One day after Elsa A. Murano announced her resignation as president of Texas A&M University’s main campus here, the university system’s Board of Regents on Monday appointed R. Bowen Loftin, leader of the system’s Galveston branch campus, as the flagship’s interim president.

In choosing Mr. Loftin, whose title at Galveston is vice president and chief executive officer, the board avoided the fireworks that might have exploded if it had chosen someone who had been involved in the recent power struggle between Ms. Murano, the university’s first female and Hispanic president, and the system’s chancellor, Michael D. McKinney.

Ms. Murano was forced to step down after the chancellor released a scathing evaluation that accused her, among other things, of not being a team player.

The board accepted Ms. Murano’s resignation, which was effective Monday, and appointed her the status of...

T.K. Wetherell, Florida State University’s president, will tell the Board of Trustees this week of his impending resignation, according to two university officials who spoke with the Associated Press.

Mr. Wetherell, who became president in 2003, was the first alumnus of Florida State to hold the job. He received bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the university.

His retirement comes at a difficult time for Florida State, which on Friday is scheduled to consider more than $56-million in budget cuts over the next three years.

Mr. Wetherell served in Florida’s House of Representatives from 1980 to 1992, before becoming president of Tallahassee Community College, in 1995.

Four faculty members at Bethune-Cookman University have been fired for sexually harassing female students, university officials announced today.

The university in Daytona Beach, Fla., did not name the faculty members or provide details of the alleged harassment. In a written statement, it said it had hired an independent investigator after a female student confided in a faculty member, who urged her to file a formal complaint with the university’s president, Trudie Kibbe Reed.

The investigation included interviews with faculty and staff members and students, and surveys of students in the classes taught by the professors. It found that the professors had engaged in “inappropriate conduct with female students,” the statement said. The faculty members were dismissed at the end of the spring semester and the Daytona Beach Police Department was notified.

University officials said they...

Five colleges and a research organization have been named to Computerworld’s list of the 100 Best Places to Work in IT in 2009.

The University of Pennsylvania placed fourth, recognized for good benefits and the diversity of employees. The University of Miami was ranked 10th; it was also recognized for diversity and benefits, as well as retention and career development.

The Online Computer Library Center, and Cornell, Temple, and George Washington Universities also made the list, which looked at surveys from 27,812 employees from the top 100 companies nominated for the honor. The evaluation focused on salaries, promotions, retention, training, benefits, and the makeup of staff members.

If Nevada’s feisty higher-education chancellor, James E. Rogers, has his way, David B. Ashley will leave the presidency of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas before his contract ends next year. The chancellor, who steps down himself at the end of this month, wrote in a letter to the system’s Board of Regents on Tuesday that Mr. Ashley should be fired, the “Las Vegas Review-Journal‘:http://www.lvrj.com/news/breaking_news/48195557.html reported.

The chancellor and others increasingly have raised complaints about the president’s performance in recent months. Mr. Ashley cut short a trip to Singapore last week to deal with the controversy.

In his letter to the board, Mr. Rogers wrote: “I recommend that Dr. Ashley’s contract not be renewed and that you consider immediate termination of the contract as president.” Among six specific concerns mentioned in the letter, the chancellor...

We have just begun to see academic publishers ramp up cutbacks due to the current economic malaise. I have a sense that this won’t affect the so-called “first tier” of scholarship produced in universities with publish-or-perish environments just yet, but I do think it will impact more middle-tier scholars or emerging junior scholars who are just beginning to navigate the intricacies of academic writing.

As publishers perish, or at least languish, do you think we will ever see an overhaul of the publish-or-perish culture? At what point will higher education be forced to deal with deeply rooted tenure-and-promotion policies that may not reflect the current state of academic publishing?

The University of Iowa has so far dodged cuts and layoffs, but it looks as though that reprieve may be temporary. President Sally Mason told the university’s governing board last Thursday that UI may still be forced to cut up to 130 jobs next year to make ends meet, the Des Moines Register reports. An as-yet-to-be-determined number of layoffs could be in the university’s future, too; that number will depend on how many workers opt to retire early, the newspaper notes. Mason insisted, however, that nothing was set in stone: “That’s our worst-case scenario at this point in time,” she told the board. “I don’t want to alarm people because I think that could shrink.”

Iowa’s other two public universities are also bracing for layoffs next year, the Register reports:

Iowa State University President Gregory Geoffroy said the university is looking at 40 to 100 layoffs after retirements an...

In other news …

John T. Casteen III, the longtime president of the University of Virginia, announced last Friday that he would step down at the end of the 2009-10 academic year.

Mr. Casteen, who is 65 and has been president of the university since 1990, is known as a forceful advocate for increasing the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of the university’s Charlottesville campus, which for much of its history has been mostly white, male, and privileged.

He announced his decision to retire in an e-mail message to the university community and in a statement on the university’s Web site. “These 19, soon to be 20, years feel today like a very short time,” Mr. Casteen wrote in the message to alumni. “These years have been magical times for me.”

Mr. Casteen was 17 when he arrived in Charlottesville, Va., as the first member of his family to go to college. He went on to earn bachelor’s, master’s, and...

College faculties often use votes of “no confidence” to try to push out the leader of their institutions. Many do so, however, without giving much thought to what such a vote actually means, whether they are using it appropriately, or how it will affect their institution—and their own future.

Mae Kuykendall, a professor of law at Michigan State University and an expert on corporate law, has spent much of the past two years studying the no-confidence vote’s origins, philosophical underpinnings, and uses in higher-education institutions and other organizations. She is scheduled to discuss her findings in Washington on Saturday at an international conference on college governance, academic freedom, and globalization sponsored by the American Association of University Professors. The Chronicle asked her to share her insights in an interview conducted via e-mail.

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