The late Notre Dame University president Father Ted Hesburgh advocated for the values that animate liberal education: critical thinking, persuasive communication, insightful judgment, cultural competence. He saw these values as essential to liberate people from inchoate fear, prejudice and the sense of powerlessness that often accompanies social change.

Buoyed by the votes of millions of Americans who never went to college, the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States seems to be a failure for American higher education. President-elect Trump’s rhetoric articulates values that are the antithesis of the liberal education values that Father Hesburgh proclaimed.

How did higher education in one of the most educated nations in human history lose its narrative and become marginalized in the wave of fear and resentment that Trump rode to victory?

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Being a department chair can feel like running a small business, yet most professors aren’t trained for that kind of work. Initial data from a new study of department chairs suggest that most don’t even receive training for their role. Moreover, when professors do receive training to be chairs, advice centers on hard skills that may or may not be relevant rather than on interpersonal and other soft skills that can make or break a departmental climate.

“It’s more ‘how to do a budget sheet’ or ‘where do budgets come from,’ as opposed to how to cut a budget,” said Kelly Ward, the study’s co-lead and chair of educational leadership, sports studies and educational and counseling psychology at Washington State University. “It’s ‘here’s the annual review process,’ as opposed to do ‘How do I deal with someone who’s not performing?’”

Ward said the lack of both initial and ongoing development for chairs is unfortunate and shortsighted, since good chairs contribute to faculty satisfaction and retention throughout the department, and because department chair is an important pathway to other administrative jobs. So if institutions want to attract strong leaders from diverse backgrounds, she said, it’s wise to help them succeed in what is often their first real leadership role.

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When I was a professional-school dean (at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism), we had no choice but to try to define the specific content of an education in our field. The premise was that if you want to practice a profession, there is a body of material you must master, at least in the early part of your education. That perspective led me to urge, this year in The Chronicle Review, that undergraduate colleges move in a similar direction: a core curriculum.

Traditional undergraduate colleges have had the luxury of being far looser in the way they define what it means to be educated. Of course American undergraduate colleges vary greatly. The majority of undergraduates study skills, mainly by taking courses designed to prepare them for specific jobs, in practical-minded fields. But liberal-arts majors, who populate the country’s most renowned and prestigious colleges, usually have a great deal of choice in what they study. Some colleges have no curriculum requirements at all; most impose only a light-duty distribution requirement, perhaps along with a required writing course.

My premise here is that the liberal arts are still essential to an undergraduate education. The explicitly liberal-arts colleges will continue to set the standard for what an undergraduate education means, and so will have a broad effect; and almost no college is so skills-oriented as to be willing to drop any claim that it is providing its students with more than the kind of education one could obtain at a free-standing trade school.

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In her head scarf and T-shirt declaring her undocumented status, Hina Naveed realizes she could be doubly vulnerable if Donald J. Trump carries through with his campaign threats against Muslims and immigrants.

But as the 26-year-old nursing student stood in front of Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan on a cold, blustery Tuesday morning, she struck a defiant tone.

“We as immigrants and children of immigrants are so much more than our legal status,” Ms. Naveed told a small group or reporters and supporters as others watched a live feed on the Dream Action Coalition Facebook page. “We have families, hopes, dreams, and a right to exist in peace. We will not let fear push us back into the shadows.”

Ms. Naveed, who came to the United States from Pakistan when she was 10, is in her final semester of a baccalaureate nursing program at the College of Staten Island, part of the City University of New York. She is already a registered nurse, having taken the state licensing exam after receiving an associate degree in nursing.

Her plans to practice here depend on a program that President-elect Trump vowed during his campaign to eliminate.

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On a recent Saturday, over breakfast, I read The New York Times report on college drinking and sexual assault  —  stories from five universities of alcohol-soaked scenes laying the groundwork for rampant sexual assault. By two hours later, I was living it again.

I live in East Lansing, Mich., home to Michigan State University. Every time there is a big game in town, as there was this particular weekend, when Michigan State played the University of Michigan, thousands of people pour into our small city and drunken revelry ensues. The choice I then face when going to bed is to set multiple fans to drown out the extraordinary noises, or to keep the fans off, so that I will hear if a young woman screams for help.

Last year, I woke from a dead sleep to someone screaming, “Get away from me!” I ran out to our porch to find a young woman being pursued by a man. I yelled to her to come to my porch.

“No,” she answered drunkenly. “It’s cool. I know him.”

I asked her why she was yelling that he should leave her alone. “Because he won’t leave me alone!” she said, as if I was daft.

I asked her again, while he put his hands on her, to please come to my porch. I said I would take her home. She started yelling at both me and him simultaneously. I thought about calling the police, but knew from experience that, by the time they arrived, the drunken couple would be gone.

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Educators and employers agree that critical thinking is one of the essential skills required for postgraduation success. Unfortunately, multiple surveys indicate that employers believe that recent grads do not have the critical-thinking skills those employers expect, although recent grads (surprise!) have a sunnier view of their capabilities.

Whether recent grads are up to standard or not, there’s evidence that the college experience does not do enough to improve those skills, and not a lot of evidence that it does. In “Higher Ed’s Biggest Gamble,” John Schlueter takes this case even further, questioning whether the college experience can even in principle build those skills.

I’m more optimistic. In contexts ranging from higher education to corporate training to test preparation, I’ve helped thousands of learners improve their skills and found nothing unique about that process. While aptitude for critical thinking is clearly not distributed equally in the population, no one is an expert critical thinker from birth. Even the best of us had to learn it somewhere.

That said, it isn’t easy. We can improve critical-thinking skills, in college or elsewhere, but doing so requires a commitment, an understanding of the nature of the task and deep learning experiences.

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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 new 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:

November 29, 2016

Among the latest incidents, a Muslim student at the University of Washingtonsuffered a concussion after someone threw a bottle at her head while she was walking on the campus this month. The student, who was wearing a hijab,reported the incident to the university police but no campus alert was sent out, The Seattle Times reported.

The police told the Times that due to the lack of a description of the suspect and no video evidence, they do not have much to go on. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, disappointed in the police response, is calling on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to get involved.

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“Trigger warnings” have become the latest football in the political playing field of higher education. My own university attracted national attention earlier this fall when an administrator informed all entering undergraduates that the university does “not support so-called ‘trigger warnings.’”

Of course, as many pointed out, academic freedom protects the right to use trigger warnings if professors deem them pedagogically useful. A letter that was meant to affirm freedom in learning and pedagogy, ironically, seemed to deny one part of it.

Much of the dispute about trigger warnings, unfortunately, appears to turn on rather different interpretations of what they are. An earlier article in The Chronicle described trigger warnings as “written or spoken warnings given by professors to alert students that course material might be traumatic for people with particular life experiences.” And when so understood, the case for them can be straightforward.

Consider the easiest case: Sometimes teachers have a legal obligation to give trigger warnings, and ethically it is the right thing to honor that obligation. Those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, are often at risk of debilitating psychological stress if exposed to stimuli — images, words, sounds — that evoke the original trauma. Survivors of sexual assault and military combat may need to be warned when assigned materials include descriptions of triggering events, such as rape or combat.

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By selecting Betsy DeVos to become the next secretary of education, President-elect Donald J. Trump has signaled his commitment to an ambitious plan to reform elementary and secondary education. But after a campaign during which Mr. Trump offered few details on higher education, the pick does little to clarify his vision for that sector.

Ms. DeVos, 58, is a leading player in the national school-choice movement. As chairwoman of the American Federation for Children, she has advocated aggressively for the expansion of charter schools and voucher programs for low-income students. She has served on the boards of several other organizations that have supported school choice, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Great Lakes Education Project, and the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which was established in 2007 by Jeb Bush, one of Mr. Trump’s foes in the Republican primary.

A Michigan native who served two stints as chairwoman of the state’s Republican Party, Ms. DeVos is known also for her philanthropy and support of conservative causes. The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation — which she runs with her husband, Dick DeVos — has been a reliable donor both to community projects and to national think tanks and research groups. (Mr. DeVos, a Republican, failed in a 2006 bid to become governor of Michigan.)

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Leaders of California’s three systems of public higher education sent a joint letter to President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday urging him to allow students who are in the country illegally to continue their educations without fear of deportation.

“These sons and daughters of undocumented immigrants are as American as any other child across the nation” in all but the letter of the law, do not pose a safety threat and have contributed to their communities, wrote University of California President Janet Napolitano, Cal State Chancellor Timothy P. White and Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor-designate of California Community Colleges.

“They represent some of the best our nation has to offer,” the three continued. “They should be able to pursue their dream of higher education without fear of being arrested, deported, or rounded up just for trying to learn…. we implore you to let them know they are valued members of our communities and that they will be allowed to continue to pursue the American dream.”

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