If you think lotteries have run their course as a source of higher-education revenue, maybe it's time to consider another solution: camel wrestling.

Haşmet Işık, mayor of Yatağan in the Muğla province of Turkey, says his town has been staging camel-on-camel bouts, and the money is good.

"We are going to use the money raised from the wrestling competitions to build a vocational school of higher education in our district," the mayor tells the English-language Hurriyet Daily News. "The school will be completed in a year, and 1,000 students will be able to receive an education there."

Camel wrestling, long a tradition of the nomadic Yoruk people, attracts both domestic and foreign tourists, who bring picnic lunches and watch the matches from truck beds, tugboats, and tractors. The best part, says one of the organizers, is that the sport is much more humane than bullfights in Spain....

Here at Tweed we receive lots of press releases announcing Really Big Events that are happening on college campuses — so many that sometimes we don't actually get around to reading them until after the events have passed. Occasionally this fills us with regret.

Take, for example, this release, which landed in our e-mailbox last Friday (italics supplied for emphasis):

We knew that colleges...

January was a busy month for Harriet Richardson Ames. The retired schoolteacher from New Hampshire celebrated her 100th birthday, graduated from college, and died — all in three weeks' time.

Her daughter told the Associated Press that earning a diploma from Keene State College was Ms. Ames's final goal. "She had what I call a 'bucket list,' and that was the last thing on it," Marjorie Carpenter said.

Ms. Ames, who turned 100 on January 2, had been in hospice care. She earned her teaching certificate at Keene in 1931, and went on to teach at a one-room school and then taught first-graders. She continued to take classes until her retirement in 1971, but with her eyesight failing she stopped. Ms. Ames was never sure whether she had enough credits for her bachelor's degree in education.

Officials at Keene State got wind of her story a couple years ago when she was interviewed for a film a...

Bill Martin is a philosophy professor at DePaul University who has written a book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation.

Bill Martin Jr., who died in 2004, was a children's author who wrote Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? The men are not related.

Last week, the two Martins were briefly fused into one persona by Pat Hardy, a member of the Texas State Board of Education, who moved that Bill Martin be removed from a suggested revision of the state's third-grade social-studies curriculum. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram quoted Ms. Hardy as saying that his books for adults contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."

She was speaking, of course, of the philosopher Bill Martin, who expressed amusement at Ms. Hardy's remark when Tweed spoke to him on Sunday. "I take it as a compliment," he said. "I embrace it."

Ethical Marxism...

Hitting the dance clubs this weekend? Peter Lovatt — aka Dr. Dance — has a few things to teach you about making yourself more appealing to prospective partners.

Mr. Lovatt, a psychology professor at Britain's University of Hertfordshire and a former professional dancer, tells Der Spiegel that it all starts with the fingers. If your ring finger is longer than your index finger, you were exposed to more testosterone in the womb. More testosterone means that you are prone to making bigger and more complex moves out on the dance floor. And those kinds of moves tend to attract partners who are unconsciously looking for someone with higher testosterone. ("Women simply don't like it small and simple," he explains.)

Or if you're looking for someone with lower testosterone, you'll be attracted by moves that are more subtle and that are concentrated in the hips.

Mr. Lovatt explains it all in ...

The University of Alabama's student government association spent more than $4,700 this month to send five of its leaders to Southern California to dish food at a homeless center in Pasadena, according to a report by The Crimson White, the student newspaper.

Steven Oliver, president of the organization, assured the newspaper that no student funds were used to send the student leaders to the Rose Bowl the next day to see the Crimson Tide defeat the Texas Longhorns 37-21 in college football's national championship. 

The community-service event, at the Union Station Homeless Adult Services Center, was reportedly run in conjunction with student-government leaders at the University of Texas. A spokeswoman for Alabama's student government acknowledged that the trip reimbursement violated student-government spending rules, because the student senate must approve expenditures over $1,000. But...

The following reports were taken from campus police logs:

CALVIN COLLEGE

2:50 p.m., November 21

Campus Safety officers responded to a complaint of a terminated former college employee trying to pass themselves off as a current employee in order to get a discount at the spirit store in Van Noord Arena.  The former employee had on a Calvin College building services uniform shirt at the time.  The former employee was contacted and the uniform shirt was confiscated and turned over to building services.  The former employee was given a t-shirt in replacement. Disposition: Closed.

HARVARD U.

11 a.m. December 16

Suspicious activity. Hauser Hall. The officer was informed an individual received several gifts from an unknown individual. When the individual returned the items to the individual they became upset. The individual informed the individual to leave the area and they did.

4:08 a...

If you're an adjunct faculty member in the State University of New York system, and you're growing pot, you might as well surrender now. A team from the New York State Police will be busting down your door any minute.

The Albany Times Union reports that Scott R. Davidson, a part-time lecturer in marketing at SUNY-Albany, was arrested Friday and charged with growing marijuana plants after agents raided his home and found 80 plants, along with growing equipment, lights, scales, and packaging materials. He is scheduled to appear in court this month.

Earlier last week, the paper reports, an adjunct lecturer in the agriculture and engineering division of SUNY-Cobleskill was charged with a misdemeanor after the police raided his home and found a small amount of marijuana as well as equipment for growing it.

Our map of New York suggests that investigators may be heading northeast. (Psst:...

Dozens of students marched on a Swedish brewery on Tuesday, winning a landmark, if somewhat mock, victory in a decades-long struggle to get a 100-kilometer beer pipeline built from the brewery near Gothenburg to Chalmers University of Technology. The long-sought pipeline, which would pump beer directly to the student union, will advance by a single meter, reports the Local, a newspaper in Sweden.

The student effort began in 1959 when the Chalmers student union purchased a single share in the brewery, giving it a platform to press for construction of the 100-kilometer (62-mile) pipeline. Two meters—one on the brewery end and another on the student-union end—were laid, but “no further construction has taken place since 1968,” according to the Local.

A spokesman for Carlsberg, which now owns the local brewery, noted that the students “are a big customer for us and it’s important to...

High-tech forms of cheating get all of the press, but students in Britain still seem to prefer the low-tech variety: writing the answers on arms and other body parts.

The Sun, a British newspaper, filed a Freedom of Information request to learn the most popular forms of cheating, and writing on the skin was No. 1 — at least among the 160 students who were caught. Among the other popular forms of cheating: buying essays off the Internet, stealing information, faking illness, hiding notes in the bathroom or in pencil cases or reference books, plagiarizing from the Web, having a stand-in take the exam, pretending that bereavement affected performance, and using a mobile phone.

The Telegraph, another British newspaper, reported that a poll of 1,000 students at the University of Cambridge found that nearly one in two admitted having cheated.

The Chronicle has written about essay mills,