Across the country, many colleges are making the same promises: we will do more to support our minority students. We care deeply about diversity. We are committed to an inclusive campus.

But what, exactly, does that commitment look like?

“One of the issues with diversity efforts and conversations is they lack focus. They’re all over the place,” Samuel Museus said. “You ask 50 people what that means, and they’ll tell you 50 different things.”

Museus is the director of Indiana University at Bloomington’s Culturally Engaging Campus Environment Project, an initiative created to help colleges attain that focus. Last month, the project released a survey that colleges can use to encourage inclusive campus environments. Colleges that register will administer the survey to students during the 2016-17 academic year, and Museus hopes the results will help those colleges make meaningful changes.

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A psychology instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University says he was forced to choose between his principles and the wishes of his publisher as part of a disagreement about the textbook industry and the role of open educational resources.

Rajiv S. Jhangiani, a faculty member in psychology at Kwantlen Polytechnic in British Columbia, Canada, announced in a blog post last week that he had withdrawn a chapter he had written for Thematic Approaches for Teaching Introductory Psychology, an upcoming anthology of best teaching practices published by Cengage. Jhangiani made the decision after he was asked to make “a series of changes that would make my previously accepted chapter more palatable to the publisher.”

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“The university seeks to foster in all its students lifelong habits of careful observation, critical thinking, creativity, moral reflection and articulate expression.”

“… University fosters intellectual inquiry and critical thinking, preparing graduates who will serve as effective, ethical leaders and engaged citizens.”

“The college provides students with the knowledge, critical-thinking skills and creative experience they need to navigate in a complex global environment.”

These are but a tiny sampling of the mission statements from higher education institutions around the country where critical thinking is a central focus. Indeed, in many ways, critical thinking has become synonymous with higher education. Yet we have not found evidence that colleges or universities teach critical-thinking skills with any success.

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CHICAGO — It’s a familiar question: Do the liberal arts need saving? The answer here Thursday at a conference on the topic — yes — was familiar, too. But keynote speakers at the opening of the conference at the University of Chicago focused less on the question itself than on from what and whom a broad education needs rescuing.

And their concerns went beyond the usual suspects of politicians, administrators and the introduction of identity studies (though ample blame was still reserved for the first two), to both deeper cultural factors and more practical ones — such as how the liberal arts are quantified.

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A couple of months ago, I discovered The Pocket Instructor: Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom. The contributions are from professors across the globe, each one describing an activity designed to engage students in critical thinking about texts of all genres.

Higher education is abuzz with the concept of engaged learning, and yet it can be difficult to develop an effective student-centered pedagogy. The exercises in this book have inspired me to consider my“Great Works of Literature” seminar as a setting to foster intellectual independence.

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On her influential blog and in speeches she gives around the country, Audrey Watters warns that gadgets deserve more scrutiny, and that they often mask what she sees as a political attack on the academy. Watters has known higher education as an insider. She was an almost-Ph.D., having come just chapters away from finishing her dissertation, and she taught for years when she was a graduate student. But she now stands on the outside looking in on the academy and providing her analysis of where ed tech is going. She’s a fiercely independent voice who refuses to accept ads on her blog or do consulting. Her website describes her job description with one word: “troublemaker.”

Just a few weeks ago, she started a podcast called Tech Gypsies. Each week now, she and her partner, who is an advocate for open software standards called open APIs, riff on the latest ed-tech news, and, as always, she calls things as she sees them. After listening to the first few episodes, one thing struck me. She’s deconstructing what she calls a Silicon Valley narrative that she sees as pushing into higher education.

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Students attending Hispanic-Serving Institutions are more likely to stick with their studies than students at all other colleges and universities, even though they may have to stop and start their college careers, a report released Wednesday finds.

¡Excelencia! In Education, a non-profit focused on education and Latinos, analyzed 20 years of funding and student data from institutions with high Latino student populations, also known as Hispanic Serving Institutions or HSIs.

Their findings suggest that Latinos may be doing better when it comes to getting college educations than completion rates suggest. Those who did the analysis also say their findings point to a need to adjust how student success is measured in higher education and how to provide higher educations.

About 60 percent of all Latino college students attend HSIs. An HSI is defined as a public or private not-for-profit, degree-granting institution with 25 percent or more undergraduate, full-time equivalent Hispanic enrollment.

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As one of the advocates for creating separate governing boards for Oregon’s universities, I was pleased to note the apparent success The Oregonian/OregonLive reported about the initial operation of these boards. The article also noted that the Legislature had allocated a “record $665 million in general state support … for the 2015-17 biennium.”

While Oregonians may take some satisfaction in this “record” appropriation to higher education, it may also be useful to put that number into a comparative context. We might ask ourselves: What do other states with similar populations and state budgets spend on public higher education?

The answer is disquieting.

The “Distribution of State General Fund Expenditures” compiled for the most recent year of available data, 2014, by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, provides a comparison of state expenditures.

In 2014, Oregon, with a population of 3.9 million, had total state expenditures of $7.9 billion; it spent $347 million on higher education, less than half of the $885 million it spent on corrections. Oregon ranked 26th in total expenditures, but it ranked 41st in expenditures for higher education and 18th in expenditures for corrections. None of the nine states spending less than Oregon on higher education had populations of more than 1.6 million, and the average population of the nine was only 1 million. Even North Dakota, with a population of about 740,000, spent more on higher education than Oregon. The 17 states that spent more on corrections are all large states, with average populations of about 13.4 million.

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After two years at the University of Richmond, Susannah Haisley felt her education was getting too expensive. So she transferred to Clemson University, in her home state of South Carolina, with a generous scholarship package.

She graduates on Saturday. But in federal databases, her diploma will not count.

The federal graduation rate includes only first-time, full-time students. More than half of all bachelor’s degree recipients attend more than one college, and millions of students who transferred or enrolled part time are excluded every year.

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In late April, Miami University hosted educational consulting firm EducationCounsel for a series of sessions on diversity issues at Miami. More than 200 students, faculty and staff attended over four days of meetings with 15 campus organizations and committees.

The conversations have been a long time coming, said campus officials, and, once EducationCounsel issues a formal report of its findings, changes may be implemented at the university level.

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