A Washington State jury has ordered Clark College to pay $545,000 to a former women's basketball coach who alleged in a long-running lawsuit that he was wrongly dismissed, in 2002. According to The Columbian, a local newspaper, the coach, Trev Kiser, had expressed concern about the college's compliance with Title IX, a federal gender-equity law, but his lawsuit concerned only the issue of his firing. The college's president told the newspaper that it was considering its options, including, presumably, an appeal.

The managers of the investment fund for the University of Texas and Texas A&M University systems are putting their money where investors tend to turn when they fear high inflation and other big economic troubles loom ahead: They've invested $500-million of Permanent University Fund assets in gold, according to The Houston Chronicle. The decision, by the University of Texas Investment Management Company, is rare for managers of university endowments, who typically look for investments that will grow on their own, not just serve as a formidable hedge against inflation or currency fluctuations. Still, the fund's big gold purchase represents only a tiny fraction of its overall value of about $22.3-billion.

Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry is teaming up with the Illinois Institute of Technology to offer a master's degree in science education to schoolteachers, the Chicago Tribune reports. The museum and the institute have been collaborating on credit courses since 2007. Science museums are educational institutions, but they rarely get involved in granting degrees. The American Museum of Natural History, in New York, was the first in the United States with a doctoral program, offering M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s in comparative biology, according to a 2006 article in The New York Times.

A professor at the Texas A&M University Health Science Center sued the university and the A&M system this week, alleging that he had been demoted after questioning the construction of a medical building in which he said some A&M employees held a financial stake, the Austin American-Statesman reported. The professor, Robert Hash, says he was relieved of his position as vice dean of academic affairs and stripped of tenure a few days after he filed an ethics complaint about the building, which he says was constructed at above-market prices. He says that after he appealed the decision, the university restored his tenured status but not his administrative post. The university's general counsel, Andrew Strong, told the newspaper that Mr. Hash had been demoted because of "personality differences with other administrators."

Birmingham-Southern College announced on Wednesday a series of major cuts to deal with its sweeping financial problems, The Birmingham News reported. Among other things, the college will lay off 51 staff members, not fill 14 vacant positions, reduce pay by 10 percent across the board, put all employees on two weeks of furlough, and cease contributions to retirement and dental plans. The college suffered a big blow to its finances when it made an ill-fated move up to Division I in sports, then retreated to Division III. This past spring it discovered that it had erroneously awarded millions in student aid. Moody's Investors Service recently issued an unusually harsh report on the college's finances.

Over the last generation, students of all racial and ethnic groups increased their college-going rates by double-digit percentage points, and also increasingly went directly from high school to college, according to a report out today from the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics. The report, "Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups," concerns itself largely with elementary and secondary education in studies covering the years since 1980. But in a section on postsecondary education, it notes that, as of 2008, members of most minority groups disproportionately attended public colleges, a much higher percentage of black students than other students were enrolled at for-profit colleges, 80 percent of students received some form of financial aid, and women earned more degrees than men within each racial group, especially among black...

A 62-year-old engineering professor at Boston University was found dead this morning in his laboratory at the institution's Photonics Center, The Boston Globe reported. The police did not disclose a cause of death for the professor, Francesco Cerrina, but homicide has been ruled out. As part of the investigation, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been notified, which the Globe said is standard procedure for an unattended death in a lab. Professor Cerrina, chairman of the electrical- and computer-engineering department, was known for his role, while at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in inventing a faster, cheaper way to manufacture gene chips, a technology that automates the search for particular segments of DNA.

Agriculture schools at the Universities of Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, and Vermont are among those planning to sell all or part of their herds of dairy cows as low milk prices, the high costs of feeding and maintaining the cattle, and overall budget pressures have combined to create an insuperable challenge at the land-grant institutions, the Associated Press reports. The animals are typically used for research, not instruction, and Vermont plans to have faculty members continue their work on private farms.

The University of Texas at Austin is one step closer to removing the name of a Ku Klux Klan leader from a dormitory on the campus. According to an announcement today, the university's president, William Powers Jr., endorsed the recommendations of a review panel and will recommend to the Board of Regents that the building, Simkins Residence Hall, be renamed Creekside Dormitory. The 55-year-old building was named for William Stewart Simkins, a law professor at the university in the early 20th century and former organizer for the Klan.

A ballyhooed study published last week by Science, announcing that 150 genetic variations could be used to predict whether someone would live to extreme old age, has now come under attack from geneticists, one of whom told The New York Times that it was "very unlikely" that the paper's findings "are correct, or even mostly correct." The critics have also raised questions about whether Science's editors, who announced the findings at a news conference, were insufficiently skeptical of the paper because of a competitive desire to publish blockbuster research. The authors of the paper, led by researchers at Boston University's medical school, and Science stood behind the research and the decision to publish it, although the lead author, Thomas T. Perls, acknowledged a "technical error" that "would not affect the overall accuracy of the model," the Times reported.