Robert M. Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities, announced today that he would retire from the post next May, when his contract is up. Mr. Berdahl has run the organization, which represents 63 U.S. and Canadian research universities, since 2006. He said in a written statement that "the calendar" had told him it was time to step down. Mr. Berdahl, 73, is trained as a historian, has served as chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley and president of the University of Texas at Austin, and said he intended to remain active in higher education.

With a bumper crop of freshmen who need teaching, the University of Iowa has increased its adjunct faculty numbers by about 300 instructors and teaching assistants, according to The Daily Iowan. The temporary employees cost less than tenure-track professors, a university spokeman told the newspaper, and their salaries will be covered by tuition from the extra freshmen.

The editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Catherine D. DeAngelis, announced today that she would leave the medical publication next June, after 11 years at the helm. "I'm going to return to my academic home, Johns Hopkins University, ... and I'm going to start a center for professionalism—that's the ethics," Dr. DeAngelis said. A search committee for her successor will be led by Ronald G. Evens, of the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis.

A report issued today says that the number of administrators for every 100 college students increased by 39 percent from 1993 to 2007, while the number of professors and researchers rose by 18 percent during that period. The study of 198 public and private universities was released by the nonprofit Goldwater Insitute, and led by Jay P. Greene, a senior fellow at the institute who is also head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Officials at one university system, the University of Texas, objected to the study's methodology. They told The Dallas Morning News that the study included counselors, deans, and accountants in the administrative ranks, which artificially inflated those numbers. Mr. Greene said the point was to account for staff not directly involved in instruction or research. His report blames this "bloat" for the increase in...

An investigation by Harvard University has found evidence of scientific misconduct by Marc Hauser, a professor of psychology, The Boston Globe reports. Mr. Hauser, who studies the evolution of cognition, apparently was not able to produce data to support his conclusions in a paper that found that monkeys had abilities key to learning language. The university has said Mr. Hauser is now on a one-year leave but declined to say whether that was a punishment, citing confidentiality. Cognition, the journal that published the influential paper, will retract it. Other journals where Mr. Hauser has published, including Science, are conducting investigations of their own.

Csaba Marosan, who was fired in 2009 from his job as a professor in the natural sciences department at Trocaire College, in Buffalo, claims he was let go because of his age and sexual orientation, The Buffalo News and ABC News reported. Dr. Marosan, who holds a medical degree in his native Hungary, is 51 and heterosexual; he says says his superiors at the Roman Catholic college gave preferential treatment to younger homosexual men. New York State human-rights officials have found some evidence supporting his complaint, which the college vigorously denies. A hearing on the complaint is scheduled for later this year.

In "Drug Pushers in Academia," a provocative blog post just out in Mother Jones, the magazine describes how pharmaceutical companies give grants to medical schools to support the medical-education courses that doctors need to maintain their licenses. It noted that testimony at a conference held at Georgetown University indicated that companies supported courses that gave favorable reviews to their drugs, potentially slanting physicians' "education."

There was bad news, and some good news, for academic stem-cell researchers yesterday. The National Institutes of Health said that researchers could not use 47 stem-cell lines, which might have produced new information about diseases including cystic fibrosis, because the cell lines had been donated using inadequate informed-consent procedures. The agency did, however, approve eight other lines. That makes a total of 75 lines eligible for federal research financing.

The University of Florida today cleared a professor of telecommunications, Churchill L. Roberts, of accusations that he had violated university policy. As reported today in The Chronicle, Mr. Roberts was a thesis adviser of two graduate students who defied campus officials by returning to Haiti after its January earthquake to finish work on a documentary film. The officials now say the students made their decision to go to Haiti independently and Mr. Roberts was not a part of it. The United Faculty of Florida has charged that the university's investigation of Mr. Roberts was baseless and an attempt to intimidate him.

A committee of the British House of Commons concluded on Tuesday that there was no evidence that researchers at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit had tampered with data or altered peer review of publications to exaggerate the threat of global warming, the Associated Press reported. The exoneration heads off the most serious charges leveled at the scientists after their e-mail messages were leaked in an episode that has been dubbed "Climategate." Other investigations continue.