The Educational Testing Service has suspended registration in Iran for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, The New York Times reports.

A statement posted on the ETS Web site says that as a result of United Nations sanctions, "ETS is currently unable to process payments from Iran and has had to temporarily suspend registration."

The Times quoted Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as saying ETS should be exempt from the sanctions since the exam "is often a path to the outside world for young Iranians."

"The government is not being hurt by Toefl not operating in Iran," he said. "It's the people, and precisely the people we're hoping to empower."

A documentary filmmaker was barred from bringing his camera into a public meeting of the University of California's regents last week, and a state senator wants to know why.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the filmmaker, Ric Chavez, did not know that state law allows anyone to film public meetings of state bodies. He e-mailed the university's public-information office for permission to film Thursday's meeting and was shut out because he had no press credential.

Sen. Leland Yee, a Democrat from San Francisco who heads the Senate's committee on public-records and open-meetings laws, wrote to the university's president, Mark Yudof, asking why university policy "is in complete contradiction to state law." Liz Enochs, president of the Society of Professional Journalists' Northern California chapter, also wrote -- in her case, to the regents -- to protest the decision.

The San...

Columbia University has halted research at its prestigious brain-imaging center after federal investigators found repeated safety and ethical violations, The New York Times reports.

Investigators from the Food and Drug Administration found that researchers at Columbia's Kreitchman PET Center -- considered a leader in the use of positron emission tomography to study brain disorders -- routinely injected mental patients with impure radiotracers. Such injections would threaten the health of the patients and the scientific validity of the research.

FDA investigators also found a document altered to hide a drug impurity.

The university said in a statement on Friday that it had conducted its own investigation of the lab at the FDA's request and had found no evidence of harm to patients, the Times reports.

David I. Hirsh, Columbia's executive vice president for research, acknowledged...

Officials of Lambuth University, in Tennessee, have reversed their decision to sell the financially ailing institution to a for-profit investment group. Under a revised agreement with the investors, whose identities the university will not reveal until the deal is final, Lambuth's Board of Trustees will retain ownership of the university and it will remain a nonprofit institution, The Jackson Sun reports.

Last week, with a tentative agreement to sell, the university was working to meet a May 28 deadline to submit revised documents to its accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which placed Lambuth on probation last year. "We determined that there were more advantages to staying a nonprofit versus going to a for-profit status," Lambuth's president, Bill Seymour, told the Sun. "We could accomplish the same things through a joint venture with the investors."

The...

Police officers seized more than 900 photographs on Friday from the offices of James Madison University's student newspaper, The Breeze, as part of their investigation into an off-campus event on April 10 that turned into a riot.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that, according to The Breeze's editor in chief, the police, led by Commonwealth's Attorney Marsha L. Garst, arrived unannounced and threatened to remove all equipment and documents from the newspaper's offices if the photos were not turned over.

The Student Press Law Center, a nonprofit organization that defends student journalists' First Amendment rights, demanded that the authorities immediately return any photos that had not been published in The Breeze, saying the federal Privacy Protection Act makes it illegal to search newsrooms for unpublished news-gathering materials.

A group of gun owners filed suit on Tuesday against Colorado State University to block a ban on carrying concealed weapons on campuses. The ban, approved in February, will take effect August 1. The Coloradoan reports that the CSU board will decide what steps to take at its May meeting. The suit was filed the same week the Colorado Court of Appeals allowed a suit challenging a concealed-weapons ban at the University of Colorado to proceed.

The members of a University of Oxford drinking club have been suspended for sending e-mail messages to each other rating the sexual desirability of women on the campus.

After the messages -- which described plans to lure some "fitties" to a drunken party -- were posted around Oxford's Hertford College, the college suspended all 15 members of the club, the Telegraph reports.

Hertford College's Penguin Club had gained notoriety for its freshman initiation ceremony, in which inductees streaked around the university while smeared in goose fat and eating raw squid, according to the Telegraph.

An Idaho state judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a former engineering professor at Idaho State University who accused the institution of violating his right to free speech, the Associated Press reports. Habib Sadid sued the university in 2008, alleging that Idaho State had retaliated against him for publicly criticizing administration policies and that he also suffered defamation and breach of contract. This fall the university fired him over the objections of a faculty panel, which said the university did not provide him with due process and lacked evidence to dismiss him.

Even as American graduate schools debate whether to accept students with three-year degrees from European universities, Britain may shrink its three-year degree to two, The Guardian reports.

The British government has asked the financing council for universities to develop proposals for more flexible, less expensive degrees. Two-year degrees have been piloted at a handful of universities in Britain, and may now be central to the government's effort to cut costs, according to The Guardian.

U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican of Tennessee, has proposed a three-year option for American colleges, an idea that Chronicle bloggers have considered here, here, and here.