Thirty-six students who took part in a sit-in last fall in the University of California at Santa Cruz's main administrative building were fined today $944 each, to cover what the university described as nearly $34,000 in damage to the occupied building, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The fines, which can be appealed, stemmed from a university investigation of 45 students, of whom seven will be dismissed, suspended, or put on probation. Students who do not pay up could be prevented from graduating or registering for classes. The sit-in followed a vote by the university regents to raise tuition by 32 percent, to cope with state budget cuts. One critic of the fines called them "blatantly political" and part of a "tactic of fear" designed to draw attention from the university's fiscal mismanagement.

A goverment inspection team in Vietnam has criticized the rapid growth of the country's private universities, urging that those that fail to meet minimum standards be shut down, the Saigon Liberation newspaper reports. The team of investigators, working under the auspices of the National Assembly, found that universities were opening despite lacking sufficient professors or even a single building. The revelations are not new, but airing official criticism of the government in public is rare. All higher-education institutions, including those that are privately owned, are controlled by the government, yet none has ever been closed.

Local prosecutors are investigating three police officers who beat a University of Maryland at College Park student last month during street celebrations that followed a men's basketball game in which Maryland defeated Duke, The Washington Post reported. A video of the incident shows the unarmed student, one of many milling around the area, approaching several mounted police officers, but not otherwise seeming to pose a threat to them. Other police officers then shove him into a wall and beat him with their batons, with more than dozen blows landing. The student, who suffered a concussion and other injuries, was later arrested and charged with assaulting police officers on horseback, one of more than two dozen students arrested that night, but the charges against him were dropped when the video directly contradicted the police version of events.

Japanese students are shunning North American universities and opting to study at domestic institutions, according to The Washington Post. Undergraduate enrollment by Japanese citizens at American universities has plunged 52 percent since 2000, says the Post, which blames Japan's low birthrate, crowded higher-education market, and increasingly inward-looking mind-set of the nation's corporations and young people. The trend is in marked contrast to the "stampede" among students in Japan's competitive Asian neighbors to get into American colleges.

The president of James Madison University has told students on the Virginia campus that their "collective behavior" at an off-campus event that turned into a riot on Saturday was "an embarrassment to your university and a discredit to our reputation." In an e-mail message, the president, Linwood H. Rose, assailed students who attended the event, called Springfest, and engaged in property destruction, public drunkenness, and personal threats. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, more than 30 people were arrested when the police tried to break up the festival, which usually attracts 1,000 to 2,000 attendees but on Saturday drew 8,000, some from other campuses and even out of state.

Although China’s university system has long been known to be racked by plagiarism and ghostwriting, a study by a professor at the University of Wuhan, in eastern China, has shown how rampant the practices are, the Associated Press reported. Commercial sales of ghostwritten dissertations and journal articles were worth nearly 1 billion yuan (or more than $146-million) in 2009, a 500-percent increase over 2007, according to the study, by Shen Yang. And businesses produce only a small portion of the plagiarized papers in circulation. Professors and senior academic staff members frequently use graduate students to ghostwrite papers, publish junior colleagues' research as their own without citation, or pluck material from published sources.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is rescinding its apparel-licensing contract with Nike over what the university called abuses of labor rights at two factories in Honduras that did work under a subcontract for the giant manufacturer of sneakers and other athletics gear. According to a news release issued by the university, the two factories were closed without notice last year, leaving workers with neither jobs nor more than $2-million in legally required severance payments. Under a Code of Conduct created by the university and enforced with the help of the Worker Rights Consortium, Nike is responsible for the actions of its subcontractors. Madison's chancellor, Biddy Martin, said several months of negotiations with Nike had been fruitless, so the university "decided it was best, all things considered, to end this business relationship" and forgo $49,000 in annual licensing revenue...

A 22-year-old student at Hinds Community College, in Mississippi, died on Tuesday after collapsing on a practice field following a series of sprinting exercises, The Orlando Sentinel reported. The student, William Huzzie, a native of Orlando, Fla., was attempting to become a walk-on member of the Hinds football team.

The North Dakota Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision today that hastens the day when the University of North Dakota's Fighting Sioux mascot and nickname are officially retired. In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court held that the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education has the authority to change those controversial symbols before a November 30 deadline that was set in an agreement with the NCAA. Under that deal, the university pledged to retire the Indian images unless two Sioux tribes agreed to retain them. Only one of the two did, and members of that tribe had asked the high court to reverse the lower-court ruling.

[Update:] The state board, meeting later in the day, said a decision it reached last May to retire the nickname and mascot would stand and advised university leaders to go ahead with the transition, The Grand Forks Herald reported. It's not clear how long...

The U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics has published its "Digest of Education Statistics, 2009," an annual compilation that gathers data released over the last 12 months about all levels of education. Among other things, the digest includes data on the number of colleges, college enrollments, and college graduates; on federal and other spending on public and private education; on education attainment levels; on tuition, fees, and student aid; and on a range of faculty and staff employment issues, including tenure, part time vs. full time, and pay. The statistics center also published today a shorter version of the digest, the "Mini-Digest of Education Statistics, 2009."