An assistant professor of biochemistry at Rush University, in Chicago, is facing felony charges after police officers who were called to his home during a domestic dispute found more than a dozen homemade explosive devices, the Chicago Tribune reported. The professor, Marcello DelCarlo, told investigators he had made the devices as fireworks for celebrating the Fourth of July. The university has placed Mr. DelCarlo on administrative leave pending an investigation.

The University of Nevada at Reno is working on a way to keep its College of Agriculture amid steep budget cuts, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported. The university had said last month that it would eliminate the college and two of its departments. But the provost, Marc Johnson, told the Board of Regents on Friday that the university had held discussions with "stakeholder groups," including the Nevada Cattlemen's Association and the Nevada Farm Bureau, that want the university to have a dean of agriculture to respond to the academic needs of students and the research requirements of the industry. Mr. Johnson said the groups had endorsed a compromise proposal that would allow the college to survive in a scaled-back form.

In a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday in Cheyenne, Wyo., William Ayers and a student at the University of Wyoming say the institution violated their constitutional rights of free speech and assembly when it canceled a planned speech by Mr. Ayers. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit contends that university officials are censoring Mr. Ayers "based solely upon his perceived message and his activist political background." Mr. Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, belonged to a radical group responsible for bombings in the 1970s. The lawsuit seeks a court order forcing the university to allow Mr. Ayers to speak on the campus later this month. A university spokeswoman declined to respond, saying the university does not comment on litigation.

An independent panel of academics in Britain has cleared climate scientists at the University of East Anglia of allegations, based on hacked e-mail messages, that they manipulated data related to man-made global warming, The Wall Street Journal reported. In its report to the university, the panel said it had found "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice." A committee in Parliament reached a similar conclusion last month. The latest report, however, did express surprise that the scientists had not worked more closely with professional statisticians.

Kim Komenich, an assistant professor at San Jose State U., restrained a robbery suspect who he thought might be reaching for a gun.

Kim Komenich has some impressive credentials: He's an assistant professor of journalism and new media at San Jose State University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer. Now he's also known as a crime stopper with a champion bear hug.

Mr. Komenich earned that latest distinction on Monday as he waited in line at a bank in downtown San Jose, Calif. According to accounts in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Spartan Daily, the campus newspaper, Mr. Komenich heard the man in front of him demand money from the teller. When he saw the man reach for his pockets, he gripped the man in a bear hug and held him until police officers arrived. The scene was captured on bank surveillance cameras. (Photo courtesy of the San Jose Police Department)

A member of Utah's higher-education governing board has resigned in protest over a legislative maneuver that required the Board of Regents to approve a proposed electronics-engineering program for Weber State University, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. The departing regent, Anthony Morgan, was chairman of the board's academics committee, which had shelved an earlier proposal from Weber State. The university presented a new proposal in February, but before the regents could review it, a legislator introduced a measure requiring the regents to approve the program. That measure was signed into law on March 31 as part of a bill to expand regional representation on the board, SB 52.

To the consternation of several architectural firms that submitted bids to design the University of South Carolina's new Moore School of Business in Columbia, S.C., the university abruptly canceled all bids this month and allowed a donor to choose a design firm for the project, The State, a local newspaper, reported. The school is named for the donor, Darla Moore, a financier who is also a member of the school's private foundation. Her choice, the New York firm Raphael Viñoly Architects, had been a finalist for the contract but was not going to win it, a source told the newspaper.

Other academic projects designed by Viñoly include Bard College's Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation and the Charles M. Harper Center of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Nearly 70 percent of Idaho State University faculty members who participated in an advisory vote last week expressed no confidence in their provost, Gary A. Olson, the Idaho State Journal reported. The vote has no binding effect. Mr. Olson, who has been at Idaho State for less than a year, has led efforts to develop a sweeping reorganization plan that is intended to save up to $1-million. But some faculty critics say the plan would create excessive administrative oversight, while others doubt the savings it would generate. Mr. Olson, a regular contributor of advice columns to The Chronicle, could not be reached for comment in the Idaho State Journal's article.

A South Carolina judge has blocked the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church from removing trustees from the governing board of Erskine College while a lawsuit filed by three of the trustees against the church is pending, The Greenville News reported. In March, the church's governing body voted to fire 14 trustees from the 30-member board. Three of the ousted trustees sued the church, and a judge on Friday issued a temporary injunction saying they would be likely to prevail if the case went to trial, according to reports in the News and the Anderson Independent-Mail. The college, in Due West, S.C., is affiliated with the denomination. The church has investigated student complaints that professors have questioned their religious faith, and faculty members have complained that the church is trying to impose a narrow orthodoxy on the college.

Ten years after Florida banned affirmative-action admissions policies, minority enrollment at the state's public universities is lagging, The Orlando Sentinel reported. According to the newspaper's analysis, black students made up 17.5 percent of the state's university freshmen in 1999, but only 14.9 percent in 2008. Their representation among high-school graduates was roughly unchanged over those years, at about 20 percent. Jeb Bush, the former governor who had championed the "One Florida" initiative that ended consideration of race in admissions, said the program had succeeded in admitting minority students without offering explicit racial preferences. But State Sen. Tony Hill, a Democrat and longtime critic of One Florida, said, "We turned our back on a policy that we know was working. And now we have less diversity."