The University of Colorado at Boulder is considering shutting down its School of Journalism and Mass Communication as part of a "strategic and budgetary realignment," according to a news release issued today. In the release, the university's chancellor, Philip P. DiStefano, cited the "tremendous pace" of change in "news and communications transmission as well as the role of the press and journalism in a democratic society" as among the reasons for a review of the journalism school's status. At the same time, Mr. DiStefano said the university would explore a "new interdisciplinary academic program of information and communication technology." Committees looking into the proposals will receive input from faculty members and students this fall and report back to the chancellor next year. Even if the school is closed, all current students would be able to complete their degrees, the...

Marc Hauser, the prominent Harvard psychologist whom the university said yesterday was "solely responsible" for scientific misconduct in his lab, says he is "deeply sorry for the problems this case has caused to my students, my colleagues, and my university." But in a statement he released late Friday, he acknowledged only that he had made "some significant mistakes," not that he had committed the research misconduct of which he has been accused. He also said he was "deeply disappointed" over a retraction and two corrections of published work. Professor Hauser, who is currently on leave, said he looked forward to returning to work, "mindful of what I have learned in this case."

Frank Kermode, a leading literary scholar and critic on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1950s, died on Tuesday in Cambridge, England, at the age of 90. According to The Guardian, Mr. Kermode held endowed chairs at Cambridge, Harvard, and University College London; inspired the founding of the London Review of Books; and for more than half a century imparted to readers his enormous erudition in dozens of critical works on writers including Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Forster. His publisher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Alan Samson, called him "probably the greatest literary conversationalist I've ever known." The New York Times has posted a longer obituary.

The Rev. Charles L. Currie, president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, announced today that he would step down as president next June, after serving 14 years in the post. Father Currie, who previously served as president of Wheeling Jesuit University, in West Virginia, and Xavier University, in Ohio, will be succeeded by the Rev. Greg Lucey, a former president of Spring Hill College, in Alabama.

Faculty members at the Art Institute of Seattle, a for-profit college owned by the Education Management Corporation, voted narrowly last week against forming a union, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. A spokewoman for the American Federation of Teachers said she was surprised at the result because it seemed that faculty members initially wanted a union. She said the institute's response to the union bid -- to reduce class sizes, improve facilities, and address faculty concerns about the quality of education, among other things -- might have made a difference. But an instructor accused the college of using "union busting" tactics, including mandatory meetings and several phone calls each day with a message of "intimidation" about how a union was "going to be bad."

Rep. Charles B. Rangel, a once-powerful New York Democrat who has served in Congress for 40 years, will face a public trial before the House ethics committee over a number of alleged violations that, according to two anonymous sources quoted by The New York Times, includes doing a political favor for a businessman in return for a major donation to the City University of New York's City College. Mr. Rangel, who has denied the allegations since they were first made, in 2008, reiterated his denials on Thursday. In the CUNY allegation, the congressman is said to have used his clout as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee to preserve a tax loophole worth tens of millions of dollars for an oil company whose chief executive had pledged to give $1-million to help create the university's Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service. The center, for which Mr. Rangel has raised more than...

The San Jose/Evergreen Community College District has agreed to pay $100,000 to settle a two-year-old lawsuit filed by an adjunct professor of biology whom it dismissed over her classroom comments about homosexuality, according to the Associated Press. The professor, June Sheldon, answered a student's question about the genetic roots of homosexuality by referring to a study finding that environmental factors can play a role. After a student complained, a dean investigated and concluded that she had taught "misinformation as science," which was considered grounds for dismissal. Under the settlement, the college admitted no wrongdoing but removed the dismissal from Ms. Sheldon's record.

One in 20 essays submitted by applicants for medical residencies at a prestigious Harvard teaching hospital contained evidence of plagiarism, according to a study published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine and described by The Boston Globe. The authors, a group at Brigham and Women's Hospital led by Scott Segal and Brian Gelfand, studied nearly 5,000 personal statements submitted from 2005 to 2007 with applications to the five largest residency programs at the hospital.

About 14 percent of the applications from outside the United States and Canada contained plagiarized material, while around 2 percent of the applications submitted by U.S. citizens did. Copied sections included personal anecdotes about patients and family members. "I think that is the part that bothered me the most," Dr. Segal told the Globe. "You read this heartfelt anecdote about a person's illness or a...

The controversy over the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's dismissal of an adjunct professor for his teachings in a course on Roman Catholicism has been exacerbated by word, reported in today's Chicago Tribune, that the instructor was selected to teach the course and was paid by the church, through the campus's St. John's Catholic Newman Center, which is financed by the diocese of Peoria, Ill. The adjunct, Kenneth Howell, was dismissed after a student complained to the university that Mr. Howell's remarks on Catholic doctrine on homosexuality constituted "hate speech." A university panel is now reviewing the situation, to determine if Mr. Howell's academic freedom or free speech were violated.

A separate committee will look into the university's 39-year-old partnership with the church, in which the latter largely determines how Catholicism is taught in the otherwise-secular...

New York University has said it is not interested in acquiring films of the late artist Larry Rivers' two daughters as naked adolescents, The New York Times reports. The university is purchasing an archive of the artist's work from the Larry Rivers Foundation, and according to an NYU spokesman, it was surprised to learn a few weeks ago about the content of the tapes and about the dispute between one of the daughters and the foundation over the disposition of the films. The spokesman, John Beckman, said NYU had asked the foundation whether there were any other "similarly problematic material that should not come to the university."