TUNIS — The ultraconservative Islamist student announced his arrival by kicking over a large metal ashtray in the lobby.

“You want to make life hard for me,” he shouted, as he climbed the stairs toward the university dean’s office. “Well, I can make it hard for you.”

Without any security guards to call and knowing that the police would not come soon, if at all, the white-haired dean, Habib Kazdaghli, could only sigh, retreat behind a flimsy locked door, and try to reassure his visitors that everything would be all right.

So began a recent confrontation at Manouba University on the outskirts of Tunis, Tunisia’s capital, where tensions have been running high for nearly a year. Here a handful of ultraconservative Salafist students and their busloads of supporters, many from the poor interior of the country, are pitted against an urban faculty with a strong sense that this bare-bones campus with its overgrown paths is no place for prayer rooms or women who veil their faces.