The University of Massachusetts at Amherst quickly scuttled today a chaplain’s suggestion that students could earn academic credit by campaigning for Barack Obama. According to an Associated Press report, Chaplain Kent Higgins sent an e-mail message to students last week urging them to “activate” themselves in this fall’s campaign, saying an unnamed “sponsor” in the history department would offer a two-credit independent study to those who would canvass or volunteer for Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee.

The university disavowed that program today, saying officials had envisioned that the students would be engaged in nonpartisan work, such as get-out-the vote campaigns. But officials changed their minds after seeing a portion of Mr. Higgins’s e-mail message, a spokesman, Ed Blaguszewski, told the AP. “The history-department chair feels that what they were told was misleading,” Mr. Blaguszewski said, “and then when the details of this emerged through the correspondence, they said, ‘Hey, this is not appropriate and it’s not going to happen.’”

The department’s chairwoman, Audrey Alstadt, told the news agency that the department did not “engage in or sponsor partisan political activity,” adding: “We certainly do not give academic credit for participation in partisan politics.”

Mr. Higgins said he had never intended for the program to be limited to supporters of Mr. Obama. Despite the opinions expressed in his e-mail message, he said, he would also have been open to students who wanted to canvass for the Republican nominee, John McCain. —Charles Huckabee