Piedmont University provost Daniel Silber resigned abruptly this week to protest proposed budget cuts and faculty layoffs, which he called “morally wrong.”
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report, “Managing Political Tensions: Strategies to Counter Hate, Extremism, and Violence on Campus.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a nightmare for higher education, but during the 2020-21 academic year it largely spared the nation’s sparsely populated campuses from rising political tensions. That reprieve is likely to end as colleges open back up, forcing them to be alert not just to heated partisan rhetoric but also to potential violence.
Experts point to the 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Va., as a stark warning. They note that colleges and their personnel have long been targets of propaganda and harassment. Given the combustibility of political tempers in recent years, they say, academe would be unwise to shrug off the possibility of something worse. “The pandemic has been awful,” says Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas who studies extremism. But, he says, because of remote learning, colleges “dodged a reall