John B. Mason, Eastern Washington University’s provost and vice president for academic affairs, resigned late last week, citing health concerns, The Spokesman-Review, a newspaper in Spokane, Wash., reported. Mr. Mason, who has been at the university since 2007, had recently come under criticism from deans and department chairs over curriculum changes and other decisions of his. The Faculty Senate had been scheduled to vote on a no-confidence measure regarding him today.

When a new Arizona law takes effect this fall, excluding domestic partners of state employees from getting health benefits through state-supported plans, the University of Arizona will start offering such coverage on its own, the Arizona Daily Star reported. The university's plans won't use any state money but will have similar premiums. Allison Vaillancourt, the university's vice president for human resources, told the newspaper that if the university did not provide such coverage, it would be at a disadvantage in hiring and retaining talented employees.

The Nevada Board of Regents voted on Thursday to eliminate two departments in the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources at the University of Nevada at Reno, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported. In a budget-cutting proposal released in March, the university's president, Milton D. Glick, had called for eliminating the college and reorganizing agricultural programs and research projects under other divisions. But under pressure from agricultural interest groups in the state, officials later came up with a plan for keeping the college in scaled-back form. The regents approved the plan on Thursday, along with other cuts at Reno and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

A Wisconsin judge has appointed a special prosecutor to weigh animal-cruelty charges against researchers and officials at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who conducted or approved experiments that killed sheep, the Associated Press reported. At least four sheep have died in recent years in studies that simulated the changes in air pressure that deep-sea divers experience. Judge Amy Smith of Dane County Circuit Court found probable cause that the scientists and officials had violated a state law and appointed a special prosecutor to decide whether to file criminal charges, issue an order halting the experiments, or impose lesser penalties, such as fines.

Police officials in Rwanda say that C. Peter Erlinder, the Minnesota law professor who was arrested in Rwanda last week on charges of promoting genocidal ideology, is recovering in a hospital after attempting suicide on Tuesday by swallowing pills in his prison cell, the Associated Press reported. Mr. Erlinder's daugher, Sarah Erlinder, a lawyer in Arizona, said U.S. Embassy officials had visited her father in the hospital but could not get much information on why he was there. She said she did not believe her father had tried to kill himself, but said the new developments had made the family fearful that "they've already attempted to hurt him or they're laying the groundwork to kill him." Peter Erlinder leads a group of defense lawyers at the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and traveled there last week to help with the legal defense of an opposition candidate for...

The Breeze, the student newspaper at James Madison University, has won an apology from a state prosecutor and $10,000 in legal fees stemming from an incident in April in which law-enforcement officials raided its offices and seized 942 photos. The officers were executing a search warrant obtained by Marsha Garst, the commonwealth's attorney in Harrisonburg, Va., in a quest for evidence related to an off-campus party that turned into a riot. Under the settlement agreement, as reported by The Breeze and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Ms. Garst expressed regret for the "fear and concern" she caused in executing the search warrant, and the newspaper agreed to release 20 of the photos to her office.

Florida Gulf Coast University, in Fort Myers, has agreed to give all employees a $1,000 bonus this fall and a 2-percent pay raise, starting in January, a local newspaper, The News-Press, reported. The agreement, which comes a day before the university and its faculty union were scheduled to begin impasse hearings, extends the 2007-10 faculty contract by a year.

Santa Ana College, a two-year institution in Southern California, is creating a $2,500 scholarship for illegal-immigrant students in memory of a former student who was killed in a highway accident in Maine last month, The Orange County Register reported. The scholarship will honor Tam Ngoc Tran, who was an illegal immigrant herself in pursuit of citizenship and had testified before Congress in favor of the Dream Act. She was a graduate student at Brown University at the time of her death.

The planned scholarship has drawn an outraged response from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, who threatened in a letter to the college's president to try to yank the institution's federal money. He called the scholarship "an affront to law-abiding citizens" that showed "a misguided set of priorities." In a news release, the college noted that the scholarship would be offered by the...

Nick Enlow, who graduated from Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis with a bachelor's degree in psychology in 2008, isn't happy with his job prospects or his student-loan debt. So he put his diploma up for sale on eBay, setting the starting bid at $36,000, according to the Journal and Courier newspaper. eBay halted the sale, but Mr. Enlow achieved at least one of his goals, of striking up a conversation about educational debt and the worth of a college degree. "The universities are handing out too many degrees that have zero real-world application," he told the newspaper. Irwin Weiser, an interim dean at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Ind., agreed that a college degree "is not an automatic ticket to a job," but defended studying the liberal arts. It prepares students to be successful, Mr. Weiser said, "because they learn to think creatively, critically, and...

The University of Idaho has reached a tentative agreement with 268 retired employees who sued over changes in their insurance benefits, the Associated Press reported. The proposed settlement would set a 10-percent cap on increases in the co-payments and guarantee that life-insurance benefits would not drop below $10,000. A judge had ruled in the university's favor last year on a motion to dismiss the case, but later agreed to reconsider the ruling. A court hearing on the proposed settlement is scheduled for July.