The Academic Senate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Monday overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging university officials to cut formal ties with a foundation that espouses free-market ideals, to avoid the appearance of endorsing its views. The University Senates Conference, which represents faculty members on all three University of Illinois campuses, passed a similar resolution last month. Faculty leaders thought they had persuaded university officials to sever formal ties with the foundation, the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government, in 2008, but a report issued in August by the Urbana-Champaign senate's executive committee concluded that the foundation remains formally affiliated with the university and its fund-raising arm. A spokesman for the university system has said its president, Michael J. Hogan, plans to meet with faculty and student leaders to...

Top officials at the University of Minnesota have told faculty representatives they plan to review their institution's actions in connection with a documentary on the environment to ensure academic freedom was not compromised, according to reports in The Minnesota Daily and the Twin Cities Daily Planet. The controversy stems from a decision by Twin Cities Public Television to postpone the October 5 premiere of Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story at the request of Karen Himle, the university's vice president for university relations. The station has since agreed to show the film, but students and faculty leaders have asked whether administrators' actions in connection with the premiere's delay violated a university policy prohibiting institutional restraint on research and creative expression on matters of public concern.

Faculty leaders in the Louisiana State University system are worried enough about the long-term fallout from perceived threats to tenure in the University of Louisiana system to have passed a resolution weighing in on the debate. The University of Louisiana system's Board of Supervisors last month considered proposed policy changes intended to make it easier for the system to dismiss tenured professors for budgetary reasons, but postponed voting on the policy revisions to allow for feedback from system lawyers and faculty members. The Louisiana State University system's Council of Faculty Advisors, which represents faculties on that system's campuses, last week passed a resolution urging the University of Louisiana's board to slow down consideration of the policy changes and negotiate them with faculty representatives in good faith. Kevin L. Cope, the council's chairman, said its members...

Education researchers are protesting an effort by Arizona officials to obtain data from studies of English-language learners that, the researchers argue, should be kept confidential, Education Week reported Thursday. Lawyers for the superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, say they issued a subpoena for the data because they need it to cross-examine expert witnesses in a legal battle over the state's approach to educating English learners in its public elementary and secondary schools. But researchers from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University who conducted the studies say their research protocols promised schools that the data would be kept confidential. Turning it over, they said, would discourage participation in such studies down the road. Patricia Gándara and Gary Orfield, co-directors of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los...

The controversial former president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, will be joining the faculty of Georgetown University this fall. The university announced today that it has named Mr. Uribe as a distinguished scholar and that he will be conducting seminars and other program activities for students in its Walsh School of Foreign Service and elsewhere at the institution. Mr. Uribe served as Colombia's president from 2002 until last week. He was regarded as a close ally of the United States and a leading advocate of free trade, and he was widely credited with helping to reduce the level of violence there. He was also accused of ties to drug traffickers and right-wing paramilitary groups, which he denied.

Texas, in replacing affirmative-action preferences in public-college admissions with a guarantee of acceptance for students in the top 10th of their high-school class, appears to have hurt the graduation prospects of lower-ranked minority students who ended up shut out of its most-selective higher-education institutions, according to the findings of a study recently published in the Economics of Education Review. The study by Kalena E. Cortes, an assistant professor of higher education at Syracuse University, found that the mid-1990s admissions-policy shift was followed by drop of 3.3 percentage points in the six-year college graduation rates of black and Hispanic students with high-school class rankings between the top 10 and 20 percent, and a 4.2 percentage-point decline in the graduation rates of such minority students with high-school class rankings lower than that. The study charted...

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard oral arguments today in a lawsuit challenging the use of race-conscious admissions by the University of Texas at Austin, the Austin American-Statesman reported, but the judges gave little indication of how they might rule. According to the Associated Press, a lawyer for the university argued that its admission policy was carefully tailored to conform with the limitations on such policies spelled out by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2003 ruling involving the University of Michigan's law school. Lawyers for the students challenging the policy argued that it appeared to be designed simply to increase minority representation, and was not justified based on any educational benefits. The case came before the Fifth Circuit on an appeal of a U.S. District Court decision last year to throw out the lawsuit.

The California Supreme Court today upheld that state's Proposition 209 ban on affirmative-action preferences in a case involving public contracting by the city of San Francisco, the Mercury News has reported. The measure, passed in 1996, amended California's constitution to bar public colleges and other state and local agencies from granting preferences based on race, ethnicity, or gender in education, employment, and contracting. In today's 6-to-1 ruling, the state's highest court rejected San Francisco's argument that Proposition 209 violates the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection Clause because it creates barriers for minority and female contractors that are not faced by other constituencies seeking favored treatment. Opponents of Proposition 209 said today's decision was not a complete loss for them, however, because it left open the possibility that San Francisco can show its...

The American Association of University Professors has urged South Dakota State University to reverse its decision to fire an entomologist, arguing that the institution failed to follow appropriate dismissal procedures. Michael Catangui, a tenured professor in the university's department of plant science and an Extension Service entomologist, said in an interview Tuesday that he has been fired and locked out of his office without any formal dismissal procedure. A university spokesman declined to comment on the dispute, saying it was a confidential personnel matter. In a letter sent to university officials this month, Gregory F. Scholtz, director of the AAUP's Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, said Mr. Catangui should have been afforded a hearing in front of a faculty committee before being dismissed for what his department's head characterized as "serious performance...

The U.S. State Department has reversed a decision to deny a visa to Colombian journalist planning to study at Harvard University, the American Civil Liberties Union said today. The ACLU had joined several other groups in calling for his entry into the United States. The journalist, Hollman Morris, is critical of Colombia's right-wing militias and has been accused by that nation's departing president, Álvaro Uribe, of aiding terrorists. Mr. Morris was selected to participate in Harvard's Nieman fellowship program but reportedly was denied a visa by a U.S. consular official who cited language in the USA Patriot Act intended to bar people with terrorism connections. The statement issued by the ACLU today said it hopes the State Department's decision to grant a visa to Mr. Morris "is a signal that the Obama administration is committed to facilitating, rather than obstructing, the exchange ...