Illinois students eligible for the state's need-based Monetary Award Program grants may be out of luck this year if their application hasn't already been accepted. The agency that runs program, the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, doesn't have a final budget for next year's grants yet, but the $400-million it expects is already spoken for. In fact, the agency has already turned away nearly 27,000 eligible students since cutting off applications a month ago. Some 120,000 eligible students were denied MAP grants last year, and the agency predicts that the number turned away this year will far exceed that total.

Some students' colleges may be able to make up for shortfalls in state aid money. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for instance, plans to spend more than $40-million on supplemental financial aid, the Associated Press reported. But for many students left out, ...

The FBI is helping to investigate vandalism in which someone cut the brake lines over the weekend on a vehicle belonging to a scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported. The city police department called in the FBI because the incident resembled past attacks on researchers at Santa Cruz and other campuses who perform studies involving animals. However, the scientist in the latest incident did not conduct research using animals.

In a full-page ad in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday, scores of faculty members at Marquette University and Seattle University condemned Marquette's decision to rescind the offer of a dean's job it made to Jodi O'Brien, a sociologist at Seattle who has written about gender and sexual-identity issues. More than 100 faculty members at Marquette and about 90 faculty members at Seattle signed the ad, which states, in part: "We strongly believe the decision puts academic freedom at risk at Marquette University. We reject an intellectual 'litmus test' for our faculty, staff, and leaders in the administration."

Family members of victims of the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech say the news media focused too much on the killer and not enough on those hurt, according to a study led by an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona. The professor, Shahira Fahmy, and Sara J. Roedl, a doctoral student at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, interviewed families and studied more than 2,000 newspaper photographs related to the tragedy, the University of Arizona's news service reports. Some family members felt the victims were ignored, and one said it was traumatic for parents to see graphic photos of bodies' being carried away "before you know whether your child is safe or dead." Ms. Fahmy said that "by focusing on the shooter, the newspapers did not cover the full story." The study's findings are being published in Visual Communication Quarterly.

A state prosecutor said on Friday that campus officers at the University of Florida were justified in their use of force during an early March incident in which a Ph.D. student from Ghana was wounded, The Gainesville Sun reported. The prosecutor, William P. Cervone, also said a resolution was expected soon on charges against the 35-year-old student, Kofi Adu-Brempong. The university's reviews of the incident are still under way.

An arbitrator has ruled that Florida Gulf Coast University should rehire and award back pay to a professor it suspended and later fired in 2009 after investigating his handling of university funds -- as well as his handling of a female mannequin used in a criminal-forensics course, the Naples Daily News reported. In a ruling this month, the arbitrator found the university's investigations and evidence insufficient to warrant the suspension and firing of the associate professor, David Lounsbury. A spokeswoman for the university said the institution would appeal the ruling in state court.

The University of Texas is about to begin a review that could lead to the removal of a Klansman's name from a dormitory on the Austin campus, The Austin American-Statesman reported. The building, Simkins Residence Hall, is named for William Stewart Simkins, who helped organize the Ku Klux Klan in Florida after the Civil War and taught law at Austin for 30 years until his death in 1929. It opened 55 years ago, but a controversy over its name has risen only in recent weeks, in the wake of a scholarly article about its namesake and news-media accounts.

A Louisiana Senate Committee today rejected a bill, backed by the state’s chemical and oil industries, that would have severely restricted the activities of law-school clinics throughout the state, The Times-Picayune reported. The bill’s main target was Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic, which industry lobbyists accused of chasing jobs out of the state. The bill would have barred legal clinics that receive state money from suing government agencies or seeking monetary damages against companies that violate pollution laws. After two hours of testimony, the Senate Commerce Committee moved to defer the bill, essentially killing it.

Two students at Southern Oregon University who are accused of scrawling anti-gay graffiti on doors and in hallways of a residence hall face a disciplinary hearing with the university and criminal charges with the police, The Ashland Daily Tidings reported. If the students are found to have violated the university's code of conduct, they could "receive anything from a warning to permanent dismissal," Jonathan Eldridge, the university's vice president for student affairs, told the newspaper.

Thirteen months after he switched parties to save his career, Sen. Arlen Specter was defeated by Rep. Joe Sestak in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, ending his bid for a sixth term in the U.S. Senate. A cancer survivor, Mr. Specter has been a big proponent of increased spending on biomedical research throughout his Senate tenure. He is perhaps best known for working with Sen. Tom Harkin to double spending on the National Institutes of Health between 1998 and 2003.