Diagnostics Hybrids Inc., a company founded in 1983 by Ohio University professors, its president at the time, and a graduate, and supported by the university for decades since then, is being sold for $130-million in cash. The university, whose 32-percent stake in the company is unusually large for a university spinoff, will receive about $41-million.

The University of Maryland at College Park may be putting Yiddish instruction out on its tuchis after the 2010-11 academic year for financial reasons, but the National Yiddish Book Center is celebrating the biggest single gift in its history, $3-million from the estate of Mickey Ross, a television writer whose work on shows like All in the Family took aim at anti-Semitic bigotry. The Yiddish Book Center is a scholarly resource known for efforts to save books of Yiddish literature and make them available to researchers and others in more technologically friendly formats. Mr. Ross's bequest also included $4.5-million for YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, its largest gift ever.

C. Peter Magrath, a longtime higher-education official, has established a scholarship for a woman studying journalism at the University of Texas at Austin in memory of his wife Deborah Howell, 68, who was killed in an accident last week in New Zealand, where the two were on vacation. Ms. Howell, a pioneering journalist known for her big heart and lusty sense of humor, was a familiar figure to many in higher education through her husband's ties. Mr. Magrath, a veteran college administrator, was president for 13 years of the organization now known as the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and more recently was interim president of West Virginia University.

While Abbott Laboratories still plans to appeal a record-setting patent-infringement judgment involving its arthritis drug Humira that could yield millions of dollars to New York University, the company announced this week that it had settled another case related to the drug that was filed by the University of Iowa and its research foundation. The amount and terms of the settlement in that case, filed in June, were not made public.

Two leaders of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which for years has made no secret of its low regard for the abilities of university technology-transfer offices, is now calling for a change in rules for the 30-year-old federal Bayh-Dole Act, to give professors the right to choose their own agents to handle the licensing of their inventions. The idea, which would change current practice (universities, which own the rights to academic inventions, typically hold that responsibility), has gotten a boost from the Harvard Business Review, which ranks it as one of its 10 Breakthrough Ideas for 2010.

The parent company of the University of Phoenix said on Monday that it would pay $67-million to the U.S. government, plus $11-million in lawyers' fees, to settle a 2003 "whistle-blower" lawsuit by two former student recruiters, who accused the company of obtaining federal student aid under false pretenses. The company, Apollo Group Inc., noted that the settlement, first discussed in October, includes no admission of wrongdoing.

For-profit colleges sometimes describe themselves as the "tax-paying sector" of higher education. Now the Education Management Corporation will receive $6-million in state and local tax credits and grants as part of a plan to expand its headquarters in Pittsburgh and add 600 employees over the next three years, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. The company, which operates the Art Institutes and Argosy University, said the new workers -- at the headquarters and at a new data center -- would be in addition to the 2,500-plus it already employs, and would be part of a $30-million investment in Allegheny County.

A University of Florida patent for a nutritional supplement to build muscles was found invalid by a federal appeals court because an ad for the product in the body-builder magazine Flex made public key information about the product, which undercut the university's ability to claim its invention was new and novel. The court ruling can be found here.

Five leading research universities pledged today to do more to ensure that poor people and developing nations can get access to new drugs based on inventions coming from academic research, according to Bloomberg News. The five signers are Harvard University (which has already used licensing terms in deals to promote this "global access") as well as the University of Pennsylvania and Boston, Brown, and Yale Universities. The push for global access comes from the campuses and from Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, which has also been urging Congress and research universities to oppose a measure in legislation to overhaul the health-care system that would give drug companies 12 years of exclusive rights to certain new kinds of drugs.

Brigham Young University, which is suing Pfizer Inc. for billions of dollars claiming the giant pharmaceutical company's drug Celebrex infringes a university-owned patent, was awarded more than $850,000 from the company by a federal magistrate after she found that Pfizer had repeatedly delayed the progress of the case, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. The university has also claimed that Pfizer destroyed some evidence that would have shown that a BYU professor played a key role in developing the drug.