A dean at the University of Baghdad was assassinated along with his family today, as Iraqi academics have increasingly been the targets of attacks in sectarian violence that has gripped the country, the Associated Press reported. The dean, Jassim al-Asadi, a Shiite who led the university’s school of administration and economics, was shot by unidentified gunmen, in a killing thought to be the work of a Sunni hit squad. Hundreds of Iraqi academics have been murdered since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, and thousands more have fled the country, as they have been singled out for what a human-rights group said last summer was “a coordinated liquidation process.”