On the other side are students who say they feel threatened like never before by Trump's campaign rhetoric and early White House actions. On the sprawling Ohio State University campus, president Michael V. Drake says that since November, he's been meeting in his office every other week with one Buckeye group or another anxious about the future – from undocumented immigrants to African-Americans to LGBT students.

"What's different this time is that they're seeing, for the first time in my lifetime, the fear that there will be less toleration, less support, less acknowledgment of their personal circumstances in the broader society than they would have expected a year or five years ago," says Drake. "Those are discussions that I hadn't had in my career before.

The raised temperatures have resulted in highly combustible campuses. An uptick in hate speech on campuses caused Michigan State University to ban whiteboards from dorm-room doors beginning next fall. At Texas State University, anti-Semitic flyers have made the rounds four times since November.

Outside agitators at the University of California, Berkeley in February, led to the cancellation of an appearance by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. And at Middlebury College in Vermont, opposition to a speech by controversial social scientist Charles Murray, author of the 'The Bell Curve,' a 1994 book that suggested a link between socio-economic success, intelligence, and race, ended with a politics professor in the hospital after being attacked by a protestor. She was later released.

"I would tell you that what happened at Middlebury wasn't about Charles Murray," says Karen Gross, former president of Southern Vermont College. "He becomes like a big, anti-Lady Liberty statue, the symbol of discrimination in America. He's done many speeches on ‘The Bell Curve' and this hasn't happened. He's a target, not because of what he wrote, but because of where he was at this moment in history.