Oklahoma's only Roman Catholic university will begin laying off some of its faculty and staff members this week, according to an announcement on Wednesday. David Marker, interim president of St. Gregory's University, told the Associated Press that 5 percent of the institution's 119 employees would be affected. Endowment losses and declining enrollments were blamed. A hiring freeze and other cost cuts are also planned.

A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that Fairleigh Dickinson University is immune from liability for the 2005 death of a student who fell from a fourth-floor dormitory window, The Star-Ledger reports. The student, Keith Orzech, 21, had been drinking heavily. The ruling overturns a $260,000 jury award to Mr. Orzech's family. The three-judge panel cited New Jersey’s Charitable Immunity Act, which protects educational institutions if a plaintiff is a beneficiary "of the works of such nonprofit corporation."

Mike Leach, the Texas Tech football coach who was suspended two days ago while the university investigated his treatment of a player with a concussion, was fired today, the Associated Press reports. The player, Adam James, had alleged that the coach confined him twice in dark rooms while the team practiced. The university would have owed Mr. Leach an $800,000 bonus if he was still the coach on December 31.

The federal Food and Drug Administration says it will ban a range of alcoholic beverages that contain caffeine unless the companies that produce them can quickly prove that the drinks are safe, The New York Times reports. The drinks, which are promoted to young people with social-marketing tools, have become increasingly popular among college students. A group of scientists who study college drinking told the FDA in a letter, "Being wide awake and drunk at the same time increases the risk of engaging in several forms of violent or other high-risk physical behaviors that can cause injury."

On the heels of protests that roiled the University of California system, Robert J. Birgenaeu and Frank D. Yeary, the chancellor and vice chancellor of the Berkeley campus, write in The Washington Post that the time has come for a national "federal-state university system." Under their proposal, "a limited number of our great public research and teaching universities [would] receive basic operating support from the federal government and their respective state governments."

Continuing its coverage of how politics have influenced college admissions in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reports that scholarships that state legislators are permitted to give out as a perk of the job often go to the children of their political supporters.

Each legislator gets to hand out the equivalent of two four-year scholarships each year -- good for all tuition and fees -- that can be left intact or divided into as many as eight one-year awards. The Tribune reports that the lawmakers last year distributed 1,509 scholarships worth a total of $12.5-million. In the meantime, they slashed support for other college grants.

B. Joseph White announced this week that he would step down in December as president of the three-campus University of Illinois system in the wake of the Tribune's series of reports. He has denied any wrongdoing.

The University of Utah agreed to pay nearly $500,000 to settle a lawsuit over the deaths of seven Chinese scholars who were killed in when their 15-passenger van crashed in Pennsylvania in 2003, The Salt Lake Tribune reports. The university, as host of the scholars, had made their travel arrangements. After the widows' testimony left jurors in tears, the university made its settlement offer.

A 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia appears to be the main target of a series of orchestrated cyberattacks Thursday and Friday on the Web services Twitter and Facebook, The New York Times reports. The professor, who reportedly teaches at Sukhumi State University and blogs under the name Cyxymu, would identify himself only as "Giorgi."