July 3, 2009

New Allegations in Admissions Controversy at U. of Illinois Suggest Ex-Provost Played a Role

The shoes keep dropping as the Chicago Tribune digs deeper into allegations that politically connected applicants have used a range of techniques to gain admission to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Today the newspaper reported that a Greek Orthodox priest got help from the state treasurer in putting a family friend on the list of applicants with clout. As a result, the Tribune reported, the student was admitted and the priest helped raise money for the state treasurer, who was running for higher office.

This latest disclosure resembles other tales, unearthed by the Tribune, of how political ties — often to Illinois’s ousted governor, Rod Blagojevich — helped applicants whose mediocre credentials made it impossible to admit them based on what they knew, only on who they knew.

The difference in today’s news is that the episode appears to tie the university’s former provost, Linda P.B. Katehi, to the leg up given to the priest’s family friend. Ms. Katehi, formerly the engineering dean at Purdue University, supervised the admissions office as provost at Illinois but has insisted she was kept in the dark about the special treatment accorded certain applicants.

She was named in May as the new chancellor of the University of California at Davis and is scheduled to take office next month, but since the Tribune started its series of articles on the alleged admissions abuses, one California lawmaker has questioned her appointment. The University of California’s president, Mark G. Yudof, told the San Francisco Chronicle two weeks ago, however, that “I have 100-percent confidence in her.” —Andrew Mytelka

July 2, 2009

Sonoma State U. Foundation May Lose $350,000 on Loan to Former Board Member

A Sonoma State University foundation that provides scholarships to students stands to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because it lent $1.25-million to a financier and former board member who is facing bankruptcy, a newspaper reported.

The Sonoma State University Academic Foundation issued more than two dozen loans to individuals and businesses during the 1990s and earlier this decade, according to the newspaper, The Press Democrat, in Santa Rosa, Calif. One of the recipients, Clem Carinalli, told the nonprofit foundation that he would stop making interest payments on his loan because the real-estate crash had ruined his financial position. He said he might be able to repay the principal in three to four years. That means the foundation stands to lose up to $350,000 in interest payments, and more if Mr. Carinalli is unable to repay the principal in full.

In addition to being a former board member of the foundation and the largest landowner in Sonoma County, Mr. Carinalli leads a business that arranged more than two-thirds of the foundation’s loans, the newspaper reported. The organization will be forced to issue fewer scholarships in the 2010-11 academic year because of a diminished endowment, said Patricia McNeill, Sonoma State’s vice president for development.

News of the loan prompted the leader of Cal State’s systemwide faculty association to call for clamping down on auxiliary organizations, which she said hold 20 percent of the university’s budget and operate largely outside of public view. Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association, urged passage of legislation that would apply state public-record laws to university foundations.

“The irony is not lost on the CSU faculty that in the same week Bernie Madoff is sentenced to jail, we learn that money meant to help students get a college education is being lost to an insider scheme, supported by executives who hold the public trust,” Ms. Taiz said in a written statement. —Josh Keller

Court Overturns $2-Million Verdict for Former Coach at U. of Louisiana-Lafayette

A Louisiana appeals court has struck down a $2-million jury verdict in a race-discrimination lawsuit brought by a former football coach at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

The coach, Jerry Baldwin, one of the few African-American coaches in big-time college football, was fired in 2001 after three losing seasons. He sued the university, asserting he had been dismissed because of his race. In 2007 a state-court jury awarded him $2-million.

The university appealed that verdict, and on Wednesday the state’s First Circuit Court of Appeal ordered a new trial in the case. Among other problems, the appeals court said jury selection and expert testimony in the trial had been flawed.

The coach’s lawyer, G. Karl Bernard, told the Associated Press he would ask the appeals court to reconsider its decision, or appeal to the state’s Supreme Court. —Libby Sander

Bedbugs 1, Charity 0

Never underestimate the power of pests to ruin a good thing on college campuses. This week the notorious villains known as bedbugs forced Colorado State University at Fort Collins to cancel its annual Great Sofa Roundup, which allows students to donate unwanted couches to other folks.

According to the Denver Post, there was “no evidence of mass infestations” in the area. Nonetheless, the event’s organizers feared that continuing the sofa swap was just asking for trouble — annoying, blood-sucking trouble — because bedbugs love to hang out in upholstered furniture, as many colleges have discovered in recent years (see a Chronicle video).

“You can get them in nice hotels,” Jane Viste, a spokeswoman for the Larimer County Health Department, told the Post, “anywhere you don’t know exactly where the furniture came from.” For now, the future of the Great Sofa Roundup is uncertain. —Eric Hoover

Water-Main Break Damages Library at University in St. Louis

Summer classes at Harris-Stowe State University resumed today, but the library remains closed, after a water-main break on the St. Louis campus on Wednesday sent a geyser of water into the air and across the quad, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Water gushed through the library’s back door and lapped at the bottoms of shelves, a university official told the newspaper. Damage is still being assessed. —Andrew Mytelka

July 1, 2009

Former Professor Gets 4 Years for Allowing Unauthorized Access to Sensitive Technology

A former professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville was sentenced today to serve four years in federal prison for allowing unauthorized foreign citizens access to restricted military technology, The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported.

J. Reece Roth, a retired professor of electrical and computer engineering, was convicted last September of violating the Arms Export Control Act. Prosecutors said he did so by giving two graduate research assistants — one from Iran and one from China — unauthorized access to sensitive military arms information and by disclosing some of the information in lectures abroad. Mr. Roth, who is 71, was working at the time for a company on a contract to study the use of plasma technology on unmanned military aircraft.

The former professor pleaded not guilty to the charges. But A. William Mackie, the assistant U.S. attorney who led the prosecution, said that Mr. Roth had deliberately broken the law. While government officials have stressed that the case does not signal a crackdown on enforcing regulations about who can work with sensitive technologies, Mr. Mackie said he hoped the case would make university researchers more careful about how they handle such information. —Marc Beja

German Research Institute Accuses MIT, UMass, and Whitehead of Wrongdoing on Patent

A prestigious German research institute has sued three American academic institutions — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and the University of Massachusetts at Worcester — in a case that accuses the three of improperly claiming rights to inventions that belong to the German institute.

While it is not uncommon for academic organizations to get embroiled in disputes over invention rights when faculty members from several institutions have collaborated on research, as these organizations’ researchers did in the 1990s, such disagreements usually are resolved without a court fight.

The case revolves around two groups of inventions related to RNA interference. Patent rights to one group of inventions belong solely to the German institution, the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. Rights to the other group of inventions are shared among the four institutions.

According to the lawsuit, filed last week in state court in Boston, Whitehead and the other defendants have “misappropriated inventions owned by Max Planck and misrepresented those inventions as their own.” Max Planck says that by seeking to have those invention rights considered as part of the patent jointly owned by all four academic institutions, the three defendants are undermining the chances that Max Planck will be awarded a patent for the inventions that it owns solely.

By prior arrangement, the parties agreed that Whitehead would be responsible for obtaining patents on the jointly owned inventions, the lawsuit says.

The technology-transfer arm of Max Planck and a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that has licensed rights to both sets of inventions, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc., have joined the German institute in the suit.

The lawsuit asks the court to order Whitehead to stop its pursuit of patents on the jointly owned inventions. It also seeks an undetermined amount in damages. —Goldie Blumenstyk

Georgia State U. Accused of Retaliating Against Professor Who Alleged Anti-Muslim Bias

A professor at Georgia State University has resigned as director of its Middle East Institute and filed a federal discrimination complaint because, she alleges, the university failed to adequately deal with incidents of anti-Muslim bias and retaliated against her and a student for pressing it to act.

Dona J. Stewart, a professor of geosciences, and her lawyer announced in a news release issued today that she had left her post as the institute’s director to protest the university’s handling of her discrimination complaint and retaliatory actions that have “impaired her ability to fulfill federal grant commitments and harmed her career.”

A spokeswoman for Georgia State, Andrea Jones, issued a statement today saying the university treats complaints of discrimination “very seriously” and took appropriate action last year in response to Ms. Stewart’s discrimination complaint. “Due to federal privacy guidelines, the university cannot address the details of the complaint and its resolution,” the statement says. But, it says, “in no way” were retaliatory actions taken against the student or Ms. Stewart, who, it notes, had recently been promoted from associate professor to full professor.

Both Ms. Stewart’s news release and her complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, filed in January, allege that she came into conflict with the university’s administration last year, after alleging discrimination on behalf of a Muslim-American doctoral student who had been repeatedly asked by another faculty member whether she was “carrying any bombs” under her head scarf.

When Ms. Stewart and the student pressed administrators to deal with the incidents, the dean’s office at the college of arts and science demanded that Ms. Stewart remove the student from a visiting-instructor position at the Middle East Institute, canceled the student’s registration for her doctoral courses, and declared the student ineligible to lead a study-abroad program in Egypt that had already been approved, the EEOC complaint alleges.

Administrators subsequently withdrew their support for Ms. Stewart’s plan to use a federal grant to establish a bachelor-of-arts program in Middle Eastern studies, and otherwise undermined her and her institute, the complaint alleges.

Ms. Stewart remains a member of the university’s faculty, but has taken unpaid leave for the coming year. The university’s statement says it is “fully cooperating with the EEOC on this investigation and looks forward to resolving this matter.” —Peter Schmidt

Layoffs and Restructuring Hit Harvard U. Press

Harvard University Press, one of the most prestigious scholarly publishers, has done away with seven positions as the university as a whole faces hard times. The lost jobs include three in marketing, one in sales, one in design, and two in editorial, according to William P. Sisler, the press’s director. The editorial layoffs did not include acquisitions editors, Mr. Sisler said, “and did not affect the composition of the list.”

The layoffs are part of a broader, institution-wide purge of jobs at Harvard, which eliminated 275 positions in late June, with more downsizing to come. The poor economy played a part in the layoffs at the press, but Mr. Sisler said that his shop had been rethinking its strategies and structure before the downturn.

“Even before the economy really began to tank last fall, we were already engaged in planning for the changed and changing publishing environment,” Mr. Sisler wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. “Then the bad stuff hit, the university saw its endowment drop, and our small segment of that obviously dropped as well, sales decreased, etc., etc., and the change process was expedited.”

In a sign of how book marketing has changed, the restructuring hit the press’s publicity operation hardest. “We have reconstituted the group formerly known as publicists into ‘media specialists’ to reflect the fact that much of the activity of getting books exposed has moved on to the Web and into social media,” Mr. Sisler said. —Jennifer Howard

Lawmaker Wrote His Own Job Description for Florida College

Exchanging e-mail messages about sensitive, politically connected hires is a big risk, as college chiefs at North Carolina State University and now Northwest Florida State College have learned the hard way.

James R. Richburg was fired in April as president of the two-year college over an alleged $6-million political boondoggle. He and a former state lawmaker, Rep. Ray Sansom, are accused of falsely securing state money to build an aircraft hangar for a friend and major political donor. They both face felony misconduct charges.

While in the Legislature, Mr. Sansom helped steer $35-million in state money to the college. In what critics call a quid pro quo, Northwest Florida State last year hired him as vice president for external affairs, a part-time job with a $110,000 annual salary.

Mr. Sansom had an unusually hands-on role in his job’s creation: He drafted his own contract. In an e-mail exchange released by state investigators, which was published by the St. Petersburg Times, he sent Mr. Richburg a three-page draft description of the position, including the salary and various job tasks. Other messages between the two surfaced as part of a lengthy report released by the investigators.

One of Mr. Sansom’s self-generated job duties was to work on the college’s transition to offering four-year degrees, part of a broad effort in Florida that has provoked a backlash among the state’s universities.

Mr. Sansom tried to land a post at Northwest Florida State two decades earlier, according to the newspaper. He was a finalist to be an assistant to Mr. Richburg, who had become president in 1987. That job eventually went to Bolley (Bo) Johnson, a state lawmaker, who left the post in 1992 and later went to prison for tax evasion. —Paul Fain