Good morning, and welcome to Monday, October 16. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: rick.seltzer@chronicle.com.

Can the center hold?

Divisions over Israel and Palestine strained many U.S. campuses last week, the first after Hamas, in a surprise attack, killed Israeli civilians and took hostages. But with an Israeli counteroffensive expected to claim more innocent lives in Gaza, this is going to continue to be a major issue for colleges.

Campuses largely made it through last week’s planned protests peacefully. Shouting matches, scuffles, and a few clashes didn’t escalate into widespread violence.

But several developments at the end of the week suggest rising tensions threaten any new equilibrium. Among them:

• An instructor allegedly targeted Jewish students in a Stanford University course. Students reported the instructor, who was teaching a required undergraduate course, asked Jewish students to raise their hands and separated them, calling it a simulation of what’s being done to Palestinians. The lecturer also reportedly asked students about their ancestry and labeled each as “colonizer” or “colonized.” Stanford removed the instructor and is investigating.
• A college president’s comments prompted pro-Palestinian protesters to cancel a rally planned for Thursday at the University of Arizona. The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter said that Robert C. Robbins had made its members feel it wouldn’t be safe to host their event on campus. The president issued a Wednesday statement saying that SJP didn’t speak for the university but that its members had a right to express their views in a safe environment, even though the national organization had made statements endorsing the actions of Hamas that are “antithetical to our university’s values.”
• A petition sought to oust a pro-Palestinian professor at Yale. The petition, which cited a series of social-media posts by the professor that said “Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle,” received tens of thousands of signatures. A Yale spokesperson said that the institution is committed to freedom of expression and that the posts represent the professor’s own views. A clinical fellow at the university’s medical school was killed by the Hamas attacks in Israel, the Yale Daily News reported.
• New College of Florida preened and saber-rattled. The public institution posted a reminder that Florida law makes it a felony for anyone to provide material support to terrorist organizations, including Hamas. “Any individual or group at New College providing support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” it said.

Don’t dismiss those as isolated incidents. Each has specific context, to be sure. But they’re part of a larger cycle of coarsening dialogue and heedless escalation.

The cycle threatens to undercut colleges’ missions as educational settings unless it’s interrupted or taps itself out. Learning can’t happen if students, faculty members, and administrators are unable to interact with one another respectfully.

The big questions: Did last week mark peak tensions on campuses, or will shouting matches continue to escalate as fighting continues in the Middle East? Do any higher-ed leaders have the vision, authority, and relationships on campus to push constituencies out of self-destructive cycles — to suggest that just because groups have the right to posture cruelly as people die, it doesn’t mean they should?

Quick hits

• Leadership changes at Notre Dame: The Rev. John I. Jenkins, who has been president since 2005, will step down at the end of the current academic year and return to teaching and ministry. Jenkins led the institution as it joined the prestigious Association of American Universities but also found himself caught in controversies, particularly after he attended a White House event without a mask early in the pandemic when President Donald Trump nominated a Notre Dame law professor, Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court. (Notre Dame, AAU, The Chronicle)
• Morgan State says it wants fencing, not a wall: The historically Black institution in Baltimore seeks to enclose 90 percent of its campus to limit access as part of security upgrades in the wake of a homecoming-week shooting that injured five people. Officials sought to clarify the plans after finding the term “wall,” which appeared in earlier descriptions, was “highly charged.” Morgan State’s president is describing such barriers as part of its construction strategy for almost a decade, adding that 60 percent of the perimeter is already enclosed. (WBAL, The Chronicle, Morgan State)
• Queer Arizona State professor injured in campus run-in with Turning Point USA: Two people representing the conservative organization followed a writing instructor who said he’d just finished teaching a class on LGBTQ+ youth in pop culture and politics. The professor said the people brought up Drag Story Hour Arizona, an organization he’d co-founded with the goal of supporting diversity in literacy programs, and followed him until he tried to block their camera, at which point an altercation left him with “relatively minor” injuries. Turning Point USA disputed parts of his account, and the university police said they were investigating. (The Arizona Republic)
• Most board members resign at Pittsburgh Technical College: Five of seven trustees have left the institution, which has been rocked by an investigation into its president and a vote of no confidence by faculty and staff members. (WPXI)
• Broward College shores up accreditation: The Florida community college addressed concerns after the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges found it to be out of compliance in 22 of 40 areas, according to college officials and the accreditor. Many of those issues related to staff members’ providing inadequate information, but after a site visit last week, the accreditor found no areas of concern. The institution’s accreditation was a point of tension between its board and former president, Gregory A. Haile, who suddenly resigned last month. (South Florida Sun Sentinel, The Chronicle)

Stat of the day

12.5 percent

That’s the average perceived probability of consumers missing a debt payment over the next three months as of a September survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The share is up 1.4 percentage points, to its highest point since May 2020.

The context: This finding coincides with the resumption of student-loan payments. But any effects are unlikely to be felt evenly across the country — Southern states have 10 of the 14 highest student-loan burdens, the Pew Charitable Trusts recently noted.

Comings and goings

• Dimitri Tamalis, associate dean of the College of Health and Human Development at California State University at Northridge, has been named vice provost for academic affairs at the University of the Incarnate Word, in Texas.
• Darren Reisberg, president of Hartwick College, in New York, has been named senior counselor to the chancellor of Vanderbilt University.
• Col. Wanda A. Wright, retired, a former director of the Arizona Department of Veterans’ Services, has been named director of the Office for Veteran and Military Academic Engagement at Arizona State University.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.

Footnote

Pardon me while I buzz for a moment about the University of Maryland at Baltimore’s hosting some bees up on the seventh floor of a health-sciences building. The little buggers seem to find city living pretty sweet, with an apiary employee telling WMAR that their boxes are filled with so much nectar that it would “be difficult for just any one person to move.”

I could drone on for hours about Baltimore’s wonderful parks and green spaces, which are probably sustaining the hives. Instead, I combed through The Chronicle’s archives to find this 2007 gem about an estimated 100,000 bees that were relocated from their colony in the walls of an engineering building at the University of Houston. Like honey itself, a good bee story doesn’t spoil.