After a six-month search, Gov. John Hickenlooper has named a former undersecretary of education in the Obama administration as the new head of the Colorado Department of Higher Education.

If confirmed by the state Senate, Kim Hunter Reed will be the department’s first African-American woman* as executive director.

She would start on Feb. 15.

For the past year, Reed was a member of the Obama administration as an undersecretary of education in charge of post-secondary diversity and inclusion. She also led the White House initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, which dates back to 1980 and has been renewed by presidential executive order several times since then. The initiative seeks to strengthen historically black colleges, which serve more than 300,000 students at 102 colleges located in 19 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

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President Donald Trump’s decision to tap the president of Liberty University to lead a task force within the U.S. Department of Education reflects two trends: a backlash against liberal policies at American colleges and universities and a hot new brand in higher education—the conspicuously conservative college.

Liberty, founded in 1971 by the Baptist pastor and conservative political activist Jerry Falwell, boasts of being named the “Most Conservative College in America.” Taking up the conservative mantle of his father, Jerry Falwell Jr. endorsed Trump and, although many conservatives and people associated with the evangelical institution are anti-Trump, promoted a campus environment that discouraged speaking out against the president’s campaign. Falwell even encouraged students to carry weapons in case of a terrorist attack. He will now help identify when the federal government is “overreaching” in its regulation of universities, he told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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The protests on Wednesday, which included fires, several explosions, and smashed windows, were carried live on some national-news networks. Mr. Yiannopoulos’s planned speech was his final appearance scheduled in a controversial campus tour. Read more about what happened.

President Trump is famous for his stream-of-consciousness online observations in the 6 a.m. hour, and many of his tweets do not end up aligning with federal action. But in one speech during his campaign, Mr. Trump did take on a similar issue.

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The American campus today is global. Colleges send their students abroad and welcome the best and brightest from around the world, some one million last year, to their classrooms. Research is international, and universities work with partners around the world to create new programs, degrees, and even institutions. More than half of all colleges include internationalization among their top strategic priorities.

But those globalist attitudes put higher education at odds with the nationalist policies of the new Trump administration. Colleges that have prided themselves on working across borders of country and culture now find themselves dealing with a president who campaigned on a pledge to build a wall to keep out foreigners. As higher education was looking outward, President Trump and his supporters embraced a mantra of “America first.”

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A rally against President Trump’s travel ban motivated students in marginalized groups to take up strategies beyond protests.

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Work in government was something Jacquelyn Gill, an assistant professor of paleoecology and plant biology at the University of Maine at Orono, thought would happen later in her career — after she got tenure and built a large body of research.

But after President Trump’s administration signaled that it would restrict federal agencies’ communication with the public, sending scientists across the country into a frenzy, Ms. Gill said a campaign for public office may be in the cards for her sooner than she had imagined.

As with many scientists, Ms. Gill’s research depends on grants funded by tax dollars. So she’s made a point of being as transparent as possible about her work. She publishes a blog about her research and is an active Twitter user, looking to engage not just the scientific community, but anyone who’s willing to learn.

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WMST-L is like many online discussion groups for scholars. It features many posts in which scholars try to help one another. What would be a good book to add to a syllabus on a given course? What do people know about the content of a forthcoming conference? Who might be interested in joining a panel at a scholarly meeting?

And it was the response to a seemingly innocuous call for panelists and papers that has prompted scholars to quit the Listserv and call for a boycott. Those calling for the boycott say the list, a major forum for communication in women’s studies, gives voice to anti-transgender bigotry.

The call for panelists was for a session for this year’s conference of the National Women’s Studies Association. The session is to be called “Pregnancy Without Women: Representations of Reproduction in Art, Literature, Film and Culture.”

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Macalester College President Brian Rosenberg’s assessment of President Trump’s immigration executive order stands out as unusually sharp, a direct and scathing judgment distinct from the steady stream of critical statements issued by college and university leaders in recent days.

Not every college or university president has the ability to share such a strong set of opinions so clearly — and many might find themselves facing blowback from trustees, donors or politicians if they did. But Rosenberg said he has been in his position long enough, and Macalester’s mission is clear enough, that he was able to take on the highly charged topic in his own voice.

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Faraj Aljarih is a translator, a journalist and a student in a master’s program focused on teaching English to speakers of other languages at Washington State University. He loves the small town of Pullman, Wash., which is about the same size as his hometown of Saluq, Libya, and which he says has been incredibly welcoming and supportive. After the election of President Trump, someone left a bouquet of flowers at the door to the local mosque, and an open house hosted by the mosque in early December was packed with local residents wanting to show their support.

“Everybody was there, everybody on the same message, we are stronger together. This is the message we received,” Aljarih said.

“I feel at home here.”

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When Elizabeth A. Bennion asked students in her political-controversies course to discuss gun control, the conversation could have dissolved into fractious debate. Her class included strong supporters and staunch opponents of gun-control legislation.

Equipping the class with readings and a list of gun-control measures, Ms. Bennion, a political-science professor at Indiana University at South Bend, asked the students to devise a policy. The catch? They were divided into groups that deliberately had both proponents and adversaries of gun control.

When they were forced to seriously consider an opposing view and to listen to their classmates’ concerns, Ms. Bennion says, students were able to move beyond rhetoric and arrive at a reasonable compromise. “What’s amazing,” she says, is “every team ends up with multiple policy changes on which they agree.”

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