A U.S. congresswoman has dropped plans to speak at one of the commencement ceremonies in June at the University of California at Riverside, after unionized workers in the university system called for such a boycott in response to layoffs and proposed reductions in pay to deal with state budget cuts, the Los Angeles Times reported. The lawmaker, Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat, said, "I wish nothing but the best for this year's young graduates and hope they will respect my decision to stand in solidarity with my union brothers and sisters."

In 1990 the administration at Mills College, a liberal-arts institution for women in Oakland, Calif., decided to go coed, following many other women's colleges that had sought a solution to enrollment and financial problems in the admission of men. But the plan provoked huge protests, among students and alumni, that after just 16 days led college officials to back down. Now, 20 years later, with Mills "a stronger place" in many ways than it was in 1990, the Los Angeles Times reports, the college is celebrating the anniversary of the protesters' victory over the administration.

Vanderbilt University, one of several colleges and universities struggling to recover from severe floods this week in Nashville, is granting up to two weeks of paid leave to members of its faculty and staff who lost their homes in the disaster. The university, which has 3,100 faculty members and 23,000 other employees, said that more than 400 of them had suffered major damage from the flooding.

The Education Management Corporation, dinged in a Frontline program this week for allegedly stampeding students to enroll at its Argosy University by pushing their "hot button," now faces a whistle-blower lawsuit alleging that student recruiters at its South University Online had been paid based on how many students they drummed up, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The practice, if proven, would be a violation of federal student-loan law and could be costly to the university -- the False Claims Act, under which the lawsuit was filed, calls for triple damages. The allegation, from a former employee, doesn't specify how much money is at stake, but the university is disclosing the lawsuit in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing today, suggesting it could have a material affect on its finances.

The four-campus Peralta Community College District has agreed to pay $90,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by two students it disciplined in 2007 and 2008 for praying at the California institution, the Contra Costa Times reported. Under the terms of the settlement, the money will cover the students' legal costs and the college will withdraw warnings it had given the students.

A former law professor at the University of Texas at Austin is pressing the university to rename a dormitory, Simkins Residence Hall, that honors a Ku Klux Klan organizer named William Stewart Simkins, according to the Web site of KXAN, a local television station. The former professor, Thomas D. Russell, who now teaches law at the University of Denver, argues in a paper published this spring that however much the University of Texas has changed since the days of segregation, it has no business retaining the name of a white supremacist on one of its dormitories. A university official told KXAN that, given the age of the building, it would probably be torn down in the near future, making the name issue moot. But the official declined to say when that might happen. Changing the name would require the Board of Regents' approval.

The United States' nine military academies, colleges, and universities offer a basically sound education to current and future members of the armed forces, but there are areas needing improvement, according to a report issued today by the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. The report, described by the panel as the "first comprehensive Congressional review" of the nation's professional military-education system in 21 years, urges better coordination between joint professional military education and joint duty assignments, identifies a disconnect between various efforts to produce more strategists, says that curricula, particularly for junior officers, don't teach critical-thinking skills, and makes other recommendations.

Six months after the University of Wisconsin at Madison's Faculty Senate voted overwhelmingly against a proposal that would have reorganized the Graduate School and shifted how the campus manages research, the faculty leaders now seem to have gotten the plan changed to their liking. According to The Capital Times's Campus Connections blog, a motion approved at Monday's Faculty Senate meeting, with administrative support, calls for graduate education and academic research to remain unified in the Graduate School under a single leader, a graduate dean who would also be vice chancellor for research. The original proposal would have created a separate research office, headed by a vice chancellor, to run university research.

A starting player on the University of Virginia's nationally ranked men's lacrosse team was charged today with first-degree murder in connection with the death on Sunday night of a player on the university's women's lacrosse team, according to The Roanoke Times. The suspect and the victim, both 22-year-old seniors, "had a relationship in the past," the police chief in Charlottesville, Va., told the newspaper.

The Education Writers Association, a national organization of reporters who cover all levels of education, announced today that Caroline W. Hendrie, a managing editor at Education Week, would be the association's new executive director, effective June 1. Ms. Hendrie, who has worked at Education Week for 15 years, will succeed Lisa Walker, who is retiring after 24 years as the group's leader.