Royce C. Engstrom, provost of the University of Montana, was approved by the state Board of Regents on Thursday as the university’s next president. Mr. Engstrom became the sole candidate for the presidency this summer after two other finalists dropped out. He will begin his new duties on October 15, replacing George M. Dennison, who is retiring after leading the institution for two decades.

A former employee of American University was sentenced on Wednesday to a year in prison and ordered to make full restitution of nearly $400,000 she stole from the university's law journals over a six-year period, according to a news release from the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. The former employee, Martine Tavakoli, of McLean, Va., pleaded guilty in May to a charge of interstate transportation of stolen property. Ms. Tavakoli deposited checks made out to the law journals into an account she opened in Virginia and used for personal expenses, the prosecutor said.

The University of Florida has fired a professor after finding he made inappropriate comments in the classroom and behaved inappropriately toward female students, The Gainesville Sun reported. The professor, Timothy Taylor, who taught in the department of food and resource economics, reportedly offended students by telling a class on contemporary issues in agribusiness management that Latin American women dress more provocatively than U.S. women. In a letter of termination sent on Friday, the department chair, Ray G. Huffaker, wrote that Mr. Taylor had been suspended twice previously for inappropriate actions and warned that any similar incidents would result in dismissal. Mr. Taylor, who is filing a grievance to challenge his termination, said he was making a point about cultural differences and accused the university of stifling academic freedom.

A faculty physician was wounded in a shooting incident that claimed two lives and shut down parts of the Johns Hopkins University's medical complex in East Baltimore for several hours on Thursday, The Sun reported. The shooter apparently killed his mother, an 84-year-old patient in the Johns Hopkins Hospital, before turning the gun on himself. Investigators discovered their bodies after sending in a robot with a camera. The doctor, David B. Cohen, an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery, was wounded in the abdomen and was expected to recover. Access to the School of Nursing, across the street from the hospital, was restricted during the incident. A notice on the university's Web site advised nursing students to check with instructors about the status of classes and not to come to the East Baltimore campus if they did not need to.

A federal appeals court has reversed the conviction of a woman accused of taking part in an arson attack that destroyed a horticultural research center at the University of Washington in 2001, The Seattle Times reported. In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the trial of Briana Waters was so riddled with judicial errors that the panel did not believe her conviction was fairly obtained. The decision sends the case back to the the U.S. District Court in Tacoma for a new trial. The attack was one of several claimed by the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group that federal investigators have designated a terror threat.

Fisk University's famous art collection, donated by Georgia O’Keeffe and valued at $74-million, may be spending time in Arkansas in the future, but it won't be headed to a museum in downtown Nashville in the meantime, The Tennessean reported. On Tuesday, after more than 100 Fisk students protested the state attorney general's plan to move the collection to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts until the university could better afford its upkeep, a state judge rejected that idea as a "short-term solution" and "insufficient." The judge, Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle, said her only alternative was to consider Fisk's petition for permission to sell a $30-million share in the collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Ark. The judge has given Fisk and the attorney general until October 8 to submit plans that would ease Fisk's financial responsibility for caring...

A trial has begun in Manhattan for the lawyer who is accused of stealing a professor's identity online, among other cybercrimes, in a campaign to advance his father's arguments in a scholarly debate over the authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Associated Press reported. The lawyer, Raphael Golb, is the son of the religion scholar Norman Golb of the University of Chicago. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of using Internet aliases to falsely accuse Lawrence Schiffman of New York University of plagiarizing his father's work. The alleged crimes and cyberbullying were detailed by The Chronicle last year.

A federal judge has ruled that New York University is not required to award an M.B.A. to a student who had completed his course requirements before pleading guilty to conspiracy in an insider-trading case, Reuters reported. The student had sued NYU for denying him the degree, saying it had violated its own disciplinary rules. But Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, ruled that the discretion to determine whether the student was qualified to receive the degree rested with the business school's faculty.

Faculty members at Eastern Michigan University have voted overwhelmingly to approve a two-year contract, the Detroit Free Press reported. The agreement, reached late last month by university administrators and the faculty union, calls for salary increases each year, but also requires faculty members to pay more toward health-insurance costs.

The governing board of the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science resigned on Friday in a last-ditch effort to save the beleaguered institution, which was at risk of seizure because it was not expected to make payments on $43-million borrowed to build a new nursing school, the Los Angeles Times reported. The new board includes leaders of the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, and will be led by M. Roy Wilson, a former chancellor at the University of Colorado at Denver. One expectation of the restructuring is that the University of California might resume its previous level of financial support to Drew.