not to report sexual violence and dating violence to an appropriate administrator outside of athletics.”

You get the picture. Maybe Baylor does, too: The fallout has claimed the jobs of Art Briles, the head football coach; Ian McCaw, the athletic director; and Kenneth W. Starr, the university’s high-profile president. (The regents initially demoted Mr. Starr to the post of chancellor, which is largely ceremonial, but he said last week that he would give that title up too, although he will remain on the faculty of Baylor’s law school.) And ESPN reported last week that seven of this year’s Baylor football recruits are asking to be released from their commitments to attend.

3 Colleges Shuttered

Janet Worne, Lexington Herald-Leader

It’s been a rocky spring for a few small liberal-arts colleges. Dowling College, which has two campuses on Long Island, and St. Catharine College, in Kentucky, both said last week that they would close — and their announcements came just two weeks after Burlington College, in Vermont, said it was shutting down.

Trustees at all three institutions waited until after graduation to make their decisions, which explains why the announcements came so close together. But their proximity served as a rude reminder that among many of the nation’s smallest private colleges, “none of us is very far from the wolf’s door,” as G.T. (Buck) Smith, president of Davis & Elkins College, in West Virginia, put it.

Even so, Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, said nothing he’s heard suggests that the three closures represent the beginning of a trend. “While it’s true that the financial pressures on many small colleges are increasing,” he said, “I doubt that we will see more than the usual small number of closings each year.” A recent count by the council, he added, showed that two or three small colleges, on average, have closed annually for the past three decades.

Debt and deteriorating enrollment were common themes in the three announcements:

• Burlington, which dates to the early 1970s and has counterculture roots, borrowed in 2010 to buy a piece of property from the local archdiocese and ended up with “crushing” debt. It had fewer than 200 students.
• Dowling, which split off from Adelphi University in 1968, has run through seven presidents in the past dozen years and was said to owe $54 million. Undergraduate enrollment had dropped to about 1,700, and one of its two campuses was partially closed.
• St. Catharine, a two-year college until 2003, racked up debt for residence halls, a health-science facility, and a library — and then got put on the Education Department’s “heightened cash management” list after a review of its finances turned up “severe findings.” The college had fewer than 600 students this year and said it would have enrolled only 475 in the fall.

Mr. Ekman and others noted that lenders that might once have given colleges a fair amount of flexibility with repayments have become less forgiving lately. And Barbara K. Mistick, president of Wilson College, in Pennsylvania, said small institutions need to be better at “proactively dealing with their fiscal stress.”

But Alice L. Brown, a former president of the Appalachian College Association who has studied college closings, isn’t optimistic about the future of small colleges that don’t have deep enough pockets to make necessary program changes. “What I see is that a lot of people still have their heads in the sand,” she said of some small-college leaders. “They’re in a state of denial, thinking that God’s going to bless them and some donor’s going to come along with $50 million, and it’ll be just like what it was once upon a time.”

And So Much More ...

A federal judge in San Diego has unsealed hundreds of pages of internal documents from Donald Trump’s Trump University, a for-profit venture that promised to reveal secrets for success in real estate. The documents — including playbooks describing high-pressure tactics aimed at getting gullible people to pay for Trump U. courses — are evidence in one of several pending lawsuits that describe the company’s behavior as fraudulent. The judge in the case has scheduled a trial for late November. … Caught between the state’s new “bathroom bill” and federal officials who say it violates civil-rights laws, the University of North Carolina system said it would not enforce a provision of the law requiring transgender people to use bathrooms labeled for the sex on their birth certificates. … San Francisco State University’s recent graduates included a woman who was abandoned as a newborn in a laundry room in one of its dormitories and was discovered there by two students doing their wash. Jillian Sobol, now 31, said hers is “a story of hope, joy, optimism, family and San Francisco State University.”