The American Council on Education and more than a dozen research universities and organizations have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the patent case in which Stanford University lost ownership of a series of patents because one of the university-employed inventors had assigned his ownership rights to a company as part of a consulting agreement.  In their brief to the court, the universities and organizations contend that letting stand a federal-appeals court ruling that grants ownership to the company, Roche Molecular Systems, will "cloud universities' title to thousands of federally funded inventions, contrary to Congress's intent and the public interest."

E-mail messages released as part of the U.S. Senate's investigation into whether Goldman Sachs's investment tactics involved engineering trades to profit at the expense of its most important customers reveal that one of them was Harvard University. In a report in The Boston Globe, a Harvard spokesman declined to say how much the university lost in the 2007 derivatives trade but said the transaction was part of an investment strategy that "is no longer pursued."

The video-indexing patents auctioned off online this week by the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education drew a bid of $7-million. The institute, which developed the technology to search its archive of testimonies from Holocaust survivors and liberators, will use the proceeds (less a 15-percent fee to the auction company, Ocean Tomo) to continue its educational and research programs. Ocean Tomo policies forbid the institute, an arm of the University of Southern California, to disclose the identity of the successful bidder, but a university official said it was a party that would actually use the patented technology, not a company that buys up patents in order to simply sue alleged infringers.

Moody's Investors Service will now require institutions whose creditworthiness it rates to disclose more about the portion of their assets that cannot be tapped to cover daily, monthly, or annual costs of operations or debt service because the assets are tied up in real estate, hedge funds, or other investments. The credit-rating agency's demand for more information about illiquid funds also covers assets that are restricted by conditions imposed by a donor. Over the past 18 months of the financial crisis, an unusually high number of colleges have found themselves scrambling to satisfy obligations for loans or investments to which they had committed, and Moody's, which rates the debt of hundreds of colleges, had previously signaled its concern about colleges' lack of disclosure about liquidity.

The Association of University Research Parks has its own ideas for improving the way university inventions move from the lab to the market -- 10 of them, in fact. Its report, "The Power of Place 2.0: The Power of Innovation," was released on Thursday at the second of two big conclaves this week about innovation and the economy. In the report, the group calls for changing federal laws to allow greater use of grant money for the costs of commercializing academic research. The changes would ease restrictions that prohibit private companies from operating out of facilities built with tax-exempt financing. The report also endorses a proposal by Krisztina Holly, vice provost for innovation at the University of Southern California, for new federal "proof of concept" funds, which would go to a test group of universities to advance development of early-stage inventions.

Bernard Lander, who founded Touro University and became known as one of nonprofit higher education's most creative and improbable entrepreneurs, died this week of congestive heart failure at the age of 94. Although Touro's trustees had announced his successor in June, Mr. Lander continued to build his institution, most recently signing an agreement to bring in New York Medical College as the fourth medical school in the univeristy's international system of colleges.

The tax credit for small businesses and nonprofit organizations that hire new employees, proposed this week by President Obama, would also apply to private colleges and the affiliated foundations of public universities. For such groups, which are exempt from federal income tax, the credit would apply to payroll taxes on wages that they do pay, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Taking a page from several other institutions that have recently acquired shuttered industrial sites, the University of Maryland at College Park is planning to expand by buying The Washington Post's former production plant for $12-million. After the deal is finalized, in February, the university plans to seek developers and other partners to refurbish the building as a feature of its east campus.

The U.S. secretary of commerce, Gary Locke, announced this week that he would convene a forum of college leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, and government officals in February to find ways to improve the commercialization of federally financed research conducted at universities. The announcement, made in a speech at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation's "State of Entrepreneurism" event, comes not long after foundation officials criticized technology-transfer practices, and as the Obama administration turns more toward improving the economy.

The National Labor College announced today that it was forming a new distance-learning joint venture with the Penn Foster Education Group (recently acquired by Princeton Review), in a program tentatively called the College for Working Families. Penn Foster will provide the marketing, course platform, and recruiting services, while the college, which serves 11.5 million union members and their families, will be solely responsible for the quality and integrity of the academic offerings.