When Juan S. Muñoz speaks about his role and responsibilities as top diversity officer at Texas Tech University, his conversation touches on facets of the university that range from its long-term strategic plan to its recent ascent to become a top-tier research institution.

“Whether it’s fees, institutional funding, retention and graduation goals, strategic enrollment and recruitment, finance, students or academic affairs and academic issues, the chief diversity officer has been invited to serve on the very highest policy discussion at Texas Tech,” said Muñoz, whose official title is senior vice president for institutional diversity, equity, and community engagement.

Muñoz has plenty of company among his peers, according to a new survey from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, or NADOHE. The survey found that 77 percent of the 196 respondents are considered part of the executive / administrative staff within their institutions. “That means more than three quarters are at the center of decision making at some level that’s in the executive ranks of the institution,” said Archie W. Ervin, president of NADOHE.

“That’s what we want,” Ervin said. “We want to be in the position of making a difference and having an impact.”

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Higher education was already reeling from a tumultuous 2015-16 academic year. Serious campus climate issues about race and class surfaced across the country in the form of student, and even employee, protests. Those protests came as a surprise to many in higher education who have worked hard to build inclusive communities on campuses. But they nonetheless clearly demonstrated that colleges and universities still have a long way to go.

Then last month’s presidential election sent another shock wave across higher education. It was a reminder that many experts, the news media, some elected officials and, to a certain extent, the highly educated elite are still “missing something.”

That something is a better understanding of what’s truly going on in our country, on our campuses and in citizens,’ students’ and employees’ lives.

If we in higher education want to have a deeper and clearer understanding of why there is considerable unrest on our campuses and across our nation, we must grasp a fundamental attribute of democracy that we seem to have lost track of: opinions being heard and counting.

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WASHINGTON — With the overall number of public high school graduates in the United States expected to plateau over the next several years but at the same time become more diverse, colleges and universities must do more to enroll students of color and ensure their success.

Doing so, said  Joe Garcia — president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, or WICHE — is not just a matter of increasing equity and opportunity.

“This is a matter of economic competitiveness and sustainability of the economic recovery,” Garcia said. And for colleges and universities that face declining enrollment and have excess capacity, he said: “This is a matter of survival.”

“They need to figure out how to reach out to these populations,” Garcia said.

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Organizations that track hate crimes have seen a rise in reports since the presidential election. The Southern Poverty Law Center has released two reports on hate-motivated incidents since the election. The first reveals that the center documented nearly 900 such incidents, many on college campuses, in the 10 days following the election of Donald J. Trump as president.

The second reveals that in a survey of 10,000 educators, largely at elementary and secondary schools, 90 percent said that their institution’s climate had been negatively affected by the election.

Many of the episodes, on campuses and off, involved references to President-elect Donald J. Trump. Here’s the latest:

December 6, 2016

Racist and anti-Semitic posters continue to crop up on campuses across the country. The latest is the University of Chicago, where fliers featuring a photo of Adolf Hitler and the words “No Degeneracy, No Tolerance, Hail Victory” were found on Monday. The Chicago Tribune reported that a neo-Nazi group had taken credit for the posters.

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Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on power poses has been viewed 37 million times. For comparison purposes, Kanye West’s video “Famous,” which features naked celebrities in bed together, has been viewed 21 million times. Cuddy’s talk is the second-most-watched video in TED history, behind only Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” — and, at its current pace, will eventually take over the No. 1 spot, thereby making power poses the most popular idea ever on the most popular idea platform.

The talk led to a book, Presence, which was published a year ago by Little, Brown and became a best seller. For the promotional tour, Cuddy, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, popped up on an impressive list of television shows, including Good Morning America, Today, Morning Joe, and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. She received the sort of publicity roll-out usually reserved for celebrities. And why not? Cuddy had become a celebrity in her own right. In Presence, she writes about getting recognized in airports and snapping selfies with fans. They spot her and immediately strike a power pose — feet apart, hands on hips, head thrown back. “Hey! It’s TED girl!” they cry.

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The Debt Collective, an activist group and offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, is calling on the Obama administration to provide debt relief for student loan borrowers who say they were defrauded by for-profit institutions before President Obama leaves office next year.

The organization posted a video Monday of Pam Hunt, a debt striker and former Corinthian Colleges student, who appealed to Obama directly to forgive the debt of former students alleging fraud by shuttered for-profits Corinthian, ITT Technical Institute and The Art Institutes. Hunt and other debt strikers say their best chance of debt relief is in the next two months — before the administration of Republican Donald Trump takes over in January.

“We’re appealing to you this one last time. This is, like, our last chance to get the justice we deserve,” she said. “Please forgive these debts before you leave office.”

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Ibram X. Kendi hugged his wife, climbed to the stage at the National Book Awards, and turned to address the black-tie-clad literati gathered at Cipriani Wall Street, an event space in New York. His Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books) had just won the prize for nonfiction, and he acknowledged, among others, his 6-month-old daughter, Imani, whose name, in Swahili, means “faith.”

“Her name of course has a new meaning for us as the first black president is set to leave the White House and as a man who was emphatically endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan is about to enter,” said Kendi. “I just want to let everyone know that I spent years looking at the absolute worst of America. … But in the end, I never lost faith … that the terror of racism would one day end.”

Winning a National Book Award would be a career capstone for almost any scholar. For Kendi, it’s all the sweeter coming so early in his career. Stamped From the Beginning is only his second book, and the assistant professor of African-American history at the University of Florida is only 34, the youngest person to win the award in nonfiction in more than 30 years.

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David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, recently spoke with The Chronicle about his advocacy on behalf of undocumented immigrant students and what advice he has for new college presidents.

Transcript coming soon.

Watch the video here.

An Ohio State University administrator has set off a controversy — and is facing calls for her dismissal — after calling for compassion for Abdul Razak Ali Artan. On Monday, Artan drove into a group of pedestrians outside a classroom building, got out of his car and stabbed several people with a butcher knife before he was shot and killed. Officials have said he may have been inspired by terrorist groups.

Stephanie Clemons Thompson, assistant director of residence life, posted a message to Facebook (restricted to those to whom she was connected and asking that it not be shared) reacting to the way some have been posting images of Artan’s dead body and celebrating his death.

Her post was shared and quickly spread to people who were offended by it, many of whom have shared it widely, calling for her to be fired. Thompson has deleted the post, gone silent on social media and not responded to press requests for interviews.

More than 1,100 people have signed an online petition demanding Thompson’s dismissal.

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ada Merghani ended up getting way more attention than she had sought.

In August, just before Donald Trump spoke at her campus, the junior at the University of North Carolina Wilmington wrote a Facebook post telling her friends to expect to see her at the event. “Y’all are not prepared for what I’m about to do,” wrote the 19-year-old gay-rights and Muslim activist. “All I can say is pray I make it out of this alive.”

The fallout from her post included a precautionary visit from the U.S. Secret Service, barbed coverage by the conservative publication The College Fix, and a scathing online columnabout her from an unlikely source, one of her institution’s own faculty members.

The op-ed’s author, Michael S. Adams, a professor of criminology and prominent conservative commentator, dismissed Ms. Merghani as a “queer Muslim social justice warrior” in search of victim status and attention. Among the other digs he got in, he said Ms. Merghani “lacks intellectual coherence” and likened her to Gerald Ford’s attempted assassin, Lynette Alice (Squeaky) Fromme, “minus the handgun and resolve.”

Ms. Merghani did not respond to The Chronicle’s requests for comment. In a post on the social-media channel Tumblr, however, she described being barraged with online threats and hateful statements as a result of the column. She complained that the university has done little to protect her from two years’ worth of efforts “to make my life hell,” by Mr. Adams (who has never had her in a class.) She later told local journalists that she plans to transfer at the end of the current semester.

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