The University of North Carolina system's governing board voted Friday to slash the salary of James L. Oblinger, the former chancellor of North Carolina State University who stepped down in June over his involvement in the hiring of Mary P. Easley, wife Michael F. Easley, the former North Carolina governor, the Raleigh News & Observer reports:

Oblinger [...] had been earning his full administrative salary: $420,000 annually, or $35,000 a month. Under an agreement forged with UNC system President Erskine Bowles when he resigned, he was to be paid at that rate for six months before returning to the faculty at a lower wage.

The UNC system's Board of Governors voted Friday to scale his pay back immediately. He will now earn $173,000 annually, a salary comparable to other members of the NCSU faculty. Oblinger will be a professor of food science. [...]

The board's decision will cost...

Neal Smatresk, executive vice president and provost at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has been picked to lead the university, the Las Vegas Sun reports. 

The Wheeling Jesuit University Board of Trustees has dismissed the Rev. Julio Giulietti, president of the institution since 2007, the Wheeling News-Register reports.

The University System of Maryland plans to slash 175 jobs -- 151 of which are currently vacant -- and freeze hiring as part of an effort to carve $37.8-million from its 2010 budget, the Baltimore Sun reports. Only 24 employees, none of them tenured or tenure-track professors, are expected to receive pink slips, but "the cuts include a fair number of adjunct and part-time faculty, and I think that's where the students will see a real impact," Chancellor William E. Kirwan told the newspaper. "There won't be as many sections of courses, courses will be harder to get,...

Via The Juggle comes word of new research showing that many women hamper themselves at work by underestimating their job performance and their standing with supervisors and colleagues. In contrast, men tend to slightly overestimate how their supervisors would rate them, according to the study, which will be presented at the Academy of Management's annual meeting this month.

The Juggle's Sue Shellenbarger, in The Wall Street Journal, notes that "over all, averaging all the ratings, the gap between prediction and reality was three times greater for women than for men." Not surprisingly, the gap was most pronounced for women 50 and over, whose estimates averaged 11 percent below the actual rating.

The good news, says Scott N. Taylor, an organizational-studies professor at the University of New Mexico, who conducted the study of 251 managers, is that "women rated themselves just as highly ...

Furloughs at the University of California may be a "foregone conclusion," but faculty members would be wise to carefully consider how the steps are taken, warns Ari Kelman, an associate professor of history on the Davis campus, in a post at The Edge of the American West. Given the choice between taking furloughs on "calendared days of instruction" or on "calendared intersession days when no formal instruction is scheduled," he says he would pick the former, lest a dangerous precedent be set:

My sense was and is that if the state Legislature chooses to impose what amounts to a highly regressive tax (in the form of huge cuts in funding that necessitate furloughs) on a tiny subset of California’s population (most state employees), because it cannot or will not tax all of the state’s citizens, then we (those people being furloughed) need to make sure that the rest of the state understands...

Some professors at Texas Tech University have signed a petition objecting to the hiring of former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, The Public Record reports.

Carleton University, in Ottawa, has sacked Hassan Diab -- a sociology professor accused of participating in the bombing of a Paris synagogue almost 30 years ago -- a mere day after he was hired, citing concerns about a "stable, productive academic environment," the Canadian Press reports.

A law professor from Singapore has nixed plans to teach at New York University this fall after her statements against homosexuality sparked an uproar on the campus, The Chronicle reports. The reporter, Peter Schmidt, writes:

Thio Li-ann, a professor at the National University of Singapore and a member of that country's Parliament, had been scheduled to come to NYU's law school as a visiting professor and teach a course on human rights in ...

The president of the University of Hawaii, David McClain, and the soon-to-be system president, M.R.C. Greenwood, are planning to take a 10-percent pay cut in order to help offset $155-million in budget cuts over the next two years, the Honolulu Advertiser reports. Under the proposal, which President McClain will present to the Board of Regents on August 27, another 210 administrators throughout the 10-campus UH system would also take home 6 to 9 percent less, depending on their most recent performance evaluations, he told the newspaper. The announcement comes in the midst of discussions between the governor, the university, the state Department of Education, and several unions over proposed pay cuts and furloughs, the Advertiser notes. McClain, who is trimming his own salary by 10 percent this month, even though the proposed cuts would not take effect until September, told the newspaper ...

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas—unless you’re the president of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. In a daylong meeting broadcast online last week, David B. Ashley, the president, was repeatedly grilled, and then publicly demoted, during a contentious gathering of the university system’s Board of Regents.

The shakedown followed months of public disputes over the conduct of Mr. Ashley’s wife and heated exchanges between him and the university system’s former chancellor, James E. Rogers. Left in its wake were an ousted president with a tarnished reputation and a state that could have a tough time attracting new leaders.

Last Friday’s meeting opened with a pledge of allegiance and closed six hours later with the banging of the gavel, finalizing Mr. Ashley’s demotion. Not surprisingly, the president described the public process as one he would “not recommend to anyone, anywhere.”

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Showing an employee the door is probably the toughest job a manager has to face. Learn how to do it right in the latest Tech Therapy.

The year after the dissertation defense tends to be one of both joy and exhaustion. After all of that work and angst, it’s hard to think one iota about revising it into a book project or working on new projects. As one person told me, "Mostly you want to sit around the house watching Gilligan's Island and eating as much ice cream as you can afford."

I’ve seen three basic approaches to the post-dissertation blues: Chucking it all and taking a vacation from scholarship for a year. Gutting it through that year by revising the dissertation into a viable book manuscript/research proposal/grant application. Rebooting for new research interests that go in different directions from the dissertation, intentionally ignoring the dissertation area.

As dean, I encourage my new Ph.D.'s to balance that year with both rejuvenating projects and at least a minimal amount of work on those all-important...

After months of highly public disputes, the question of President David B. Ashley’s fate at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas has been answered. The Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education decided last Friday not to renew Mr. Ashley’s contract.

For more than six hours, regents grilled Mr. Ashley in a public meeting over his job performance and a controversial independent evaluation of his work that many said lacked legitimacy. The regents expressed disappointment with Mr. Ashley’s leadership style, saying he lacked communication skills and seemed passionless about the university. The regents focused especially on tensions involving his wife, Bonnie, and her alleged bullying of staff members.

Students, alumni, and faculty members were invited today to make comments, many of which were in favor of the embattled president. James E. Rogers, the outspoken former...