One of two professors who were removed from joint appointments to the University of Utah’s Middle East Center last year has filed a defamation lawsuit against the dean of the university’s College of Humanities, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

The professor who sued, Harris Lenowitz, is a scholar of Hebrew in the department of languages and literature. He and another scholar, Peter J. Sluglett, a historian, were dismissed from the center in March 2008 and reassigned full time to their home departments.

A lawyer for Mr. Lenowitz said in a statement quoted by the Salt Lake City newspaper that the dean, Robert D. Newman, had falsely accused her client of contributing to a hostile environment for female faculty members at the center, and had dismissed him without giving him a chance to respond to the accusations. “Even after the center director resigned in protest and five former center ...

The global economic meltdown is prompting many people to look for new ways to make ends meet. A recent Wall Street Journal article notes, for example, that when the going gets tough, the tough (or some of them, anyway) … um … sell hot dogs. Take Andrea and Ben Guajardo, who began moonlighting as hot-dog vendors last November, the Journal writes:

Ms. Guajardo is a grant administrator for a health-care system. Her husband, Ben, is a pipeline operator. Theirs is the first hot-dog stand in Bandera, pop. 957, that anybody here can remember.

“It’s a backup plan,” says Ms. Guajardo, a mother of four. “No one knows what’s going to happen with the economy, and I don’t want to have to scrounge for a minimum-wage job.”

Andrea and Ben Guajardo both work full-time, but began selling wieners with help from their four kids in November.

The Guajardo’s aren’t the...

Wellesley College cut 80 non-faculty positions last week and froze salaries for both staff and faculty members in an effort to tighten the budget on the Massachusetts campus, The Boston Globe reported.

The college laid off 44 administrative and union workers last Tuesday and will cut the remaining positions through a combination of buyouts and attrition. The move reduced Wellesley’s total staff by 10 percent. H. Kim Bottomly, the president, said there are no plans to cut faculty positions.

Fifty staff members already took early-retirement offers during the past six weeks, so Wellesley will probably do some hiring after this year to get the total number of job cuts back to 80. The number of new hires will depend on how many more staffers retire by the end of the year.

Facing endowment losses more severe than anticipated, Princeton University will freeze salaries for tenured faculty members and staff members who earn more than $75,000 and slash its budget for the 2011 fiscal year by $80-million, the university’s president, Shirley M. Tilghman, announced this week.

The university had planned for a 25-percent drop in its endowment’s value by June 30, but that figure is now projected to be 30 percent, Ms. Tilghman wrote in a letter to the Princeton campus. The new measures are on top of an $88-million cut in the university’s budget for the 2010 fiscal year.

“There is no question that this overall two-year target of $170-million in savings will be difficult to achieve, as the first round of cuts eliminated the majority of things that were relatively easy to forgo,” Ms. Tilghman wrote. “The steady growth in both faculty and staff that we...

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued a historically black college on behalf of three white faculty members who said they were denied jobs or let go because of their race.

Federal officials today simultaneously announced the lawsuit and an agreement between the EEOC and Benedict College to settle the case. The institution said it would pay $55,000 to each of the instructors. The college also agreed to remind staff about its employment policies prohibiting discrimination, train administrators and faculty members, and make periodic reports to the EEOC.

The EEOC said in its complaint against Benedict College that the institution discriminated against Argiri Aggelopoulou, an art instructor, when it hired a black instructor over her for an assistant professor of art position in February 2005. The following month, the complaint says, Benedict College did not renew...

A jury ruled against a Montana State University professor who said her male peers were paid thousands of dollars more than she was, according to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

In her lawsuit, Aleksandra M. Vinogradov, a tenured professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering, accused Montana State of discrimination based on gender and retaliation for complaining about her salary, the newspaper said. Her lawyer told the jury that the university did not have policy guidelines on salary increases but gave lump sums to departments to distribute. The university’s lawyer disputed that, saying pay raises were merit-based.

The case was decided late last week after a 10-day trial.

Spring break is gone and the semester is starting to wind down toward graduation. A few unexpected positions are popping loose for rushed searches.

Last-minute searches often produce very strong hires, but sometimes an interesting phenomenon occurs with these searches: the applicant whose CV looks too good to be true. Ph.D. in hand. Strong start to the research agenda. Good teaching experiences. Somehow, however, the candidate has made it through the heart of the hiring season without landing a position. Some search committees all but refuse to interview such an applicant because they assumed that the person was weird or anti-social. Then again, I’ve heard of many last-minute hires who really were as good as they looked on paper.

How can we figure out if a person is too good to be true or is just plain good?

With the economy in the can, many universities are opting to cut expenditures through mandatory furloughs — or unpaid time off — in lieu of layoffs. Over the past few months a host of universities, including Arizona State, Clemson, and Utah State Universities, as well as the University of Maryland, have used furloughs, and many more are considering it. But for those workers who find themselves on a forced leave of absence, coping with the accompanying pay cut and deciding how to spend the extra “free” time is far from easy, a recent article by Thomas Bartlett in The Chronicle reports.

Taking time off from work without pay might not sound all that bad — who couldn’t use a little extra time for hobbies or travel or family and friends? — but not when money is tight, as it is for many people right now. To compensate for the reduction in pay, furloughed workers must often find ways to...

Thursday’s jury verdict in Ward Churchill’s lawsuit against the University of Colorado has given rise to a mystery: How is it that a jury could rule that the university had acted illegally in firing Mr. Churchill, and yet still award him only $1 in damages?

Five of the six members of the jury have told court officials they do not wish to speak with reporters about their thinking. But a sixth, Bethany Newill, called a local radio station, KHOW, last night and said the $1 judgment was the product of a compromise between a single holdout juror who believed Mr. Churchill should not receive any damages and five others who believed he should be awarded some significant amount, according to today’s edition of the Colorado Daily. Helping shape the jury’s verdict was Mr. Churchill’s decision to have his lawyers not specify how much money he wanted, as well as his insistence throughout the...

One of my friends always enjoys picking up summer courses and other stray duties that carry stipends. He’s fond of saying, “Baby needs new shoes.” In the current economy, most of us need new shoes. I think everyone is feeling a little down at the heels these days.

Are summer teaching assignments becoming more competitive where you teach? Are part timers having particular difficulties landing summer gigs since the full timers may be more interested?