College with today's extremes forms consensus (5)
I believe the answer is:
unity
'consensus' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'college with today's extremes' is the wordplay.
'college' becomes 'uni' (short for university).
'with' is a charade indicator (letters next to each other).
'extremes' means to remove the middle letters.
'today' with its middle removed is 'ty'.
'uni'+'ty'='UNITY'
'forms' is the link.
(Other definitions for unity that I've seen before include "A single whole" , "One of the Mitfords" , "Number one" , "Accord" , "Completeness (with nothing wanting)" .)