What You Need to Know About the Past 7 Days

Slurs and Insults, Again

In viewbooks, autumn brings colleges crisp, sunny afternoons and trees in brilliant shades. But this year the first days of fall brought campuses across the country a fresh series of racist incidents, along with protests arising from them.

The University of Missouri at Columbia, the scene of extended unrest a year ago, drew attention again last week after members of a fraternity allegedly shouted racial slurs and obscenities at two black students. But unlike last fall — when a similar incident led black students to accuse the university of ignoring their concerns, and the campus chancellor and system president eventually lost their jobs — the university suspended the fraternity the next day, and the interim chancellor, Henry C. (Hank) Foley, released a statement saying he was outraged.

“I can’t prevent someone from making a racial slur like this,” Mr. Foley said, after meeting with angry students. “We can’t be everywhere all the time, but we can raise our expectations of student conduct and behavior.”

Among other incidents:

■ Administrators at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor were equally quick to respond after fliers found in two buildings urged white women not to date black men and encouraged “Euro-Americans” to “stop apologizing” and “denying their heritage.” A statement from the university said that “messages of racial, ethnic, or religious discrimination have no place at the University of Michigan.”

■ The president of the University of North Dakota, Mark R. Kennedy, said he was “appalled” by two racist Snapchat posts that made their way around the campus, one of them showing four white women in blackface with the caption “Black Lives Matter.” The president said it was “abundantly clear that we have much work to do” on the topics of diversity, inclusion, and respect.

■ Students at the University of Mississippi organized a sit-in to protest what they said was an inadequate response by the university to a Facebook post in which another student appeared to advocate lynching as a response to unrest in Charlotte, N.C. The sit-in ended after the chancellor, Jeffrey S. Vitter, released a second, more straightforward statement about the Facebook post, saying that “there is no place in our community for racist or violent acts.”

Free Speech, Wavering

Elsewhere, free speech continues to be a flash point on campuses — especially speech about race and police killings of black men.

At the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, three football players were widely criticized — including by the state’s governor, Pete Ricketts, a Republican — after they knelt while the national anthem was played before a game at Northwestern University. One of the athletes, Michael Rose-Ivey, a senior, said during a news conference that they felt they had a duty to join other athletes who have followed the lead of Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, by silently protesting what they say is systemic injustice against people of color.

“We did this understanding the implications of these actions,” Mr. Rose-Ivey said, “but what we didn’t expect was the enormous amount of racially hateful comments we received from friends, peers, fans, members of the media, and others about the method of protest.”

The governor, phoning in to a radio show, called what the three players had done a “disgraceful and disrespectful” insult to American veterans, but he later agreed to Mr. Rose-Ivey’s request for a meeting. A university regent — Hal Daub, a former Omaha mayor — said that university athletes “are not supposed to do things that create disparagement or negative implications” and that the trio “had better be kicked off the team.”

“Let them get out of uniform and do their protesting on somebody else’s nickel,” he said.

But the Nebraska president, Hank M. Bounds, said in a statement that the institution “will not restrict the First Amendment rights of any student or employee.”

“Our nation is dealing with difficult issues today,” he said. “I want every student, faculty, and staff member to know that I am unwavering in my support of your right to participate in these dialogues in the manner you choose under the First Amendment and University of Nebraska policy.”

■ Meanwhile, the dean of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s College of Law, Melanie D. Wilson, said she would not discipline a professor who tweeted that drivers should run over protesters blocking a highway in Charlotte. Offensive as it was, she said, the post “was an exercise of his First Amendment rights.”

The faculty member, Glenn Reynolds, is also a columnist for USA Today, which suspended him for a month. He apologized for the tweet.

■ And the president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, Phil Trout, apologized for saying that “All lives matter” in a talk about college access at the group’s annual meeting. The phrase shocked some in the audience and prompted several people to leave the room.

Mr. Trout, though, said afterward that he was just not up to speed on the nuances of the conversation about race in the United States, and that he hadn’t meant to offend anyone. “To me, it was a statement of sympathy and solidarity,” said Mr. Trout, a college counselor at a high school in Minnesota. “I wasn’t aware of the code. I didn’t know that ‘All lives matter’ was so completely dismissive of, or a rejection of, Black Lives Matter. I totally and completely abhor those who reject that. I never intended to do harm.”

Enrollment Woes

Last week brought some stunning news out of Illinois: Chicago State University’s freshman class has only 86 members, and undergraduate enrollment there has dropped by nearly a third since last year. The university now has fewer than half as many students as it had in 2010.

Chicago State is among the institutions hardest hit by a months-long budget impasse in the state legislature. The dispute prompted university administrators to end the spring semester early and issue layoff notices. To complicate matters, the president, Thomas J. Calhoun Jr., left in September after only nine months on the job.

In a statement to the Chicago Tribune, administrators said they “plan to rebuild in 2017.”

Caution: Side Effect

A provision of the Affordable Care Act has prompted the University of Wisconsin at Madison to cap student workers’ weekly hours so the university doesn’t have to provide them with insurance. Under the new policy, students may work no more than 29 hours a week — an hour under the threshold set in the law.

A university spokesman told The Capital Times that state law does not permit the university to offer employee health insurance to students, and that most students were already covered by their parents’ insurance or by the university’s student health insurance. But he said administrators were concerned that the cutback could affect some students’ ability to cover their expenses. Students had been limited to working 25 hours a week while classes were in session but could work more at other times.

Plus All This …

The president of Iowa State University, Steven Leath, said he would stop serving as his own pilot on university planes after the Associated Press learned that he had caused $12,000 in damage to one of the two aircraft while landing in windy weather last year. He and his wife were flying back from a visit to North Carolina, where they own a home. … The overall rate at which borrowers default on federal student loans has dropped again, according to the Education Department. For borrowers who began repaying their loans in the 2012-13 fiscal years, the default rate over three years was 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 percent for the group that began repayment the year before. … Louisiana State University has fired its football coach, Les Miles, and will pay about $10 million to buy out his contract.

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