Harvard Law School is ending a program that waived third-year tuition for students who agreed to work in public-service jobs for five years after graduation, The Harvard Crimson reported. The school had allocated $3-million each year for the program. The Public Service Initiative was announced in 2008 as a way for students to lower their debt load so they could take on jobs in public service, which usually pay less than corporate positions. A dean wrote in an e-mail message to current students that they would still be able to participate in the program but incoming students would not. Fifty-eight third-year students benefit from the program this year.

Northeastern University is eliminating its football program because it doesn't want to spend money to improve the Division I team in the long run, The Boston Globe reported. Administrators and trustees said that bolstering the team, which has produced six consecutive losing seasons, would require spending millions of dollars on a new head coach, on recruiting, and on improving facilities. University officials, who insisted that the move was not connected to the recession, have not decided exactly how the program's annual $3-million budget will be used instead, the Globe reported, but they said players on scholarship would keep their student aid and would be helped to transfer, if they wanted.

A leading sportswear manufacturer and university licensee, Russell Athletic, will rehire 1,200 workers who lost their jobs after the company closed a plant in Honduras, The New York Times reported today. Critics said that the company had shut down the plant after its workers unionized and that it has a history of mistreating its employees. Russell's move followed furious lobbying and protests by student activists at American universities, as well as decisions by several of them to end licensing agreements with the company.

Leadership positions at the top competitive level of college football are largely held by white men, even though a majority of the athletes they supervise are not white, according to a study released today by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. The study found that, in the 2009 season, there are nine minority head coaches at colleges in the Football Bowl Subdivision, commonly known as Division I-A. Seven of those men are African-American, one is Hispanic, and one is Asian-American. By contrast, the study found that 50.4 percent of Division I-A athletes are African-American, 2.1 percent are Hispanic, and 2.3 percent are Asian-American.

Faculty leaders at Marshall University will investigate an incident in which the daughter of a government official received A's in independent-study courses without the approval of her professor, according to the Huntington Herald-Dispatch, a West Virginia newspaper. On Monday the executive committee of the university's Faculty Senate approved a petition from Laura Wyant, a professor of adult and technical education who said she had given the student incompletes in two of the courses. The student is the daughter of West Virginia's treasurer, John D. Perdue. In late September, Ms. Wyant accused a dean at the university of changing the grades.

The College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin has dropped a plan to reduce foreign-language requirements in the face of faculty outrage. After a packed faculty meeting on Monday at which no attendees spoke in favor of proposals to reduce the requirement from 16 credits to 12 credits, a dean sent an e-mail message to the faculty saying that changing the language requirement was off the table. Department heads have been told to find other ways to cope with budget cuts, said Peter Hess, chair of the Germanic-studies department.