We all know that a syllabus has to convey information and set an open and inviting tone. But no matter how skillfully and engagingly it does those things, to be truly effective, a syllabus has to move beyond the basics and embody the actual substance of the course.

In the two previous installments of DIY Syllabus, I considered what a syllabus is (and isn’t) and the types of things that should go into (and stay out of) a course syllabus. In this latest installment, I’d like to consider how we can use our syllabi to do more than merely convey information or set the tone for the course. To be sure, those are essential functions of a syllabus, and it’s important to do them well.

But stopping there keeps the syllabus firmly within the realm of the transactional, when what we’re really after in our teaching is the transformational. How is the course going to excite, interest, challenge, and transform its participants? What is it — specifically — that students are being invited into? It turns out that we’re asking quite a lot of the syllabus. We’re asking it to become an effective entry point into a course that we hope will be empowering and transformative for our students’ learning.

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It may have surprised some observers that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has no track record in higher-education policy. Instead, Ms. DeVos has made a name for herself as an advocate for charter schools and vouchers that allow public dollars to be spent on private schools. She is also well known for her philanthropy and support of conservative causes.

Ms. DeVos’s lack of higher-education experience isn’t unprecedented. In fact, during the relatively short history of the cabinet position, most who have led the U.S. Department of Education have been steeped in the world of school, rather than higher-education, policy. (Mr. Trump might actually have gone in the other direction: Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, said that he had been offered the job but had turned it down.)

Experts say that the public usually tends to care more about what happens in schools than on campuses. Part of the reason: Most Americans go to elementary and secondary school, said Matthew M. Chingos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who researches education policy, while many fewer people end up in college.

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When it comes to gaining tenure, are minority professors held to higher — or even shifting — standards, compared to their white colleagues? That’s the question asked by numerous challenges to negative tenure decisions nationwide in recent years. It’s also the premise behind a new book that’s attracting attention for articulating what some see as a longstanding but heretofore unspoken rule of academe.

Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure(University of North Carolina Press), was edited by Patricia A. Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She begins the volume with her own story: she was initially denied tenure at her own institution at the provost’s level with no prior warning, even after she won the approval of her faculty peers. She and colleagues spent the Thanksgiving holiday of that year scouring the faculty manual about what they could have missed in her application, and communications with colleagues turned up a similar cases involving scholars of color elsewhere — including that of Andrea Smith, then of the University of Michigan. Smith, who has said she is Cherokee (something that has since been disputed), held positions in the American culture program and women’s studies, but only the former recommended her for tenure, so she lost her bid to stay at Michigan. Due in part to her popularity with students and her credentials, the case drew national attention — and Matthew’s.

“It was the beginning of my understanding about how capricious the academy can be,” Matthew says. “[Smith] had authored two books and co-authored one, with her more recent book due out from Duke University Press. She had edited or coedited three books and two special issues of journals in her field. She matched this scholarly output with the kind of service and activism that faculty of color regularly take on. I couldn’t keep track of all she had done, even though it was right there in print for me to read.”

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A new website is asking students and others to “expose and document” professors who “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

The site, called Professor Watchlist, is not without precedent — predecessors include the now-defunct NoIndoctrination.org, which logged accounts of alleged bias in the classroom. There’s also David Horowitz’s 2006 book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. But such efforts arguably have new meaning in an era of talk about registering certain social groups and concerns about free speech.

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A door in the basement of George Washington University’s newest residence hall, still smelling of paint, is unremarkable. It has no sign.

Inside, it’s packed with food. Shelves are stocked with instant oatmeal, boxes of polenta, plastic bags of pasta, salt and pepper. Dairy and produce fill three refrigerators. A cardboard cutout of a hippo, the unofficial mascot of GW, greets visitors near the door: “Welcome to The Store!” it says in a thought bubble.

This isn’t technically a store, though, because students don’t have to pay for these items. It’s a food pantry for hungry students, and it’s one of 395 member food banks of the College and University Food Bank Alliance. Four years ago, when the organization began, it only had 15 members. The group got a significant jump in membership this time last year, when it hit 300 members.

Students at the GW store must sign out with the number of items they take, which is usually not a lot. One took three apples and a muffin. Another grabbed frozen ravioli and a roll of paper towels. But all students who come to The Store remained anonymous.

One left a note on a brown paper bag: “I just want to say thank you. I walked in and I felt terrified. I cried at how many options there are, and how much people must care to do this. Bless you all.”

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The number of international students at U.S. colleges and universities has hit a record high, but experts suggest that Donald Trump’s election may slow the growth of this market — and threaten the estimated $35 billion it adds annually to the American economy.

For the first time, the number of international students at U.S. universities exceeded a million last year, according to new figures from the Institute of International Education. The total of about 1,044,000 was up 7 percent from 2014-15.
China and India remained the top two sources of international students, but Saudi Arabia —  bolstered by a government-funded scholarship program — passed South Korea to pull into third on the list.

After a caustic presidential campaign and Trump’s vows to limit immigration, build a Mexican border wall and force Muslims to register, some in higher education are bracing for a backlash among students who see the United States as a less-welcoming destination.

If the rise of post-Brexit anti-foreigner attacks in Great Britain is any indication, they say, Trump’s presidency —  and its possible policy implications—could lead international students to look elsewhere for their educations.

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Many years ago, I was an undergraduate sitting in a large amphitheater at Boston University, waiting for my new psychology class to begin. The professor, Catherine Caldwell-Harris, bustled in and took the stage. She was younger than most of my other professors, and had a great deal of energy — it was infectious and almost dizzying. Students watched with wide eyes as she paced the stage, extolling the virtues of self-directed learning and passionately railing against doing work for work’s sake.

Rather than give specific assignments, she said that each of us would produce three projects — of our own design, on topics of our choice — that would become our “portfolio.” Back then, I was one of those stick-in-the-mud students who just wanted to know what I had to do to get my A, so naturally I found the idea of doing three … somethings … to be worryingly amorphous. I fretted for a while, and then got to work.

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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 recorded more than 700 incidents of hate or violence against minorities, 16 percent of them on college campuses, even though colleges are perceived as liberal oases. Many of the episodes, on campuses and off, involved references to President-elect Donald J. Trump. Here’s the latest:

November 22, 2016

Arizona State University has joined a string of colleges that have been plastered with racist or threatening fliers. A university official told The Arizona Republiche had seen one poster that said, “The age of white guilt is over!” He called it “saddening.”

The university said in a statement that student safety is a priority and that “ASU is a place where open debate can thrive and honest disagreements can be explored, but not when hateful rhetoric is used.”

Four University of Kansas cheerleaders were suspended from their squad after a photo captioned “KKK go trump” was posted to a female cheerleader’s Snapchat account, according to the Lawrence Journal-World. The other three cheerleaders, who are men, were pictured in the offending Snapchat wearing sweaters with the letter “K” for Kansas on the front.

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When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case Fisher vs. the University of Texas in July, university admissions officers cheered the affirmation of including race and ethnicity as admissions criteria when narrowly tailored to the institution’s mission. Despite the positive decision for affirmative action, however, university leaders are facing another challenge: making sure they have the right diversity practices in place to support the students they admit. Colleges and universities still have plenty of work to do to encourage students to pursue high-needs fields, like STEM and the biomedical sciences, where diversity is urgently needed.

In addition, universities continue to struggle with faculty diversity, which studies have shown is important not just for excellence in teaching and research but also for the overall campus climate. All the more reason, then, for us to redouble our efforts in researching and sharing effective practices for improving campus diversity — and identifying ineffective practices that we should stop.

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This fall LinkedIn introduced a new product that brings together courses from Lynda.com, an online-training company it purchased last year, and LinkedIn’s rich data on job needs and job seekers. LinkedIn Learning, as it’s called, essentially provides a recommendation engine for Lynda.com courses and video segments. As described in a company blog post: “We have a unique view of how jobs, industries, organizations and skills evolve over time. From this, we can identify the skills you need and deliver expert-led courses to help you obtain those skills. We’re taking the guesswork out of learning.”

That’s a grand vision. To LinkedIn’s credit, the company has not fallen for the “we’re going to displace higher education” fantasies that powered the worst of the MOOC craze. But it’s still stuck on the idea that idealized chunks of content are equivalent to learning.

Yes, the primary audience for LinkedIn Learning is job seekers and corporate trainers. But those of us in higher education should care. The challenges of better preparing students for their working lives and filling in skill gaps are ones that colleges and universities are also trying to meet, often through graduate schools or continuing-education departments. Lifelong learning is particularly important to alumni.

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