January 31, 2008
College Loan Corporation Quits Federal Loan Program
The College Loan Corporation, the eighth largest originator of federally guaranteed student loans, announced today that it would stop making loans in the federal program on March 1.
In a letter explaining the decision, Cary Katz, the company’s chief executive officer, said that recently enacted cuts in the subsidies the government pays on such loans, coupled with disruptions in the credit markets, were “making it impossible for midsized companies like College Loan Corporation to participate in the federal-loan marketplace.”
The College Loan Corporation is the largest lender to leave the guaranteed-loan program since Congress passed legislation in September that slashed the subsidy rate for for-profit lenders by 0.55 of a percentage point. Lenders and other critics had warned that the cuts would drive some companies out of the federal student-loan program or force them to eliminate borrower benefits.
Several smaller lenders have since announced that they will stop making federally backed loans, and even Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student lender, has become more selective about the education loans it will make.
Mr. Katz said the College Loan Corporation would continue to make private student loans and manage its existing federal-loan portfolio. —Kelly Field
Custodian Strike Shuts Down Colleges in Canadian Province
Classes have been canceled at four community-college campuses in the Canadian province of New Brunswick because of a strike by custodians, and seven other campuses of the New Brunswick Community College have gone to half-days, according to the CBC.
In making those decisions, the authorities said garbage and unsanitary conditions posed a health risk. The custodians have been on strike since January 10, a local newspaper, the Telegraph-Journal, reported, and the union said it saw no end in sight for the labor dispute. The custodians forced the closing of community colleges provincewide during a similar strike in 2003.
Meanwhile, a faculty strike continues at St. Thomas University, in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Students have not been able to attend classes there since the Christmas break. —Karen Birchard
Louisiana State U.'s John Lombardi Blocks Chancellor's Bid to Sign Climate Pact
The newly appointed president of the Louisiana State University system, John V. Lombardi, has blocked plans by the departing chancellor of the system’s flagship campus to sign a carbon-neutrality pact, the Associated Press reported today.
Friday is Chancellor Sean O’Keefe’s last day on the job at the Baton Rouge campus. He had planned today to sign the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, the goal of which is to eliminate campus contributions of greenhouse gases. Four hundred and eighty-two other institutions have signed the commitment, but several have refused to do so.
Mr. Lombardi said he wanted to assess the cost of signing the agreement, and would also consider the involvement of the system’s nine other campuses.
The change in plans, said Mr. O’Keefe, is another example of the philosophical differences that led to his resignation, on January 16. Mr. O’Keefe has suggested that he lacks the full support of Mr. Lombardi or LSU’s governing board. —Paul Fain
Embattled President of Chicago State U. Steps Down
Elnora D. Daniel, president of Chicago State University, will step down, the Chicago Tribune reported today. The university’s board did not renew her contract.
Ms. Daniel’s 10-year reign at Chicago State was rife with controversy, especially related to her spending. She was criticized by the auditor general of Illinois for spending some of her travel allowance on Mediterranean and Caribbean cruises that offered minority professionals a chance to mingle at sea — money she eventually had to repay. She once said that her $75,000 annual housing allowance was “chump change.”
The Tribune had also investigated her relationships with student lenders and her purchase of two copy machines for $250,000 from a company owned by a full-time employee of the university. Those purchases, made from a multimillion-dollar grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development for a project to print textbooks for schoolchildren in Ghana, have led the agency to audit the program.
In an e-mail message to the university, which was forwarded to the Tribune, Ms. Daniel said that she was leaving the university “with both sadness and a great deal of pride” and that although she didn’t want to go, “all good things must inevitably come to an end.” —Scott Carlson
U. of Colorado Stays With the Party
One Republican political figure will replace another as president of the University of Colorado.
Bruce Benson, the only candidate to emerge from a four-month search, was approved by the Board of Regents in a 7-to-2 vote late Wednesday night, The Denver Post reported.
The choice appears to be an unconventional one. Mr. Benson has never worked for a university, although he was board chairman of the Metropolitan State College of Denver. He has served on some educational boards in the state, and is co-chairman of Gov. Bill Ritter’s P-20 Education Coordinating Council.
Mr. Benson was chairman of the state’s Republican Party from 1987 to 1991 and an unsuccessful candidate for governor in 1994. He owns Benson Mineral Group, an oil-and-gas-exploration company.
He will succeed Hank Brown, a former congressman and senator from Colorado, who has been president of the university since 2005. —Martin Van Der Werf
Presidential Campaign Heats Up at Professors' Association
National attention is on the U.S. presidential campaign, but for higher education another election is looming.
Members of the country’s largest faculty group — the American Association of University Professors — will cast ballots in March to determine the organization’s president for the next two years. The race pits Cary Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has held the top AAUP job since 2006, against a challenger, Tom Guild.
Mr. Guild is a professor emeritus at the University of Central Oklahoma and a visiting professor of legal studies at Oklahoma City University. He ran against Mr. Nelson in 2004 and lost.
The contenders will face each other in a one-hour debate on February 23 at the University of Central Oklahoma.
Both candidates have created campaign Web sites. On his site, Mr. Guild notes that the AAUP censures only a handful of institutions each year that are found to have violated professors’ academic freedom, yet he says many more institutions are guilty. “We need additional mechanisms to make violators of our principles of academic freedom and tenure pay a price for doing so,” he writes.
He also wants the organization to shore up its membership among full-time faculty members. Overall membership in the AAUP has dropped drastically over the last generation.
Mr. Nelson’s Web site lists 17 of his accomplishments as president, including a new membership campaign and stepped-up communication by e-mail between members and the national office. He also quotes supporters who call him “fearless” and say he has worked “intelligently” and “tirelessly” on behalf of the AAUP.
Whoever is elected will begin serving at the close of the organization’s national meeting, in June. —Robin Wilson
Student Newspaper at Montclair State U. Gets Funds Restored
The student government at Montclair State University restored funds, at least temporarily, to the campus’s student newspaper after a lengthy meeting on Wednesday, The Star-Ledger, a New Jersey newspaper, reported this morning.
The student government, which provides a sizable share of the budget for The Montclarion, froze the funds last week, in a dispute over the student paper’s hiring of a lawyer to challenge the government’s penchant for meeting in private. The move drew nationwide criticism from free-speech and journalism organizations. The paper continued to publish online, but its printed edition was blocked.
The government — whose president, Ronald F. Chicken, imposed the budget freeze and told the paper’s printer to cease work for The Monclarion — restored the funds for a 30-day period in which a university official will try to mediate the dispute. —Andrew Mytelka
January 30, 2008
Fine-Tuning the Role of Chief Diversity Officer
For college presidents at a loss over how to choose a chief diversity officer and what role that person should play, a paper just published by the American Council on Education answers those questions and more.
The paper, “The Chief Diversity Officer: A Primer for College and University Presidents,” is meant to “infuse discipline and clarity into the process of developing chief diversity officers’ capabilities in higher education,” said Damon A. Williams, one of the authors, in a news release issued by ACE.
Mr. Williams, an assistant vice provost for multicultural and international affairs at the University of Connecticut, wrote the paper with Katrina C. Wade-Golden, senior research scientist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives.
The authors recommend, among other things, that:
- Chief diversity officers report to the president or chief academic officer.
- Senior leaders require the diversity officers to collaborate with key departments across the institution.
- The officers be given both symbolic and actual resources to accomplish their goals.
The paper also examines the growth of chief diversity officers on American campuses in recent years and details three models of organizational diversity in higher education. —Audrey Williams June
Journal Reviewer Leaked Manuscript to Pharmaceutical Company
A peer reviewer leaked a paper due to appear in The New England Journal of Medicine to the manufacturer of a drug criticized in the manuscript, according to a news article in Nature.
The reviewer, Steven M. Haffner, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, broke the journal’s confidentiality rules by faxing a copy of a review of studies on the diabetes drug Avandia to a colleague at GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company. Dr. Haffner has received consulting fees and speaker’s honoraria from the company.
The review article linked taking Avandia to an increased risk of heart attack. When it appeared online in the journal last May, Glaxo’s stock fell by 13 percent, according to Nature.
Dr. Haffner told Nature, “Why I sent it is a mystery. I don’t really understand it. I wasn’t feeling well. It was bad judgment.”
A spokeswoman for Glaxo said that the company had already planned to publish interim results of another study of the drug that it had sponsored, but that knowledge that the review would be appearing soon “added an additional sense of urgency.” Glaxo’s study appeared online in the same journal just two weeks after the review paper did.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, sent the company a letter today, asking what it did once it received the manuscript from Dr. Haffner. —Lila Guterman
Stanford Will Keep Stephen Jay Gould From Fading Into History
Stephen Jay Gould taught biology and paleontology at Harvard for decades before his death six years ago, but he bequeathed to Stanford University his collection of notebooks, rare first editions, and other items that served as source material for the hundreds of articles and books he wrote, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Stanford has promised to use the documents to study the evolution of Gould’s ideas and to document the origins of his inspiration. The university intends to create a multimedia presentation of its analysis.
The deal reportedly grew out of contacts that Gould’s wife, a sculptor named Rhonda Roland Shearer, had with the Stanford Library. While visiting Stanford in 2001, a year before he died, “he and Shearer proposed to librarians the possible creation of digital ‘hypermedia’ editions of his work,” the article says.
The deal might have appealed especially to Gould, who wrote frequently about the development of ideas in science. In one of his last interviews with the press, Gould discussed with The Chronicle what he hoped to achieve with his career and why he felt the need to keep alive the work of evolutionary theorists who came before him. (In a Q&A accompanying the article, Gould also talked about his unusual writing habits.) —Richard Monastersky
Professor Accused of Sexual Harassment Resigns
A professor at the University of Georgia who has been accused of sexually harassing female undergraduates for nearly two decades will resign by the end of the academic year.
William Neil Bender, a professor of communications and special education at Georgia, has faced a slew of complaints from undergraduate women since 1989 — including allegations that he told female students sexually suggestive jokes, invited them to his lake house to swim and use his Jacuzzi, and made unwelcome remarks about their bodies. The allegations are detailed in a lengthy article today in Georgia’s student newspaper, The Red and Black.
The latest allegations against Mr. Bender were made last summer by the husband of one of Mr. Bender’s students, who complained to the university that the professor and the man’s wife had had a sexual relationship. In addition, two female students complained to the university last summer about Mr. Bender’s behavior toward them.
According to the student newspaper, the university found Mr. Bender guilty of sexual harassment, but it is allowing him to teach two online courses this semester under the agreement that he “refrain from having private and/or personal interactions with university students,” according to the student newspaper, which cited documents it had obtained from the university’s legal-affairs office.
In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Mr. Bender said the allegations of inappropriate behavior were “exaggerated or represent outright falsehoods.” He added: “Those who know me recognize that the pattern of behavior described does not appropriately characterize who I am. Rather, I am consistently evaluated as an excellent teacher, and a great many students over the years have chosen to work directly with me.” —Robin Wilson
Journal Retracts Harvard Professor's Paper Flagged by Copycat-Search Tool
After two researchers warned last week that many examples of plagiarism may mar biomedical journals, a paper flagged by their search process has been retracted.
The Boston Globe reported yesterday that the journal Best Practice & Research Clinical Rheumatology had retracted a 2004 paper by Lee S. Simon, an associate clinical professor of medicine at Harvard University, because it contained overlapping text with a 2003 article in the journal Expert Opinion on Drug Safety.
The researchers who sounded the warning bell last week had found the paper through a search that turned up 70,000 copycat abstracts of biomedical papers. Dr. Simon’s abstract was one of more than 70 possible plagiarism cases they identified when they studied 2,600 abstracts individually. The researchers, who are at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, notified the journals and authors in several of those cases. The retraction appears to be the first result of their sleuthing.
The Texas researchers discovered that Dr. Simon’s paper, a review of arthritis treatments, contained entire pages of text that matched those of the earlier paper, which was by Roy Fleischmann, also of Texas Southwestern. Dr. Simon’s article did not cite the earlier paper. —Lila Guterman
A Championship Team on the Field, Rampant Criminals Off
Seattle — Press coverage of rampant criminality associated with your institution may be only slightly easier to take if the acts described are several years old.
Over the last four days, an extensive print and online series in The Seattle Times, titled “Victory and Ruins,” has slammed the University of Washington’s football program — and the only good news for the institution has been that the reporters, Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry, used public-records requests to dredge up details from seven and eight years ago that were initially hidden from the news media, or ignored by them.
That was before, during, and after the 2000-1 season, which the Huskies ended with an 11-1 record, ranked third in the country, and won the prestigious and profitable Rose Bowl.
Much of the series, which ends in today’s issue of the newspaper, has focused on players recruited by Jim Lambright, the program’s coach from 1993 to 1998, but it deals with events that largely took place during the term of Rick Neuheisel, who took over in 1999, compiled a win-loss record of 33-16, and left under a cloud in 2003.
The Times series shows that the team entered the 2000 season with players under police investigation for — or already convicted of — domestic abuse, robbing and shooting a marijuana dealer, and rape. By the end of the season, the report shows, at least a dozen Huskies had been arrested or charged with a crime; at least a dozen others ran afoul of the law during other seasons. The rap sheets included hit-and-run, animal cruelty, assault on a security guard, drunken driving, and sexual assault.
According to the series, Mr. Neuheisel, whom UCLA hired as its head coach this month, and the athletics director at the time, Barbara Hedges, who brought him to Seattle, exercised little restraint on the misbehaving players, who like many teammates were enrolled in at least some gut courses (Swahili was a favorite). And, the reporters assert, the coach and the AD were not the only ones to cut the players many breaks: Starstruck police officers, strangely overcautious prosecutors, and fawning judges all gave miscreant players lenient, preferential, or favorable treatment, according to the Times series.
Online reader forums have been choked by responses, as many in defense of the hometown heroes of that championship year as in dismay at their alleged — and, in many cases, proven — faults. Not a few readers spotted a conspiracy by Seattle Times reporters and editors who graduated from UW opponents to hinder the program’s slow return to prominence after the lean years that followed post-Rose Bowl disarray. The series does come at a time when the university is emulating professional sports franchises by arguing to state lawmakers that taxpayers should secure their solid investment in the program’s fortunes by ponying up for stadium renovations — $300-million’s worth.
In an article rounding out the series this morning, Mark A. Emmert, the current University of Washington president, allows that criminal conduct appears to have been common on the 2000 team. The paper’s revelations are “shocking and deeply disturbing,” he told the reporters. “They are exactly the kinds of things you don’t want the athletic program or any other type of program to represent.” —Peter Monaghan
January 29, 2008
Appeals Court Reinstates Lawsuit Over Wisconsin's Bar-Exam Exemption
Would-be lawyers in Wisconsin who have challenged the state’s policy of allowing graduates of state law schools to practice law without passing the state’s bar exam will have their day in court after all, the Associated Press reported. A federal appeals court has reinstated a lawsuit challenging the practice, which apparently is unique in the United States.
Wisconsin’s “diploma-privilege policy” dates to 1870, and some graduates of out-of-state law schools say it’s time it was scrapped. The lawsuit challenging the policy was filed by Christopher L. Wiesmueller, who says he suffered financially from having to wait months to take the bar exam and get the results after graduating from the Oklahoma City University’s School of Law. He grew up in Wisconsin and planned to practice in that state.
Judge John C. Shabaz of the U.S. District Court in Madison, Wis., dismissed the lawsuit last year, saying there was nothing unconstitutional about the rule that exempts graduates of the law schools at the University of Wisconsin and Marquette University from the bar-exam requirement, as long as they meet certain academic criteria. And lawyers for the Board of Bar Examiners and the Wisconsin Supreme Court said that since Mr. Wiesmueller had since taken and passed the bar exam, the issue was moot.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit bounced the case back to the lower-court judge. In an opinion issued today, a three-judge panel ruled that Judge Shabaz should not have thrown the case out without first deciding whether it should be certified as a class-action lawsuit. If it were classified as such, other out-of-state law graduates could continue the suit, regardless of Mr. Wiesmueller’s standing in the case. —Katherine Mangan
Yes, Virginia, There Will Be a Sex Workers' Art Show
President Gene R. Nichol is back in the hot seat after reluctantly agreeing to allow the Sex Workers’ Art Show to appear at the College of William and Mary next week, the Newport News, Va., Daily Press reported.
The show, which is billed as “an eye-popping evening of visual and performance art” by strippers, prostitutes, and other sex-industry workers, is scheduled to visit more than a dozen college campuses this winter. Mr. Nichol had asked the students who are sponsoring Monday’s event at the Williamsburg, Va., institution to find an off-campus venue for it, but he eventually agreed that the show must go on, citing the First Amendment and the spirit of academic freedom.
“My views and the views of others in the community about the worth or offensiveness of the program can provide no basis for censoring it,” Mr. Nichol said in a written statement. “Censorship has no place at a great university.”
Mr. Nichol ignited a controversy in 2006 when he ordered a brass cross removed from the college chapel in an effort to make students of other faiths feel more welcome there. The cross was subsequently returned to the chapel. —Don Troop
U. of Cincinnati Did Not Violate Title IX in Dropping Women's Crew, Judge Rules
The University of Cincinnati did not violate gender-equity requirements in college sports despite eliminating its women’s crew, a federal judge ruled last week.
In a class-action lawsuit filed in 2002, members of the team asserted that the university had failed to provide it with sufficient equipment, training facilities, and coaches. The plaintiffs also said they had received less support than comparable men’s teams had.
In 2006, Cincinnati announced that it would cut women’s crew and replace it with women’s lacrosse. According to legal documents, Cincinnati officials decided that continuing to finance women’s crew would strain the athletics department’s budget.
In a written ruling last week, Judge Thomas M. Rose of the U.S. District Court in Dayton, Ohio, ruled that Cincinnati had not violated a key federal gender-equity law, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, because the percentage of female athletes at the university was higher than the percentage of female undergraduates.
Cincinnati now offers women’s rowing as a club sport, and its members have access to a new athletics training center. “Any claims of unequal facilities …,” Judge Rose wrote, “have been remedied.” —Eric Hoover
College in Missouri Lifts Disciplinary Charges Against Defecting Student
St. Louis Community College at Meramec has lifted hazing and disorderly-conduct charges against a student who disrupted classes and invited his classmates to join him in enrolling at another institution, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education announced today.
That group and the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri had backed the student, Jun Xiao, whose free-speech and due-process rights they said the college had violated. Mr. Xiao and the college reached an agreement before he took legal action.
In publicizing the case, the group, known as FIRE, emphasized two e-mail messages Mr. Xiao sent in October to his classmates in Organic Chemistry I. The messages informed them that he was withdrawing from the course and invited them to take Organic Chemistry II with him at the nearby St. Charles Community College, another public institution.
Three days after Mr. Xiao sent the second message, the St. Louis college placed him on disciplinary probation, which barred him from contacting other students through institutional e-mail but allowed him to remain in his courses — as long as he refrained from further misconduct.
The initial letter from the college does not spell out Mr. Xiao’s offenses, saying only that the probation is “based upon information provided by a dean, a faculty member, and multiple e-mails from students.” But a second letter, in January, says Mr. Xiao repeatedly delayed class with inappropriate questions and verbally abused a secretary in the chemistry department. —Sara Lipka
U. of Wisconsin-Madison Cuts Ties to Apparel Maker for Violating Code of Conduct
The University of Wisconsin at Madison has canceled its contract with an apparel company that refused to allow a labor inspection of one of its plants, according to The Daily Cardinal, the campus’s student newspaper.
The business, the New Era Cap Company, prevented a university-hired labor-monitoring group from entering its facility in Mobile, Ala. The university’s code of conduct requires companies licensed to use its logo to have their working conditions observed by a monitoring agency, the Worker Rights Consortium.
The university was among the first to adopt a “designated suppliers” program, in early 2006. The program established a code of conduct requiring university-licensed makers of apparel to allow their workers to unionize and to allow monitoring by the rights consortium.
The university could have filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against the cap company, but instead decided to terminate the contract immediately and end ties with the company as soon as possible, a university spokeswoman said.
New Era has been accused of worker discrimination and anti-union activity. Students, including some from Wisconsin, have observed conditions at the Alabama facility as representatives of United Students Against Sweatshops. —Beckie Supiano
New Set of Grants Will Promote Faculty Career Flexibility
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded $200,000 grants to six more universities to create programs that make faculty careers more family-friendly. The awards will go to the University of Baltimore; Canisius and Simmons Colleges; and Boise State, San Jose State, and Santa Clara Universities.
Several of the universities plan to create an option for faculty members to work part time along the tenure track. Canisius will offer an emergency travel loan that faculty members can apply for when they need to help a sick or dying family member who lives far away. Santa Clara will offer undergraduate courses on work-life balance. Students will do exercises that test their work-life decision-making skills, including career planning, budgeting, partnership or marriage, child care, and housekeeping.
The Sloan foundation started the grant program in the fall of 2006, with grants to six institutions. Kathleen E. Christensen, a director at the foundation, said in a teleconference today that the foundation had been concerned that women were struggling with academic careers. Female professors, she said, do not not have children at the same rate as male professors, are less likely to be married, and — if they are married — are more likely than their male colleagues to divorce.
“We heard the best women graduating with Ph.D.’s were not going on to academic lines because they did not see how they could have a family or a career,” said Ms. Christensen.
The American Council on Education conducted the competition, and a panel of six retired university presidents and chancellors judged applications from 56 institutions. Sloan hopes to award another round of grants next year. —Robin Wilson
Kenyan Universities Remain Closed as Fighting Worsens
Nairobi, Kenya — Three private hostels rented by students at the Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology were set on fire Monday by rioters, as violence flared again in Kenya, with tribal gangs attacking members of rival communities, in the post-election chaos that has engulfed the East African nation.
The incident occurred in Kakamega, a town in western Kenya, about 250 miles from the capital, Nairobi. Armed with machetes and other crude weapons, the protesters used gasoline to set the buildings ablaze.
The university’s deputy vice chancellor, Sibikike Makhanu, said nobody was hurt during the incident. “The university is still closed, and students should not be worried as the university had built new hostels inside the campus,” he said in a telephone interview. The buildings were owned by a local businessman.
The new chaos has jeopardized plans to reopen the country’s universities soon. All remain closed, and Maseno University, which lies about 30 miles from Masinde Muliro, in Kisumu, has said it might not reopen until April. —Wachira Kigotho
January 28, 2008
West Virginia U. Expands Panel Investigating Degree Awarded to Governor's Daughter
The Faculty Senate at West Virginia University chose three academics from other states today to join a university-appointed panel that will investigate whether the daughter of Gov. Joe Manchin III was granted a master’s degree she didn’t earn, the Associated Press reported.
The faculty had pressed for outsiders to be added to an investigative panel chosen this month by the university’s provost to look into the developing scandal. That panel consisted of two university professors and an official with the state’s Higher Education Policy Commission. The state official agreed to step down after some educators worried that he was too close to the Manchin administration.
The newcomers to the panel are Arthur L. Centonze, an associate professor of finance and economics and a former dean at Pace University; Lori S. Franz, a business professor and former associate provost at the University of Missouri at Columbia; and John M. Burkoff, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. The previously appointed West Virginia faculty members are Michael Lastinger, an associate professor of French, and Roy S. Nutter Jr., a professor of electrical engineering.
The panel will examine allegations, first reported in December in an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that raised questions about how the university granted an M.B.A. degree to the governor’s daughter, Heather M. Bresch, even though university records showed that she had completed only about half of the credits required. Ms. Bresch, a top executive at a West Virginia pharmaceutical company, says she earned the degree in 1998. —Charles Huckabee
Architects and Designers Propose the Creation of a New National Academy
A coalition of eight architecture, landscape-architecture, and design organizations is pushing to create a new National Academy of Environmental Design. As a new part of the National Academies, the National Academy of Environmental Design would focus on the built environment, and how buildings and cities could produce less waste, consume less energy, and contribute to healthier living and work spaces.
The creation of a National Academy of Environmental Design is supported by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, the Environmental Design Research Association, and other organizations.
A news release for the national academy, put out by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, notes that the built environment produces half of the world’s greenhouse gases and consumes 40 percent of the world’s energy. Those figures are much higher when applied to sectors of American society. For example, a recent report by the National Wildlife Federation on the business case for climate neutrality estimated that 70 percent to 90 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted on a college campus come from buildings.
Green building has become extremely popular in recent years, and silver, gold, and platinum ratings in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program have become a standard way of building on campuses. Yet many have said that the LEED program is just a start. After all, “net-zero buildings,” or buildings that produce more energy than they use, are still novel. So are buildings that deal with wastewater in unconventional ways. So are buildings made of some natural and recycled materials.
A proposal for the creation of the new national academy, distributed in November at a joint conference for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, called for an academy that would “serve the world by providing expert advice and assistance in the sustainable design and maintenance of landscapes, cities, and buildings, including their relationship to environmental effects on life-support systems of planet Earth.” New ideas in the environmental design and construction of cities and landscapes are always under way, the proposal said. “To deliver this knowledge in the most timely and powerful way to colleagues in allied disciplines and, more importantly, to the public, it is necessary to create a multiprofessional, multidisciplinary organization responsible only to the public.”
The proposal also said that the National Academy of Environmental Design would be a “parallel structure to the existing National Academies,” with members who are internationally recognized experts in their fields doing pro bono work for the public. —Scott Carlson
St. Cloud State U. Deals With Aftermath of Ugly Incidents
At St. Cloud State University late last year, vandals defaced campus property with swastikas and other racist images.
The incidents were unpleasant reminders of the Minnesota institution’s struggle to overcome its reputation as a hostile place for racial and ethnic minorities, the Associated Press reported.
In 2002 the university settled a discrimination lawsuit that led to the creation of a Jewish-studies center. Since then St. Cloud State has spent considerable time and money to improve its image. Recently it announced a series of plans, including a “unity rally,” to reassure minority students that they were safe on the campus.
The university is located in central Minnesota, in a predominantly white area that has had a recent influx of Somali immigrants. “When my classes start tomorrow, ‘Introduction to the Hebrew Bible,’” a rabbi at the university told the AP, “there will be people who walk in who’ve never met a Jew before.” —Eric Hoover
Bush to Congress: Cut Earmarks, or Else
Washington — President Bush plans to tell Congress tonight during his State of the Union speech to halve the number of earmarked spending projects, or else he will use his executive power to block them — but not until the closing months of his presidency. Mr. Bush’s challenge applies only to the 2009 fiscal year, not the spending package that lawmakers approved last month for 2008.
Earmarks are the controversial, noncompetitive set-asides — also called pork-barrel spending — that members of Congress sprinkle into annual spending bills to favored constituents. Colleges and universities have feasted on a growing supply of pork in recent years. Critics call the spending wasteful.
Mr. Bush plans to veto any spending bill for the 2009 fiscal year, which begins in October, that does not cut the number of earmarks in half compared with the 2008 version, a White House spokeswoman said today. In addition, he will order federal agencies on Tuesday to start ignoring any earmark listed in the Congressional reports that explain lawmakers’ intent but not in the text of the spending bills themselves. Most earmarks are placed in the explanatory reports and so are not legally binding.
However, any vetoes might be delayed for months: Congress typically does not complete spending bills for a fiscal year until well after it has started. Congress, which is controlled by Democrats, could delay spending bills for 2009 until after Mr. Bush leaves office.
In his State of the Union address one year ago, Mr. Bush also asked legislators to halve earmarks by the end of the 2009 calendar year. But he threatened no sanction if they failed. A Washington watchdog group estimates that total spending on earmarks of all kinds fell by half in 2008, to $14-billion, but that the number of earmarks increased by 10 percent.
Look for complete coverage of tonight’s speech on The Chronicle’s Web site Tuesday morning. —Jeffrey Brainard
A Victory for Adjunct Professors at Pace U.
A federal appeals court has blocked Pace University’s attempt to limit the size of the bargaining unit for adjunct professors, who are locked in a longstanding battle to negotiate a contract.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in an opinion issued last week, agreed with the National Labor Relations Board that the union for part-time faculty members at Pace should include every instructor with a class load of at least three credit hours.
Pace had asked the court for membership requirements that would have kept adjuncts out of the union during their first two years at the institution. The university has said that its adjunct professors voted to unionize in 2004 with the restriction in place, and so the bargaining unit should be formed in the same way.
The appeals-court ruling said that Pace had “failed to make known its objections to the scope of the proposed bargaining unit when it had reason, ability, and opportunity to do so” after earlier rulings by the National Labor Relations Board, and so it couldn’t object now.
About 1,000 adjunct faculty members at the institution are represented by the Union of Adjunct Faculty at Pace, which is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. —Audrey Williams June
4 Campuses Are Honored for Innovation in International Education
The Institute of International Education announced today the winners of its seventh annual Andrew Heiskell Awards for Innovation in International Education. The awards recognize the American colleges and universities with the top programs in international education.
Four colleges were recognized in three categories: Rice University and the University of Tulsa, for study abroad; St. Louis Community College at Forest Park, for internationalizing the campus; and the University of Georgia, for international-exchange partnerships.
Honorable mentions went to Florence-Darlington Technical College, Leeds Metropolitan University, Grand Valley State University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and East Carolina University. —Hurley Goodall
NIH Orders UConn to Return Grant Money
The National Institutes of Health, citing the University of Connecticut Health Center for violating animal-welfare laws, has ordered it to return some grant money that had been provided for brain experiments on monkeys.
The university can appeal last week’s order to return $65,005 of an NIH grant that financed the work, The Hartford Courant reported.
Financial penalties by the NIH are unusual—the agency typically asks universities to fix deficiencies in the care of laboratory animals but leaves it to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to levy fines for violations.
The Agriculture Department fined the health center $5,532 last summer for seven violations, the Courant reported. Two of the three monkeys involved in the research died during the project. Researchers had drilled holes into their skulls and implanted steel coils into their brains to record eye movements. The study, which examined the coordinated control of the eyes by the brain, was designed to help diagnose and treat stroke, palsy, and other conditions.
The university voluntarily stopped the study in 2006, after money for the project ran out and allegations of improper animal care were publicly aired by a UConn graduate student, Justin Goodman. He is now a research associate at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Federal inspectors later reported that the health center had failed to handle animals “in a manner that did not cause stress, trauma, and unnecessary discomfort.” The citations alleged that the university had inadequately trained personnel, used outdated drugs and animal food, and kept animals in a dirty room with peeling paint.
The lead researcher, David Waitzman, had received about $1.7-million in federal funds since 1992, but the NIH’s order seeks reimbursement to cover only the period when violations were found, the newspaper said.
In 2002 officials on the university’s main campus, in Storrs, admitted to more than 50 violations of the Animal Welfare Act and agreed to pay a $129,500 fine for, among other things, the improper care and inhumane deaths of numerous laboratory animals. —Jeffrey Brainard
Sallie Mae Settles Lawsuit Over Failed Buyout
Washington — Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student-loan company, has reached a settlement with a private-equity firm that promised last April to buy it, The New York Times reported.
Under the agreement, the proposed buyers—J.C. Flowers & Company along with JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America—will help Sallie Mae refinance about $30-billion in debt, the Times said.
The agreed-upon assistance is crucial for Sallie Mae, whose financial troubles have left it unable to issue new debt backed by its student loans. Those troubles have been exacerbated in large part by a crisis in overall global credit markets brought on by mortgage defaults.
The group of buyers, led by Flowers, had argued that it could escape from April’s $25-billion buyout deal because of language in the agreement that allowed the company to back out if Congress approved deep cuts in federal subsidies to student-loan providers. Congress did approve such cuts last September, and the two sides had been arguing since then whether those cuts were deep enough to trigger the escape clause.
The Times credits the settlement to negotiations with JPMorgan led by Sallie Mae’s newly appointed chairman, Anthony P. Terracciano, and chief financial officer, John F. Remondi. —Paul Basken
ACE Offers Guidance on Conflicts of Interest in Higher Education
Washington — The American Council on Education has released a working paper meant to provide guidance to college administrators on conflict-of-interest issues. The paper outlines the kinds of policies that higher-education institutions should have in place, along with situations that administrators should consider under conflict-of-interest policies, such as when a college official can accept a gift or own stock in a company.
The paper also covers conflicts of interest that institutions might face in research or commercial deals, such as when a vendor offers a gift to an institution.
The paper is available on the council’s Web site. —Scott Carlson
January 27, 2008
Connecticut Joins Inquiry Into Study-Abroad Deals
The attorney general of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has joined an investigation led by his counterpart in New York into the arrangements colleges make with study-abroad program providers, The Hartford Courant reported.
Mr. Blumenthal has requested records from 10 higher-education institutions in that state, including Yale University and the University of Connecticut, the newspaper said. It identified the other institutions as the University of Hartford; Fairfield, Quinnipiac, Sacred Heart, and Wesleyan Universities; and Albertus Magnus, Connecticut, and Trinity Colleges.
Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has requested information from 15 other institutions, in New York and other states, in the joint investigation. The attorneys general want to find out whether the universities or administrators received free trips, gifts, or other incentives to choose one program provider over another. Such practices can drive up costs for students.
In addition to records of financial transactions, Mr. Blumenthal has asked to see all student complaints about study-abroad programs at the Connecticut institutions since 2001, the Courant reported. It described his letters as “requests for voluntary production” rather than subpoenas, and quoted Mr. Blumenthal as saying the colleges were complying.
Two institutions, Wesleyan and UConn, told the Courant that they had paid the travel costs when their staff members went overseas to evaluate programs. One, Connecticut College, said that it allowed staff members to travel at the providers’ expense on “familiarizing trips,” but that such free trips did not sway its decisions. Yale officials said the university had policies to guard against conflicts of interest among administrators but could not immediately say if free trips were allowed.
Mr. Cuomo’s inquiry began last August with subpoenas to companies and expanded to colleges this month. —Charles Huckabee
Academic Leaders Offer Thoughts on Reforming Higher Education at AACU Meeting
Washington — For the closing session of its annual meeting on Saturday, the Association of American Colleges and Universities brought together three prominent academic leaders to discuss how educators might make some of the organization’s lofty ideas for improving undergraduate education a reality.
Derek C. Bok, president emeritus of Harvard University and a professor of law in its Kennedy School of Government, emphasized the value of research on pedagogical methods, particularly studies that might measure how effective colleges are in improving students’ writing and critical-thinking skills and their level of civic engagement. “This kind of research is the most powerful lever of change available to an academic leader,” he said.
George D. Kuh, director of the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University at Bloomington, pointed to findings of his group’s National Survey of Student Engagement as focal points for change. He suggested that colleges incorporate into their curricula “high-impact practices” such as service learning and student-faculty research collaborations, which the survey has found increase students’ self-reported engagement and success in college.
Azar Nafisi, a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, urged academics to “bring back critical dialog to the center of a liberal education.” Ms. Nafisi — whose memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, became a best-seller — spoke of the destructive effects of political correctness and politicization on higher education and said she would like to see academics take more radical action — such as organizing town-hall meetings or a march on the Capitol — to persuade those “who cannot imagine how reading Aristotle would help prevent war in Iraq” of the importance of a liberal-arts education.
Video of the closing plenary session and other panels from the meeting will be available on the association’s Web site. —Paula Wasley
January 26, 2008
Wyoming Governor Defends Academic Freedom
Gov. David Freudenthal of Wyoming came to the defense of academic freedom during a meeting on Friday of the University of Wyoming’s Board of Trustees, according to the Casper Star-Tribune. The governor, a Democrat and ex officio member of the board, said academics should be free to state unpopular opinions without fear of retaliation.
His comments followed a state legislative committee’s decision to reject a $500,000 budget increase that he had proposed for the university’s William D. Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources. Some lawmakers were angered by a report, issued by the institute, that criticized a technique for recovering methane from coal — a growing part of Wyoming’s fossil-fuel industry and of the nation’s natural-gas supply.
One co-chairman of the committee said he thought the institute’s educational mission had become improperly mixed with public-policy advocacy. The other co-chairman said lawmakers retained the right to challenge “false or misleading” statements. Still, he noted that the $500,000 could still be restored later in the budgeting process. —Andrew Mytelka
Hostage Drama at Lynchburg College Turns Into Local Mystery
Lynchburg College was hit with a scare just after midnight last night, as local police officers responded to a 911 report that an armed man had taken a hostage in a dormitory. The Virginia campus was locked down, students were evacuated from the building, and a campuswide early-alert system was activated.
Then, after a room-to-room search of the dorm, the police discovered that the report was spurious, according to the Lynchburg News & Advance, a local newspaper.
The police later charged a local man, a nonstudent, with making up the report. His motive remains unclear. The police also praised the college’s response to the episode.
In a statement on Lynchburg’s Web site, John G. Eccles, vice president and dean for student development, said that while the night’s events were a “great inconvenience,” it was good to know that the alert system was in “excellent working order.” —Andrew Mytelka
Kurdish Student's Death in Iranian Custody Prompts Global Criticism
The death in custody of an ethnic Kurdish university student this month in the northwestern Iranian city of Sanandaj has prompted anger in Iran and international calls for an inquiry into his death.
The student, Ebrahim Lotfallahi, was picked up by intelligence officers on January 6 as he was leaving the Sanandaj campus of Payam Noor University, where he was a fourth-year law student.
Mr. Lotfallahi’s family visited him three days later and found him in good spirits, although it was not clear what charges had been brought against him, Human Rights Watch says in its account of the case. “On January 15, officials from the detention center contacted Lotfallahi’s parents and informed them that they had buried their son in a local cemetery. The officials claimed that Lotfallahi had committed suicide in his cell.”
Mr. Lotfallahi’s death “has angered student activists, who believe it is part of a campaign of harassment aimed at supressing dissent before the March elections,” The Telegraph, a British newspaper, reported today. “They say students in the Kurdish part of the country, which includes Sanandaj, have borne the brunt of the crackdown.” The paper also reported that Mr. Lotfallahi’s grave had been filled with cement, to prevent his body from being exhumed for examination.
Mr. Lotfallahi’s death followed the death last October in northwestern Iran of a 27-year-old female doctor, who also was in custody when officials claimed she had committed suicide.
On Wednesday the American government joined Human Rights Watch in calling for a full investigation of Mr. Lotfallahi’s death, the Reuters news agency reported.
A statement on the State Department’s Web site urged the Iranian government to “release all individuals held without due process and a fair trial” and singled out “three Amir Kabir University students that prison authorities refuse to free despite an order issued by an Iranian judge in late December.” —Aisha Labi
Back From the Brink: College of Santa Fe Won't Declare Exigency
The College of Santa Fe’s Board of Trustees decided not to declare financial exigency on Friday, concluding that such a drastic step might create more problems than it would solve and that other ways of saving money might be sufficient to close perennial budget deficits, The Santa Fe New Mexican reported today.
The liberal-arts college, which has a dwindling enrollment and multimillion-dollar deficits, announced last fall it would cut programs, lay off faculty members, and refocus its mission. Last week it said it might declare financial exigency, which would allow it to fire tenured professors.
But Stuart Kirk, the college’s president, said the situation was still dire, and if enrollment didn’t pick up, a declaration of financial exigency could be invoked a year or two from now. —Andrew Mytelka
3rd Man Charged in Killing of U. of Chicago Student
A third man has been arrested in connection with the shooting death in November of a University of Chicago graduate student from Senegal who was just weeks away from receiving his doctorate, the Chicago Tribune reported this morning. The suspect, Jamal Bracey, was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Amadou Cisse, who was studying chemistry and was awarded his degree posthumously.
Mr. Bracey, like two other suspects who have been detained, was also charged with being involved in other violent attacks on the same night as Mr. Cisse was shot. The university’s response to the incidents drew criticism on the campus. —Andrew Mytelka
January 25, 2008
Dispute Over Closed Meetings Prompts Freeze at Student Newspaper
Montclair State University’s student government has blocked publication of the campus’s student newspaper and frozen its budget in a dispute over the paper’s legal challenge to the government’s practice of meeting in private. According to an account of the dispute in The Montclarion, the newspaper hired a lawyer to pursue its claim that the New Jersey Open Public Meetings Act forbids the student government to meet privately.
The student government’s president, Ronald F. Chicken, and its executive treasurer, Melissa Revesz, sent a letter to the newspaper asserting that hiring the lawyer violated procedures for expenditures of student funds. The officials also notified the newspaper’s printer of the budget freeze and told it not to print the paper.
The newspaper, which continues to publish online, receives $16,500 per semester from the student government. —Andrew Mytelka
Coach Forgoes Shoes for a Good Cause
A shoeless Ron Hunter coached his basketball team to victory last night in Indianapolis, but his bare feet were hardly a fashion statement.
Mr. Hunter, now in his 14th season as men’s basketball coach at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, is on a mission to gather 40,000 pairs of shoes for impoverished children in Africa, The Indianapolis Star reported today.
By all accounts, Mr. Hunter is on a roll, and not just because the Jaguars beat Oakland University, 82-69.
At game’s end, more than 100,000 pairs of shoes and $20,000 in cash had been donated to Samaritan’s Feet, a nonprofit Christian charity that is handling the effort.
Among the donors were the Department of Homeland Security, which gave 10,000 pairs; Soles4Souls, a Tennessee charity that gave 40,000; Wal-Mart, which gave 25,000; and Nine West, a shoe company, which gave 5,200. Converse, the sneaker maker, has promised a 15,000 more.
Mr. Hunter has said he plans to travel in July to Cameroon to deliver the gifts. This time, he’ll be wearing shoes. —Libby Sander
Pennsylvania Student-Loan Agency Faces Demand for $15-Million Repayment
Washington — The Education Department, after making more than $3.5-billion in payments this decade through a program of student-loan subsidies that Congress has tried to retire, said today it may ask one lender for a repayment. For about $15-million.
The department sent a letter today to the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, a nonprofit lender known as Pheaa, saying it agrees with part of a demand for repayment made by the department’s inspector general.
The finding involves the 9.5-percent loan program, which Congress created in the 1980s to give nonprofit student-loan companies a guaranteed return of 9.5 percent. The program was designed to encourage affordable student loans at a time when interest rates ran as high as twice that level. In more recent years, however, some loan companies have been accused of devising ways to keep some old loans eligible for the 9.5-percent repayment rate, even though Congress set new subsidy rates to reflect lower overall interest costs.
Today’s letter asks Pheaa to recalculate the subsidies it claimed on loans from October 2004 to September 2006. The department said it had estimated Pheaa would end up owing about $15-million in repayments.
A spokesman for Pheaa said it disagreed with the calculation and would challenge it. The spokesman said the department’s decision today, however, had cleared Pheaa of most of the $35-million in repayments that the inspector general had been seeking. —Paul Basken
Scientists Are Satisfied With Current System of Peer Review, Survey Finds
A survey of more than 3,000 academic scientists worldwide has found that an overwhelming majority believe peer review in journals is necessary.
Amid recent debate about the performance of peer review, the survey, performed by Mark Ware, a publishing consultant, found that nine out of 10 scientists believe peer review improves the quality of published papers, and just one out of eight is dissatisfied with the current form of review.
Still, more than half of those surveyed said they would prefer both reviewers and authors to be anonymous; currently, most journals make authors’ names known to reviewers. The opposite type — open peer review, where both names are revealed — has gained some support in recent years, but almost half of respondents to the survey said that a journal’s disclosure of their name would make them less likely to review manuscripts for it.
Those surveyed supported review online after publication, but as an addition to, rather than a replacement for, pre-publication peer review.
The survey also found that the average peer review takes 80 days, that the average number of manuscripts each reviewer reads yearly is eight, and that each reviewer tends to spend five hours on a manuscript over the course of three to four weeks.
The survey was paid for by the Publishing Research Consortium. —Lila Guterman
Judge Reinstates Lawsuit Against UC-Irvine Professor
The saga of a paper purporting to find that prayer doubles the success rate of fertility treatment continues. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has reinstated a defamation lawsuit that he tossed out two months ago against a professor at the University of California at Irvine who has been the study’s main debunker.
The lawsuit says that Bruce L. Flamm, a volunteer clinical professor at Irvine, defamed one of the authors of the prayer study, Kwang Y. Cha, a fertility expert, in a commentary in a medical newspaper. The legal wrangling comes after charges of fraud and plagiarism hit two of the paper’s authors, and the third dissociated himself from it. —Lila Guterman
Turkish Leaders Agree to Lift Ban on Head Scarves at Universities
Turkish universities appear set to soon lift their ban on the wearing of head scarves on their campuses by observant Muslim women, according to reports by the Financial Times and the BBC.
The country’s governing Justice and Development Party, whose origins are in political Islam, and the main opposition Nationalist Movement Party reached an agreement on Thursday to amend Turkey’s Constitution to end the ban.
“The issue is a bleeding wound in higher education [and] has to be solved,” the two parties said in a joint statement. The parties command enough support in Turkey’s parliament that changes endorsed by both should be assured of passage.
The Turkish newspaper Zaman reported that the amendments include a new phrase to be added to Article 42 of the Constitution. It states that “no one shall be deprived of the right to higher education because of their apparel.”
Details of the amendments remain to be hammered out, however, and a meeting scheduled for today to discuss specifics was postponed until Monday, with an opposition-party member telling reporters, “We have completed our studies, but the [Justice and Development] Party has not.”
Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, who shares Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s roots in political Islam, praised the move to lift the ban, which is viewed by Turkey’s secular political and military establishment as a crucial symbol of the country’s secular identity. “Universities should not be places of political controversy, beliefs should be practiced freely at universities,” said Mr. Gul, who as head of state is supposed to remain neutral on politically controversial issues. Mr. Erdogan had made clear his intentions to lift the head scarf ban last year. —Aisha Labi
Skidmore Alumnus Pleads Guilty to Making Threat Against the College
A Skidmore College alumnus pleaded guilty on Thursday to making a terrorist threat against the New York institution last spring, and could face up to seven years in prison, the Albany Times Union reported today. The alumnus, Joseph Gaudrault, left a voice-mail message on May 11 that said he planned to “appear on campus and take out a lot of people with a rifle.” The incident occurred barely a month after the Virginia Tech shootings. It was unclear what had led Mr. Gaudrault, 43 years old, to make the threat. —Andrew Mytelka
Carnegie Foundation Previews 'Shaping the Life of the Mind for Practice'
Washington — At the annual Association of American Colleges and Universities meeting here, researchers from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching presented a sneak preview on Thursday of their forthcoming book, A New Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice.
The book, due out in April, describes the foundation’s two-year effort to bridge the gap between the liberal arts and professional education by bringing together faculty members from 14 disciplines and professions, including law, engineering, and teacher education, to compare pedagogies and discuss how to better prepare undergraduates for the practical demands of a profession.
Noting lawyers’ and law students’ frequent disappointment with the practice of law, Daisy Hurst Floyd, a professor of law at Mercer University’s School of Law and one of the project’s participants, redesigned her advanced legal-ethics course with a view to forming students’ “professional identities.” The course, which had students reflect on their motivations and aspirations in becoming lawyers, took as its model that most iconic of lawyers, To Kill a Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch, who, said Ms. Floyd, emphasized the need to be “the same person at home, work, and Sunday school.” —Paula Wasley
Top Swedish University Expels Convicted Murderer With Neo-Nazi Ties
Sweden’s Karolinska Institute the celebrated medical university best known for awarding the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, announced on Thursday that it had expelled a student who had served time for a murder the police classified as a hate crime.
The New York Times identified the man as Karl Helge Hampus Svensson and reported that, at the time of the killing (which he denies committing), “Mr. Svensson was under surveillance for neo-Nazi activities” by the Swedish equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Swedish news media reported last fall that a convicted murderer on parole had been admitted to Karolinska’s highly selective training program without university officials’ being aware of his background. Despite a rigorous application process that includes providing detailed biographical information and interviews, Mr. Svensson’s past came to light only after “two anonymous letters were received by university officials,” The Local, an English-language Swedish publication, reported at the time.
Karolinska officials said then that they were unable to expel the student, but in doing so this week they cited discrepancies in the student’s high-school transcript.
“The scrutiny shows the high-school diploma, that the student referred to when appl