Brandeis University this afternoon named as its new president Frederick M. Lawrence, the law dean at George Washington University and an expert on civil rights and free expression. Mr. Lawrence, who is 54 and will succeed Jehuda Reinharz on January 1, will take the helm of an institution that was rocked last year by a proposal, since rescinded, to close its Rose Art Museum and sell off its collection to help close a budget deficit.

The student newspaper at Pennsylvania State University at University Park will not have to delete articles from its Web site describing criminal charges against five people that were later dropped or dismissed, according to the Centre Daily Times, a local newspaper that was also initially ordered by county judges to expunge articles it had published about the charges. After an outcry that the newspapers' First Amendment rights were being violated, the judges rescinded or revised their orders, clarifying that the expungement directives concerned only public agencies, such as the police force, subject to judicial control.

The Daily Collegian, a student newspaper at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, has been ordered by two local judges to delete articles from its Web site about five people who faced criminal charges that were later dropped or dismissed, according to the Centre Daily Times, a local newspaper that received the same orders from the two judges. Such orders are commonly directed at the police and other law-enforcement agencies. This case is unusual in that the judges acceded to a defense lawyer's request that the orders include newspapers that reported on the charges. "What’s the sense in having your record expunged," said the lawyer, "if anyone can Google you and it comes up?" But one of the judges, Bradley P. Lunsford of the Centre County Court, later said that his order had been issued in error and that, as soon as he heard from the Times's lawyer, he would issue another...

Back in March, when the Clay Mathematics Institute announced that its first $1-million Millennium Prize had been awarded to Grigori Perelman, a brilliant but reclusive Russian mathematician, the institute's president said he was not sure if Mr. Perelman would accept the honor. The Russian, renowned for having proved the century-old Poincaré conjecture, had already declined to accept a Fields Medal, the top prize in the field. The institute's president, James Carlson, said only that Mr. Perelman would let him know "in due time." Well, Mr. Carlson now has his answer. According to today's Washington Post and New York Times, it is nyet. The institute said the prize money would be used "to benefit mathematics."

Congress killed the guaranteed student-loan program in March, but banks buried it today. Yesterday was the final day that banks and other lenders could issue federally guaranteed student loans. From now on, the federal government will make all federal loans directly to students through their colleges.

Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives plan to take up a supplemental war-spending bill this week that would provide $4.95-billion for the Pell Grant program. The bill originally included $5.7-billion for the grants, but spending on the Pell program and others was trimmed because of Democrats' concerns about the growing budget deficit.

Gerald R. Fink, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been awarded the $500,000 Genetics Prize for 2010 presented by the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation, for his pioneering work in yeast genetics and in the use of model organisms to study broader questions in biology, and for inspiring a generation of geneticists at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, the foundation announced today. Mr. Fink will receive the award in November in Washington. The foundation also recently announced the winners of its $500,000 prizes in cosmology and neuroscience: Charles Steidel of the California Institute of Technology and Robert H. Wurtz of the National Institutes of Health, respectively.

Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the new chancellor of the University of California at San Francisco, and her husband have ordered the sale of their sizable stockholdings in the tobacco giant Altria, the owner of Philip Morris USA, after The New York Times asked about the investment, initially valued at $100,000 to $1-million. Dr. Desmond-Hellmann is an oncologist, her husband is an AIDS doctor, and the campus is one of the top medical-research universities in the country and holds a huge archive of tobacco-industry documents disclosed in litigation. The head of the university's Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education said Dr. Desmond-Hellmann had always supported the center. In a statement posted today, Dr. Desmond-Hellmann said she and her husband would donate to the center all proceeds from the sale of the stock. She also said they would henceforth "monitor our portfolio to ensure...

La Salle University has fired its vice president for auxiliary services after accusing him of running a scheme in which the Pennsylvania university paid several million dollars over 20 years to a fictitious food company that the vice president controlled, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. The official, Stephen C. Greb, did not respond to the newspaper's requests for comment. The university, a Roman Catholic institution, said it had discovered the alleged fraud through a new invoice-control system, and is now seeking restitution of the missing funds.

The University of Hawaii's Board of Regents voted unanimously today to build the world's largest optical telescope atop Mauna Kea, defying protests from Native Hawaiians who consider the mountaintop sacred and from environmentalists who said it would endanger the ecosystem. The billion-dollar project to build the Thirty Meter Telescope, an international partnership led by the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and a consortium of Canadian research universities, will help return Hawaii to the leading edge in telescope-based astronomy, which in recent years has moved to Chile. The 13,800-foot-high Mauna Kea offers ideal conditions for astronomical observation, with more than 300 cloudless days a year and little light pollution. The telescope, which could be completed by 2018, will give scientists a view of extrasolar planets and a glimpse back in time 13...