A former Women’s Studies Professor, who was arrested and charged with prostitution last year, killed herself. She held undergraduate degrees in Sociology and Biology and a Ph.D.

At Tarleton State University a party on Martin Luther King Day has caused some uproar and a statement issued by the university’s president. The party featured costumes and food deemed by some as racial stereotypes.

At Grambling State University, LA the editors of The Gramblinite have decided to cease publication out of fear that their advisers may be terminated. GSU’s provost, stating in a memo that the paper was being shut down until it improved its quality, based the decision on a recent Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case Hosty v. Carter. The Student Press Law Center however argues that the case does not apply to Louisiana as part of the Fifth Circuit and there is ample precedent that public institutions cannot censor student newspapers as they are protected by the First Amendment. See also the recent post in Fire’s The Torch on the issue.

In the annual joke issue of the Princetonian, a joke with the byline similar to the name of an Asian student who had sued the university over denial of admission last year caused some uproar.

Apparently, finishing a test too quickly can get you in trouble. At Southern Illinois University employees were found to be in non-compliance with state ethics laws because they went through the mandated ethics test too fast. 255 employees at the system, of those 65 professors at the Carbondale campus, were asked to complete another course and sign a form stating that they participated in this training for “noncompliant employees”.

…once again. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has advanced its doomsday clock, created in 1947, to 5 minutes to midnight. The current board of sponsors for the Bulletin, which made the decision to move the hand forward by 2 minutes, includes a number of Nobel laureates as such as Stephen Hawking and Paul Berg.