Scores of presidents of public and private colleges across the nation have sent a letter to President-elect Donald Trump calling on him to “seek common ground, not hostility, partnership, not conflict” as he rises to the nation’s top leadership role amid a decline in civility.

The appeal comes after several weeks of widespread demonstrations protesting Trump’s election and mixed public responses to news reports of the names of some political and social figures Trump is said to be considering for keys roles in his presidential administration to begin in January 2017.

“As do you, we ‘seek common ground, not hostility, partnership, not conflict,’” said the letter to Trump from academic leaders. “In order to maintain the trust required for such productive engagement, it is essential that we immediately reaffirm the core values of our democratic nation: human decency, equal rights, freedom of expression, and freedom from discrimination,” the letter continued.

“As college and university presidents, we commit ourselves to promoting these values on our campuses and in our communities, and we stand alongside the business, nonprofit, religious, and civic leaders who are doing the same in organizations large and small,” the letter continued.

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My students can’t write a clear sentence to save their lives. It’s my job to help them change that.

I have taught writing for 10 years. Much like Joseph R. Teller, whose October essay criticizing how we teach composition riled many a writing instructor, I have “experimented with different assignments, activities, readings, [and] approaches to commenting on student work.” But my results have been very different from his. Rather than seeing my students fail repeatedly, I’m seeing more and more of them succeed.

Their success may stem, in part, from a mantra I’ve taken to heart: If students consistently fail at something in my classroom, it’s not their fault. It’s mine.

I teach at a community college in Texas, in a city where almost 20 percent of the citizens live below the poverty line. More than 30 percent of children in the city live in poverty. About 70 percent of my college’s students take classes only part-time, and 73 percent entered this year taking at least one developmental course. Most of them have lived and been educated in a system that has overwhelmingly failed them due to a focus on testing rather than learning. Most have taken time away from education to work, so what writing skills they did possess have probably atrophied.

Teller argued that the three pillars of composition pedagogy — that courses should “focus on process, not product,” that students should write on “complex issues rather than imitate rhetorical modes,” and that reading and writing should be combined in the same course — don’t actually work. But I find they do, and I’m not alone in thinking so.

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A stark divide separated how white people voted in this presidential election: whether or not they had earned a college degree.

Two-thirds of white working-class voters backed Donald J. Trump. Among white voters with college degrees, his support dropped by 18 percentage points, a gap more than twice as large as those seen in election results for his two immediate Republican predecessors.

To be clear, Mr. Trump’s share of this part of the electorate was not far off the marks set by the two previous Republican presidential candidates: Fifty-six percent of white college graduates voted for Mitt Romney in 2012; four years earlier, 51 percent did so for John McCain. For Mr. Trump, it was 49 percent, a narrow edge over the 45 percent who supported his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Where Mr. Trump overperformed was among white voters who didn’t graduate from college.

The intersection of race and education level raises questions: What explains the educational gap among white voters? How do colleges moderate or harden white students’ views on race, class, and identity? And what are the hazards for academe going forward?

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An attempt to update an Ontario university’s sexual assault policy has led to a months-long debate between administrators, faculty and students over whether the new policy should acknowledge that a rape culture exists on campus.

If Carleton University, the institution at the center of the debate, were to include the reference to rape culture in its policy, it would be one of just a handful of institutions in Canada to do so. In the United States, such policies may be even rarer. While many colleges do define the term in their educational and prevention efforts, a review by Inside Higher Ed of sexual misconduct policies at more than 60 U.S. colleges and universities found no references to rape culture, and researchers and advocates interviewed for this article said they could not recall any colleges defining rape culture in their policies.

“The definition needs to be there,” Anna Voremberg, managing director of End Rape On Campus, said. “It helps to have parameters for the conversation you’re having on campus, so defining rape culture is important.”

The movement in recent years — in both the United States and Canada — to hold colleges more accountable for how they investigate and adjudicate allegations of sexual assault has led to many changes on campuses. Most of these changes have been on the policy front, with institutions adopting affirmative consent policies, changing the standard of proof they use in campus hearings and pledging to complete sexual assault investigations within a 60-day time frame.

But advocates have also asked for changes more symbolic in nature that, they say, would signal to victims of sexual assault that colleges are taking the matter seriously and acknowledging the broader social issues that surround sexual violence both on and off campus.

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Xavier Maciel, a first-year transfer student at Pomona College, was in a crowded room as the results of the presidential election came in. He was born in the United States, but his parents and sister were not, and he stared at the television screen in disbelief as Hillary Clinton conceded to Donald J. Trump.

While campaigning, Mr. Trump was particularly combative in his rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, pledging to deport millions and to eliminate the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or DACA, which gives some undocumented young people two years to work and live in the United States without fear of deportation.

The day after the election, faculty members at Pomona circulated a letter proposing that the California college become a sanctuary campus — an idea similar to a sanctuary city, where officials limit cooperation with immigration authorities’ deportation efforts.

In the week following the election, people at more than 50 other colleges have devised similar petitions, according to a spreadsheet Mr. Maciel created to track them. On the list are, among others, Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and Brown University, where Naoko Shibusawa, an associate professor of history and American studies, thought of the idea after a student came to her office crying inconsolably the day after the election.

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President-Elect Donald Trump has released his plans for his first 100 days in office. After outlining proposals for term limits, a trade war, and mass deportations, the plan includes the following paragraph on education policy:

School Choice And Education Opportunity Act. Redirects education dollars to give parents the right to send their kid to the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of their choice. Ends common core, brings education supervision to local communities. It expands vocational and technical education, and make 2 and 4-year college more affordable.

The details are far from clear, but it appears that his education policy will focus on three areas:

1. School choice

Trump has the right instinct on school choice, but if he is planning to promote a national voucher program, then he’s going about it the wrong way. He has previously pledged to dedicate $20 billion in federal funds to school choice policies, and stated that he would “give states the option to allow these funds to follow the student to the public or private school they attend” as well as using federal carrots to get states to expand choice policies even further. Expanding educational opportunity is admirable, but using the federal government to do so is misguided. As David Boaz explained more than a decade ago in the Cato Handbook for Congress, the case against federal involvement in education:

is not based simply on a commitment to the original Constitution, as important as that is. It also reflects an understanding of why the Founders were right to reserve most subjects to state, local, or private endeavor. The Founders feared the concentration of power. They believed that the best way to protect individual freedom and civil society was to limit and divide power. Thus it was much better to have decisions made independently by 13–or 50–states, each able to innovate and to observe and copy successful innovations in other states, than to have one decision made for the entire country. As the country gets bigger and more complex, and especially as government amasses more power, the advantages of decentralization and divided power become even greater.

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If much of the anger that helped boost Donald Trump to his victory in the presidential election is due to globalisation and falling living standards, then higher education may be vital to reversing it. That was one of the conclusions that could be drawn following a talk by Daniel Greenstein, director of postsecondary success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who was speaking at a US conference a few hours after Hillary Clinton conceded the presidential race.

Dr Greenstein told the conference of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning in Chicago that the election had shown that “the gulf between the haves and have-nots is real and it is getting wider and it is brimming with fear and anger and resentment”.

That has occurred as “the bridge to opportunity that is or should be US higher education has become narrower” he said. “It’s harder to navigate. The toll for too many is far too high.”

Unless attention continues to be paid to fixing those problems, he said, they “will leave our economy seriously short of what our economy needs to compete…higher education is something that will contribute to the nation’s success or lack of success”.

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“Do parties or social situations ever make you uncomfortable?”

“How would you categorize your stress level?”

“How often would you say you feel overwhelming anger or irritability?”

These are some of the questions that greet students at Colorado State University when they log in to the university’s new online well-being portal, YOU@CSU. Created through a partnership with Grit Digital Health and officially launched this semester, YOU@CSU acts as a virtual counselor, asking students questions about their mental and physical well-being and directing them to the appropriate campus resources.

The platform is one of several digital tools — from online portals to text messaging services and smartphone apps — that colleges are using to provide wider access to mental health services as campus health centers struggle to meet the rising counseling demands of students. Use of what’s called telepsychology for mental health services is increasing, according a survey released earlier this year by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. In the 2013-14 academic year, 6.6 percent of counseling centers reporting using telepsychology in some form. The following year, the figure was up to 9.1 percent.

“One of the things really concerning folks at university counseling centers is the growing demand for student counseling services,” Anne Hudgens, executive director of the Colorado State University Health Network, said. “It’s really hard to meet that demand and to sort through who has a critical issue and who is looking for help and support for more standard issues of stress and anxiety. We believe the help-seeking behavior of this generation is a positive thing, but we knew we had to find a way to get upstream.”

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I will never be likable.

I learned this several years ago at a dinner party celebrating the publication of a senior scholar’s magnum opus. The guest list included four male scholars and their wives, plus my husband and me. I was keenly aware of being the only female scholar present at the party, as well as the youngest person in the room.

After dinner, when all the other wives went into the kitchen to clear up, my husband winked at me as he joined them and I retired to the living room with the men. I was having fun, and perhaps a bit too much wine, and after a while, I turned to the distinguished elder scholar next to me and asked why a peer of mine at another institution had gotten tenure with so few publications.

“What was that about?” I asked.

The white-haired gentleman smiled amiably and answered, “He’s just so damn likable!”

Suddenly I was stone-cold sober. I was grateful, in a way, that my colleague had said it out loud. There is no pure academic meritocracy, and even philosophical thinkers resort to fuzzy concepts such as likability to tip the scales in favor of some over others. The young, white, straight cisgender man we were discussing could be charming indeed. But in this context, likability meant that my older, white, straight, cisgender male colleague felt comfortable in his presence. The young man was presumably likable, in part, because he reminded the old man of himself, which made the world seem stable, the norm normal and the future a steady stream forward from the past. Promoting one affirmed the other.

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In my previous blog post, I noted that marginalized scholars cannot rely on being likable to excel in academe — that is, we cannot expect our colleagues to hire us, grant us tenure, promote us or otherwise advance us professionally because we remind them of themselves. Marginalized scholars cannot depend on the habit of academics who reproduce themselves. Instead, I offered advice for my fellow unlikable and marginalized academics to succeed on their own accord.

In this essay, I will provide suggestions on editing one’s scholarly writing. Scholars who look, think and/or write like the dominant academics in their field often have support and mentoring to help them move from ideas to publications. For the rest of us, the path can be treacherous. Editing is one vital part of the journey. There are several different types or layers of editing, each with a role to play.

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