“I understand that the school doesn’t want to take a political stance,” Ms. Hui said. “But you certainly shouldn’t stand for students who make threatening statements and hateful comments.”

Lee Pelton, president of Emerson College, said the university had contacted all the students involved to ensure Ms. Hui’s security. But he warned that school administrators needed to have “global competency” or risk the kind of firestorm that enveloped the National Basketball Association this month over a pro-Hong Kong tweet from an executive.

Students from Hong Kong say the values of the movement seem straightforward and ripe for campus support in the United States: democracy, freedom of expression, the right to protest. But given the sizable mainland Chinese populations at American universities — along with accusations that the protesters have incited violence and lawlessness — the question of how schools should address the issue has been anything but simple.

Of the 1.1 million international students in the United States, one-third come from China, according to the Institute of International Education. In the 2017-18 school year, over 360,000 were from the mainland and 7,000 from Hong Kong. International students typically pay full tuition, serving as a critical source of funds for universities: They contributed more than $30 billion to the American economy in the 2014-15 school year.

Joy Ming King, a senior at Wesleyan University, spoke last month as part of a panel on the protests, sharing his experience marching in Hong Kong this summer. More than 100 students packed the room. Days later, he read in Wesleyan’s campus newspaper that the university was exploring the opening of a satellite campus in China, in partnership with a Chinese corporation and a theater academy. The leader of the venture would be a Chinese Communist Party secretary.

“I came back to campus and found out my university’s administration is proposing to partner with the regime that my friends and family are being terrorized by,” said Mr. King, who later organized a rally opposing the project.

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan and author of “ Safe Enough Spaces ,” said that “there isn’t just one student view about events in Hong Kong” and that he had met with students in recent weeks to discuss the protests and proposed campus.