A bystander intervention presentation for arriving freshmen at Wesleyan University last Thursday — “We Speak We Stand” — featured students acting out fictional episodes of campus sexual violence, harassment and problematic drinking, with examples of how to intervene. “Each of you has the power to bring to light sexual violence in our community,” one student told the group.

Fresh on the minds of university officials are last year’s highly publicized episodes involving racist taunts at the University of Missouri — which appear to have contributed to a precipitous decline in enrollment there this fall.

“That closes your doors,” said Archie Ervin, the vice president for institute diversity at Georgia Institute of Technology and president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. “If you have sustained enrollment drops and disproportionately full-paying students such as out-of-state, the state legislature can’t make up the gap.”

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, officials have put together a diversity presentation as a pilot program this year for 1,000 freshmen — whom some colleges refer to with the gender-neutral term first-year students. That program, expected to cost $150,000 to $200,000, follows incidents on campus last year. In one, a racist note was slipped under a black student’s door, prompting Patrick Sims, the university’s vice provost for diversity and climate, to post an emotional video on YouTube titled “Enough Is Enough.”

Lori Berquam, the university’s dean of students, said in an interview that the sessions would try to address the fact that some students in Wisconsin, a predominantly white state, had little exposure to people of other races until they got to Madison.

“It would not be unheard-of for a student to join us from the state of Wisconsin having had zero people of color in their high school,” Dr. Berquam said.