Ever since Donald J. Trump was elected president last month, public discussion about the small, fringe movement known as the alt-right has exploded. Its members support a wide range of extremist views, including those that are anti-Semitic, white supremacist, and misogynist, and they supported Mr. Trump enthusiastically.

The handful of academics who study the alt-right are being tapped time and time again to explain where the movement came from and what it means as anxiety builds about the alt-right, which counts white supremacists like Richard B. Spencer among its standard-bearers.

People drawn to the alt-right have for years operated anonymously in obscure corners of the internet. But when Mr. Trump became the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, the movement “was able to really troll its way into mainstream conversation,” says George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.

It gained significant attention in August, when Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, denounced Mr. Trump for having ties to the extreme movement, and when Stephen K. Bannon, a former executive of Breitbart News, was tapped to run Mr. Trump’s campaign. Mr. Bannon has called Breitbart “the platform for the alt-right,” though he denies that the website is in any way associated with the movement.

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The 2016 election of Donald Trump was surprising to a majority of the nation, since many news outlet polls predicted a Hillary Clinton win. But now the nation is looking to Trump to steer the republic — and he has made the direction he has chosen for higher education clearer since the election.

Trump recently appointed Betsy DeVos, billionaire and former chair of Michigan’s Republican Party, as secretary of education. DeVos is a proponent of privatized education, which has some pegging the decision as a defining embodiment of the Trump administration’s attitude toward future education policies.

During Trump’s campaign, he captured his voters by appealing to their concerns about the current economy andpolitical correctness, and by establishing a common enemy — elites who criticized his policies. This, along with tendencies toward anti-intellectualism, ties into how higher education may be affected by Trump’s election and how campus activists at Ithaca College and nationwide will continue to respond to Trump’s policies.

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Alternately goading and mocking the crowd, Richard B. Spencer delivered his white-supremacist message Tuesday evening to a packed room of about 400 people at the Texas A&M University Memorial Student Center.

Forty minutes into his two-hour appearance, a few people surged toward the stage, pushing and shoving, before police officers restored order. The chaos seemed to energize Mr. Spencer, who sprinkled racist, sexist comments with fat jokes aimed at protesters who challenged him.

About a half-dozen supporters, none of whom identified themselves as being connected with Texas A&M, roared their approval when he urged white people to reclaim their identities.

“Have a goddamn identity. Have a sense of yourselves,” he shouted. “Find that shadow self, that European, that hero within you. Be that person!”

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Irene Kinyanguli, a senior at Arizona State University, comes from Tanzania, where her father works in a gas station and her mother is a teacher. “We did have the basics — food, shelter, clothing — we got what we needed,” Kinyanguli says. But an international higher education would have been out of reach without a scholarship.

Kinyanguli is one of more than 100 students at Arizona State on full scholarships funded by the MasterCard Foundation, which to date reports having made pledges of about $828 million for its four-year-old flagship scholarship program. The program, officially launched in 2012, is focused on developing young leaders from disadvantaged backgrounds who come primarily from the African continent.

“If I wake up tomorrow the president of Tanzania,” says Kinyanguli, a public policy major who spent the summer as an intern to Tanzania’s permanent mission to the United Nations, “MasterCard would have played a very big role.”

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or Edward E. Baptist, the scandal was a gift. It had taken the Cornell University historian over a dozen years to produce a study tracing the creation of American capitalism to the expansion of slavery. It took less than one day for a short book review to turn his 400-page narrative into a cause célèbre.

The inciting review appeared in The Economist magazine. It faulted Baptist’s study, The Half Has Never Been Told (Basic Books, 2014), for exaggerating the brutality of bondage based on the questionable testimony of “a few slaves.” Baptist fired back in Politico and The Guardian. The magazine’s critique, he wrote, “revealed just how many white people remain reluctant to believe black people about the experience of being black.” The Economist, widely denounced online, published an apology.

The controversy stimulated both public discussion of slavery and sales of Baptist’s book. Within academe, though, some think it had another effect: to squelch debate over The Half Has Never Been Told. Skeptical scholars may have been wary of criticizing its arguments for fear of being perceived as apologists for slavery.

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One of the women came to the United States on her own when she was 15; others came as children, brought to this country by their parents. They are known as Dreamers, so-called because they meet the requirements of the Dream Act, which was established to help immigrants taken to this country illegally as children. They have grown up thinking of America as home, but all are concerned about their future following the election of Donald J. Trump as president.

In 2012 the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy gave young immigrants of their status the ability to get driver’s licenses, work legally, and attend college. President-elect Trump said on the campaign trail that he would overturn all of President Obama’s executive actions, and deport all people in the country illegally.

The five women interviewed here all know that Trinity Washington University and TheDream.US scholarship fund will continue to support them. They share their thoughts as they wait to see what the new administration will do.

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Inevitably, a senior student-affairs administrator at a large institution will deal with the extreme cases. These are the ones that can’t be described, even in veiled or disguised terms, because they are so sensitive and sometimes so unique that any discussion would carry identifiers. These are cases in which the next step for the student is usually prison or death.

Of the students in those situations with whom I have worked, some have, indeed, gone to prison or died. Some I have lost track of. But some of them have recovered and gone on to be fine. I sometimes bump into them around town, or they send me the occasional email to tell me they are okay, maybe many years later. It is impossible to know what real impact you had on those who went on to be OK, just as it is impossible not to wonder what you could have done for those who didn’t, or those whose fate is unknown.

These students might be, or might have been, in a bad drug scene. They might have become enmeshed in some fraud scheme. They might be on the verge of self-starvation, or near suicide following a trauma. They might be going through an identity crisis. Their family-support network may have forsaken them. In the worst cases, one or both parents are their tormentors, or worse, their mentors in crime. They may simply be kids who are on a mission to demonstrate that the system has failed them, and that no one can help them or will even support them. They can be very persistent in their quest to make their point. It is our job to prove them wrong.

One may legitimately wonder why college student-affairs offices, which may go by other names, must deal with these cases in the first place. The problems these students face are far bigger than what even those institutions with the best resources are equipped to deal with. Many of these students should not even be in college — they should be dealing with their nonacademic issues so that they can come back strong and fulfill their academic potential. But they are in college, and sometimes managing to maintain satisfactory academic standing. The student-affairs office is often a small but crucial part of the solution.

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Some professors were troubled by Professor Watchlist when it debuted last month, viewing it as a serious threat to academic freedom. Yet others saw the site — which names and monitors professors “who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom” (the “promoting anti-American values” criterion has since been removed) — as more annoying than dangerous. Some submitted complaints about Indiana Jones, Professor Plum or other fictional academics, for example. Others joked they wished they’d been named, saying they’d wear it as a badge of honor.

But now Professor Watchlist has met its match in a new blog, Watchlist Redux, where being named is intended as a badge of honor.

“This site is dedicated to showcasing and championing courageous thinkers and teachers — and at the same time saying ‘shame, shame, shame’ to those who would insinuate that these people are dangerous,” reads Redux. “Those of us who decided to start this site have taken — sometimes taught — courses in logic. We know bad logic when we see it, such as this: Radical equals bad equals dangerous. But [Professor Watchlist] won’t tell you what they mean by ‘radical.’ They trade in innuendo.”

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Hundreds of people protested a white nationalist’s speaking engagement at the Texas A&M University campus Tuesday night.

KBTX-TV reported police had to break up a confrontation among attendees of the speech at the Memorial Student Center and said other protesters lined the walls with fists raised.

Hundreds gathered at nearby Kyle Field to hear music and speeches highlighting diversity and unity as a counter to Spencer.

Performers and speakers were to include John Sharp, chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, Michael K. Young, president of Texas A&M University, football players Trevor Knight and Myles Garrett, and numerous student speakers.

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Iam one of many in academe who eagerly read The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, drawn in by the promise of the book’s subtitle. The frantic pace of academic life drives us to distraction — deadlines, teaching demands, information overload, days of back-to-back meetings, the increasingly competitive and resource-squeezed nature of our work.

As an associate director of faculty development at Emory University, I am always on the lookout for antidotes to that counterproductive frenzy. In The Slow Professor, published earlier this year, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber encourage us to simplify our work habits, to allow scholarship time to be fruitful and rewarding, to be more “contemplative” than “productive.” Slowing down, they write, allows for periods of rest and perspective, and it lets scholarship “ripen” in the context of community rather than competition.

It sounds luxurious, doesn’t it? Time to think. But as I read, I wondered: Are there unintended consequences?

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