Admitting that passages of his commencement speeches were lifted from several celebrities, one of the Philippines' wealthiest businessmen has resigned as chairman of the board of the elite Ateneo de Manila University, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported. The March 27 speech, as well as well as Manuel V. Pangilinan's apology, appeared on the university's Web site after accusations of plagiarism surfaced on Facebook. Comparisons revealed that several phrases had been taken from a commencement address delivered by President Obama. In one section of his speech, Mr. Pangilinan managed to use passages from the author J.K. Rowling and the television personalities Oprah Winfrey and Conan O'Brien practically back-to-back.

The number of unpaid internships has mushroomed in recent years, The New York Times reports, and some government officials say employers could be using the interns, often college students or recent graduates, to get free labor at a time of pressure to cut costs. Regulators in Oregon, California, and other states are investigating potential violations of minimum-wage laws, and the U.S. Labor Department is also looking into possible abuses. Enforcement is often hampered, however, by the interns themselves, who are eager to get experience, make contacts, and avoid jeopardizing future job prospects by filing a complaint.

A freshman football player at Tarleton State University died on Monday after suffering a head injury on Saturday during an offseason practice. According to a news release issued by the Texas institution, the 18-year-old student, Zach Shaver, was injured on a "routine football play."

Louisiana State University is facing a gender-bias lawsuit filed by a 22-year veteran of its police department who said a much-less-experienced officer was hired over her as chief of police last year even though she has bachelor's and master's degrees, the new chief has no college degree, and the job posting said the position required one. According to The Advocate, a newspaper in Baton Rouge, La., Maj. Martha Helen Haire's lawsuit said she had been given a low performance evaluation by the new chief in retaliation for her complaints. The chief was given the job, The Advocate reported, "contingent on completion of his degree."

A faculty member at Tel Aviv University has become the first Arab woman to be appointed as an associate professor at an Israeli university, Haaretz reported. "It's a real breakthrough," the professor, Fadia Nasser-Abu Alhija, told the Israeli newspaper. Ms. Nasser-Abu Alhija, an education expert who is 54, leads the department of curriculum planning and instruction in the School of Education. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Georgia. As of 2007, 33 Arab full professors, all men, worked at Israel's eight research universities.

[Editors' Note (3/26): This post has been updated to correct an error in Haaretz's reporting. Ms. Nasser-Abu Alhija was appointed an associate professor, not a full professor. She is still the first Arab woman with that university rank in Israel.]

Harold E. Varmus, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist whose tenure as director of the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s saw the start of an epic effort to double its budget, may be headed back to the NIH. The New York Times reported today that Dr. Varmus, who has served as president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, since stepping down from the NIH's helm, in 1999, is the White House's top choice to direct the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the NIH. Dr. Varmus, who is 70, already serves as co-chairman of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

The chancellor of the State University of New York, Nancy L. Zimpher, has tapped three high-level administrators and faculty members to lead a new systemwide oversight of athletics and academics. The announcement, made today during a meeting in New York City of the system's Board of Trustees, followed a lengthy report faulting the Binghamton campus for lax supervision of athletics that led to a wide-ranging scandal. One of the report's key recommendations was to increase scrutiny of athletics at the system level. Ms. Zimpher, speaking to the board, said the three appointees, including the system's provost, David K. Lavallee, would lead the effort until someone could be hired for the job on a permanent basis.

The NCAA has upheld penalties against the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa for rules violations in a textbook-distribution program that involved hundreds of athletes in more than a dozen sports. The university had appealed the NCAA's decision to vacate records in football, men's tennis, and men's and women's track for contests in which athletes who had broken the rules competed. This is the fifth major infractions case for Alabama.

The American Federation of Teachers issued a report today recommending ways faculty members and their unions could work to broaden diversity in higher education, including determining a campus's racial and ethnic breakdown, creating a campuswide diversity committee to push for progress, educating the public about the value of affirmative action, making candidates for positions feel more welcome, and setting up programs to help faculty members navigate the promotion and tenure process.

New York University is planning a vast expansion that would increase the size of its physical plant by 40 percent over 20 years, including three million square feet of space for classrooms, offices, and dormitories, and a satellite campus on an island in the middle of New York harbor, according to today's New York Times. The university, which has often fought over its development plans with its neighbors in Greenwich Village as well as historic-preservation groups, pledged that this time the plan would take into account those local interests. The expansion plan, which the university says is needed to accommodate its growing enrollment, would be subject to approval by city agencies.