The Institute of International Education announced today the winners of its ninth annual Andrew Heiskell Awards for Innovation in International Education, which recognize colleges that have made significant attempts to provide international experiences for their students. This year's winners are the Georgia Institute of Technology, for internationalizing the campus; the California Institute of Technology and the École Polytechnique, in Paris, for international-exchange partnerships; Angelo State University, in Texas, and Washington and Jefferson College, in Pennsylvania, for study abroad; and the College of Lake County, in Illinois, for study abroad at a two-year college. The winning institutions and their programs will be a focus of the institute's Best Practices Conference, on March 19.

Ward Churchill is entering a race for Congress. No, the former ethnic-studies professor fired in 2007 from the University of Colorado at Boulder is not running for office. Rather, Mr. Churchill's ouster is being brandished in a campaign commercial by Tom Lucero, who is seeking the Republican nomination to take on the Democratic incumbent in the Fourth Congressional District. Mr. Lucero was one of the Colorado regents who voted to dismiss Mr. Churchill, and to the Republican's constituents in the four-way primary race, that's a winning issue. "Took care of that mess in Colorado," Mr. Lucero says in the commercial, according to the Colorado Daily. "Now I want to lead the fight to clean up Washington, D.C."

In a move to increase the number of minority physicians, the University of Massachusetts Medical School, in Worcester, is teaming up with four other campuses in the UMass system to offer admission to both college and medical school at once, according to today's Boston Globe. Under the unusual program, set to begin accepting students in the fall of 2011, would-be doctors from underrepresented ethnic and socioeconomic groups would receive their bachelor's degrees from the UMass campuses in Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, or Lowell, then get their M.D.'s at the medical school in Worcester.

In the wake of a criminal investigation into alleged financial wrongdoing at the City College of San Francisco, the college's foundation is seeking to separate itself from the college and gain full control of its $19-million in assets, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The foundation says the negative publicity from the alleged actions of the former chancellor and two retired administrators, some of which involved the foundation, has hurt fund raising.

Florida Atlantic University's board voted this week to cancel a medical-training affiliation with the University of Miami, as a first step toward setting up its own medical school, the South Florida Business Journal reported. But an end to the unusual partnership between a public and a private university, which Florida Atlantic's interim president called a "game changer," was not being welcomed at Miami, which helped create the program at Florida Atlantic and drew substantial tuition revenue from the deal, according to The Sun-Sentinel.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today awarded the 2010 Crafoord Prize in Geosciences to Walter Munk, a 92-year-old professor emeritus of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, for what the academy described as his "pioneering and fundamental contributions to our understanding of ocean circulation, tides, and waves, and their role in the Earth's dynamics." The prize, worth about $560,000 this year, is one of four Crafoord Prizes, each of which is presented every four years. Professor Munk will receive his prize at a ceremony in Stockholm in May.

A federal appeals court has upheld a decision by the federal Trademark Trial and Appeals Board that the University of South Carolina may not register a logo featuring the initials "SC" because the University of Southern California has already registered a mark using those letters. "We agree that 'SC' may refer to the State of South Carolina. But as the evidence offered by Southern California demonstrates, 'SC' refers to many entities aside from the state," concluded a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

A state court in New Hampshire has dismissed a lawsuit filed by several Dartmouth College alumni over 2007 changes in the size and composition of the college's Board of Trustees. In a ruling dated January 8, the Grafton County Superior Court granted the college's request for summary judgment and threw out the alumni's lawsuit, asserting that they lacked standing to sue in the matter and were raising objections that had already been dismissed by the court in 2008. The lawsuit said the changes, which expanded the board, would dilute alumni participation. The board approved the changes after a series of increasingly costly and bitter elections for alumni trustees.

The oft-noted dominance of liberals on American faculties has spawned a host of research about the source and effect of the pattern, but according to an unpublished study described in today's New York Times, the past research has been focused on the symptoms, not the cause. Rather than ask why most professors are liberals, the study finds a more fruitful line of inquiry is to ask why liberals seek to become academics, and conservatives do not. The new research -- "Why Are Professors Liberal?," by Neil Gross, of the University of British Columbia, and Ethan Fosse, a doctoral student at Harvard, both sociologists -- says that faculty positions are "typecast" just like any other jobs that are also overwhelmingly held by one gender, such as nursing (women), or one political outlook, such as law enforcement (conservative). "Occupational reputations affect people's career aspirations," said ...

The South Korean police are investigating an alleged SAT-cheating scheme in which a lecturer was said to have e-mailed a copy of the college-entrance examination, with an answer key, to two students in Connecticut whom he had tutored to prepare for the test, according to the Associated Press. The lecturer allegedly got the copy from a Thai student in Bangkok last year, then quickly e-mailed the test to the two students, who were scheduled to sit for the exam within hours. The students, who may have passed the cheat sheet on to 20 other South Korean students in the United States, ended up receiving nearly perfect scores.