The dean of Liberty University's seminary, who has been at the center of a controversy over whether he made false statements about his Muslim past, is stepping down from his leadership post but will return as a faculty member, according to a university statement quoted by The News & Advance, a newspaper in Lynchburg, Va. The university investigated after bloggers challenged some claims made by the dean, Ergun Caner. It found that he had made "factual statements that are self-contradictory," the statement says.

In a special session on Sunday, New York's Legislature sidestepped Gov. David A. Paterson's attempt to force the lawmakers to approve his proposal to give the State University of New York and the City University of New York more freedom in setting tuition, the Associated Press reported. Mr. Paterson had put that measure and other policy goals into an emergency-spending bill that the Legislature would have had to pass on Monday or shut down the state government, but lawmakers got around the emergency measure on Saturday when the Assembly and Senate reached agreement on amended versions of the governor's own budget bills. Mr. Paterson then ordered the lawmakers to meet on Sunday to consider measures rejected in Saturday's agreement. The Assembly and the Senate each met for four minutes on Sunday, but neither took up Mr. Paterson's proposals.

Erskine College, in Due West, S.C., and the church that founded it have resolved a dispute in which the church removed 14 members of the college's governing board and threatened to withhold financial support, The Greenville News reported. Three ousted board members and an alumni group had sued the church and won a court order that prevented the changes from going into effect. While details of the agreement are not complete, the newspaper said the deal would end the litigation and effectively restore the previous board.

In an effort to eliminate a potential conflict of interest in medical education, the University of Michigan Medical School has announced that, starting next January, it will no longer take any money from drug or medical-device manufacturers to pay for the refresher courses that doctors must take to renew their licenses, The New York Times reported. Industry financing for continuing-medical-education courses amounts to some $1.2-billion a year nationwide, according to the National Academies' Institute of Medicine. Concerns that biased or inaccurate information might be disseminated in courses underwritten by industry have been raised by medical educators and government officials in recent years. Some medical schools, including Stanford University's, have limited outside influence over courses by pooling all industry contributions rather than allowing a company to specify the courses it...

The Minnesota State Community and Technical College at Wadena remains closed after suffering extensive damage in a tornado last week and is arranging for summer-session classes to continue at other locations, the college announced. James H. McCormick, chancellor of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, visited the campus on Sunday and pledged to assist the college in resuming summer courses and working toward reopening in the fall. The tornado that struck Wadena, in northwestern Minnesota, carved a 10-mile swath of destruction, according to news reports, and was classified by the National Weather Service as category EF4, the second-most-powerful category.

In a court filing this week, Virginia's attorney general argues that his demands for documents from the University of Virginia related to the work of a prominent climate scientist who formerly taught there should be granted because neither academic freedom nor the First Amendment "immunizes" a person from a fraud investigation, The Washington Post reported. The attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, says he is investigating whether the scientist, Michael E. Mann, knowingly used inaccurate data in grant applications, but some academics see the inquiry as a political attack on climate-change research. The university had petitioned a state judge to quash Mr. Cuccinelli's request, arguing that turning over the documents would violate Mr. Mann's academic freedom. The response filed by Mr. Cuccinelli's office on Tuesday states that "academic freedom is neither implicated nor threatened"...

The University of Utah is celebrating an invitation to join the Pacific-10 Conference and is expected to announce its acceptance on Thursday after a midday vote by the university's trustees, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. Utah, which is now in the Mountain West Conference, will become the Pac-10's 12th member, following the league's addition of the University of Colorado last week.

A Brown University graduate who accused a former classmate of rape has sued the student and his parents for breach of contract, the Associated Press reported. The claim involves a contract the two students signed in October 2006 that was intended to resolve the case. The woman says the accused student violated that contract when he later sued Brown, as well as her and her father, who is a Brown alumnus and a major donor. The former student says Brown suspended him without due process on the basis of a false accusation.

The trustees of South Carolina State University voted on Tuesday not to renew the contract of the institution's president, George E. Cooper, according to The State and The Times and Democrat, newspapers in South Carolina. Mr. Cooper, whose contract expires this month, had been at the university just two years, replacing another president whose contract was not renewed in late 2007. The board did not specify its reasons for terminating Mr. Cooper's employment. Its 7-to-4 vote came after a five-hour meeting behind closed doors to evaluate his performance.

Adjunct lecturers at Eastern Michigan University have voted in favor of union representation by a local affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, the union announced on Tuesday. The bargaining unit will include 560 adjunct lecturers, who teach more than a third of all first-year classes at the Ypsilanti institution, according to the union, the Eastern Michigan University Federation of Teachers. Contract discussions will begin in the fall, the Detroit Free Press reported.