September 5, 2008

Southern Cal Deletes Muslim Scripture From Web Site Following Complaint

The University of Southern California has removed a portion of Islamic scripture from the Web site of a Muslim-student group on its campus, The Daily Trojan reported today.

The deleted material came from the hadiths, collections of words and reports of deeds of the Prophet Muhammad not included in the Koran. The university’s provost ordered the removal of the passages after a rabbi in a Jewish human-rights group told a Southern Cal trustee that the Islamic scripture advocated violence against Jews.

David Horowitz, the conservative activist, has been campaigning against Muslim-student associations, which he sees as tied to radical Islamist thought. He told the newspaper that this was his first concrete victory. —Beckie Supiano

September 4, 2008

Cutthroat Competition for Textbook Sales Pits UMass Faculty Members Against Bookstore

A bitter battle for the textbook market in Amherst, Mass., is being waged by anything but the book, to judge from an article in today’s Daily Collegian, the student newspaper at the University of Massachusetts’ flagship campus.

The competitors for students’ textbook business are, on the one hand, several local independent booksellers, and on the other, the university bookstore, which is run under contract by the Follett Higher Education Group, the nation’s largest collegiate-bookstore chain.

It seems that a number of professors at the public university would prefer to give business to the local bookstores rather than to the Follett-run university store, so they provide their required reading lists — a prerequisite for ordering books ahead of time — only to the independent store owners. Students can buy their books wherever they want, but a store that has the books in stock has a clear advantage over a store that needs to order them.

To level the playing field, according to The Daily Collegian, the director of the university store, Ken Kahler, posed as the parent of a student and asked a professor of English what textbook she planned to assign. The professor grew suspicious, and very soon the store official was unmasked.

“When I confronted him, he admitted that he did not have a daughter in my class and that he had deliberately deceived me in effect to steal our orders from the bookstores with whom we had placed them,” the professor, Suzanne Daly, told the Collegian.

Mr. Kahler was reprimanded by a vice president at Follett, the newspaper reported, and the university official who oversees the contract with Follett has apologized to Ms. Daly and other faculty members who have complained of the store’s business practices. —Andrew Mytelka

Penn State Professor Dies After Collapsing in Class

A well-liked professor at Pennsylvania State University at University Park died on Wednesday after he fell ill while teaching a classroom of graduate students, The Centre Daily Times reported today.

The professor, Lawrence Hochreiter, who taught mechanical and nuclear engineering, collapsed at about 10 a.m. on Wednesday. Students, administrators, and paramedics called 911 and performed CPR on Mr. Hochreiter until he was moved to the Mount Nittany Medical Center’s emergency room, where he died shortly after 11 a.m. The county coroner told the newspaper that the professor had died of natural causes.

Former students and colleagues spoke warmly of Mr. Hochreiter, who had taught at the university since 1986. Before that, Mr. Hochreiter, who held a Purdue University doctorate, worked as an engineer at an energy business and was an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Mr. Hochreiter’s research interests included thermal-hydraulic modeling of nuclear power plants, reactor safety analysis, and the experimental study of two-phase flow and heat transfer. He was teaching reactor engineering when he collapsed. —Allie Grasgreen

September 3, 2008

Legal Scholar Held in Iran Was Scheduled to Teach at Penn

An Iranian scholar who was scheduled to teach this term at the University of Pennsylvania Law School has been detained in Tehran, and reportedly has been held in prison for more than two weeks.

The scholar, Mehdi Zakerian, was awaiting clearance from the Department of Homeland Security for a visa to travel to the United States when he was detained in August, according to a statement on the law school’s Web site. “The Iranian government has not released any information about his location or condition, nor have any formal charges been brought against him,” the statement says. The International League for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch joined the law school in calling for Mr. Zakerian’s release.

Until about a year ago, Mr. Zakerian was a professor at the University of Tehran, a state institution, but he and dozens of other professors were removed from their positions in a wave of firings that began after Iran’s arch-conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came to power, in 2005. Mr. Zakerian is now a professor of human rights at Islamic Azad University, an independent institution that has repeatedly been singled out for criticism by President Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Zakerian is also chairman of the Iranian International Relations Society and a senior researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies of the Middle East. The center is the only scholarly organization in Iran that deals with Israel as a political entity, notes William Burke-White, an assistant professor at Penn Law who helped to arrange for Mr. Zakerian to come to Penn as a visiting scholar.

The online publication Iran Human Rights Voice noted that Mr. Zakerian’s detention followed the June arrests of Kamiar and Arash Alaei, two physician brothers who are well-known AIDS researchers in Iran.

Kamiar Alaie is a student at the State University of New York at Albany’s School of Public Health, and had been expected to return for the start of classes last Monday, Mary Applegate, the school’s associate dean for academic affairs, said last week. The brothers apparently are being held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison on charges of colluding with anti-government organizations. —Aisha Labi

NIH Tries to Buy Eureka Moments With New Round of Grants

Few, if any, scientific discoveries prompt a slap to the forehead and a shout of “Eureka,” as Archimedes is said to have done.

But that hasn’t stopped the National Institutes of Health from chasing after truly novel work that could push research in new directions. Today, the agency announced it was giving out $42.2-million to 38 “exceptionally innovative research projects that could have an extraordinarily significant impact on many areas of science.” Each will get $200,000 in direct costs for up to four years.

The awards are the first to be made under a new initiative with the acronym “Eureka,” for “Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration.” For example, Iswar K. Hariharan, a professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of California at Berkeley, won a grant to study new ways to promote tissue to regrow.

The Eureka awards are one way the NIH has been trying to respond to criticism that its ultracompetitive grant-making process favors established researchers and relatively safe projects that are sure to deliver results.

Last year the agency started granting new innovator awards to support researchers early in their careers. The Pioneer award program, by contrast, provides $500,000 per year for five years to researchers with a track record of opening new areas in research. —Richard Monastersky

September 2, 2008

Sami Al-Arian Is Out of Jail for First Time in 5 Years

Sami Al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor once accused of being a leading Palestinian terrorist, was released from custody today for the first time in more than five years, the Associated Press reported.

Mr. Al-Arian had been jailed while awaiting trial on contempt charges for refusing to testify before a grand jury about Muslim organizations in the United States. He had been in federal custody since February 2003, when he was arrested on charges that accused him of being a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

In a mixed verdict in 2005, a jury acquitted him of some of the original charges but deadlocked on others. In a plea agreement, he later admitted to a single count of conspiracy and was sentenced to 57 months in prison, with credit for time served. He also agreed to be deported after serving the remaining year and a half.

Since completing that sentence, however, he has been held on contempt charges for refusing to testify. He will be on home detention at his daughter’s residence in Virginia while awaiting trial on those charges. —Charles Huckabee

Conflict-of-Interest Policies Are Not a Tough Pill to Swallow, Medical Journal Finds

Academic medical centers are finding it easier than expected to pull the plug on marketing practices that seek to sway doctors’ prescribing practices, according to a study published this afternoon by The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Fears that faculty members would flee and industry-research financing would dry up if free lunches and gifts were banned have not been realized, the study found. A report of the study’s findings was written by David J. Rothman and Susan Chimonas of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Stanford University became the latest institution last month to announce that it was imposing strict limits on industry support for continuing medical education.

In the last two years, at least 25 medical centers have adopted stringent policies aimed at preventing conflicts of interest, the report notes. Among the universities they represent are the entire University of California system, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to banning free handouts, the policies have restricted access for drug-company representatives seeking to visit academic physicians.

Institutions with strong policies usually have a dean who takes the lead, supported by knowledgeable administrators such as a dean of pharmacy, the study concludes. —Katherine Mangan

Dispute Widens Between Southern Illinois U.-Carbondale and Ulysses S. Grant Association

A dispute between Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and the Ulysses S. Grant Association has deepened with the filing of a lawsuit over the association’s collection of papers of the U.S. president and Civil War general — which are held at the university’s library — and a welter of contending accounts of the split in the news media.

According to reports in The Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at Carbondale, the association has sued the university to seek the release of the papers. The association voted to remove both itself and its papers from Carbondale in May.

The move was precipitated by a dispute over sexual-harassment allegations made by co-workers against John Y. Simon, the former executive director of the association and editor of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, a publishing project. Mr. Simon spent 44 years at the university in those roles and as as a professor of history. He had completed 30 of the 31 volumes of the Grant papers when was fired by the university in January. He died in Carbondale in July.

Today’s issue of The Daily Egyptian also published an article in which Mr. Simon’s widow, Harriet Simon, said that her husband had never seen a full report of the investigation against him. Officials at the university contradicted that account.

The Daily Egyptian also reported that the vacuum of leadership at the association after Mr. Simon’s termination had led to allegations — made in the lawsuit — that Mr. Simon’s signature had been forged on some payment documents. The allegation was first made in correspondence between the association’s lawyers and the university that was obtained by the newspaper. —Richard Byrne

California Judge Orders Community College to Reinstate Fired Instructor

A California judge has overturned the 2006 firing of a Grossmont College instructor who allegedly offered a student a passing grade if she agreed to show him her bra, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on Saturday.

The judge, Charles R. Hayes of the Superior Court for San Diego County, ordered the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District to reinstate Timothy Cliffe, a physical-geography instructor. In his decision, Judge Hayes overruled another judge who had found that Mr. Cliffe had engaged in “immoral conduct.”

According to a spokeswoman for the district, it has not decided whether it will appeal the latest ruling.

In his ruling, Judge Hayes questioned the validity of the claims made by the student, Yu Yu Chen, a native of Taiwan. He said Ms. Chen’s limited English skills might have caused a misunderstanding. He also noted that Mr. Cliffe had once caught the student cheating on a test.

The alleged incident occurred when Ms. Chen asked Mr. Cliffe to change her grade from an F to a C.

Mr. Cliffe has admitted making a sarcastic comment that likened course grades to bra sizes, but has denied seeking sexual favors. —Allie Grasgreen

August 28, 2008

Herding the 'Escape Goats': Contest Sends Up Epidemic of Student Howlers

Gone are the days when careless students are humiliated only in front of their professors, or their classmates. Nowadays British students who don’t double-check their writing risk seeing their slip-ups circulated everywhere online.

The students can thank the Times Higher Education’s recently revived annual “exam howlers” competition, in which merciless professors submit their students’ dumbest — and most unintentionally amusing — writing flubs to the magazine. At least the anonymous students can wallow in their shame unrecognized.

Some of the honored blunders of the year:

• A research student’s assertion that “tackling climate change will require an unpresidented response.”

• An English student’s literary interpretation: “The Handmaid’s Tale shows how patriarchy treats women as escape goats.”

• An economics student who bemoaned a regulator’s “laxative enforcement policies.”