Faculty members at the University of Pittsburgh are skeptical of a directive to “irrevocably assign and transfer to the university” their rights, title, and interest to all intellectual property produced during their employment, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.
Administrators say the rule, which also applies to nonclerical staff members, is necessary to keep the university eligible for federal research dollars because of the 2011 Supreme Court decision in Stanford v. Roche. That ruling, acco…
Clark Atlanta University has sued the city of Atlanta, claiming to have property rights over a piece of land the city recently acquired from the bankrupt Morris Brown College. According to Clark Atlanta, the two colleges had a decades-old agreement that the land in dispute would be transferred to Clark Atlanta if it was no longer being used for educational purposes.
A federal bankruptcy-court judge approved the land sale in June, and it was finalized at the end of August. The same judge said Clark Atlanta could pursue litigation at the state level.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Clark Atlanta University has filed a lawsuit against the city of Atlanta claiming the school has long-standing property rights over a portion of land the city recently bought from Morris Brown College. The suit, filed Sept.
A researcher at the National Science Foundation was removed from her post late last month for allegedly misrepresenting her ties to domestic terrorist groups during a background check, according to an article in Science.
The researcher, Valerie Barr, took a leave of absence from her professorship in the computer-science department at New York’s Union College last year for a two-year stint as a program director at the NSF. But the Office of Personnel Management, an agency of the White House, found in two interviews with Ms. Barr that she had misrepresented her affiliation some 30 years ago with two groups connected to the May 19 Communist Organization, a group that has carried out acts of domestic terrorism.
Ms. Barr described herself as a “worker bee” for the two groups and said she had been truthful in both interviews. She said she would return to teach at Union College soon.
Valerie Barr was 22 and living in New York City in 1979 when she became politically active. A recent graduate of New York University with a master’s degree in computer science, Barr handed out leaflets, stood behind tables at rallies, and baked cookies to support two left-wing groups, the Women’s Committee Against Genocide and the New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence.
The University of Illinois’s Board of Trustees voted on Thursday to deny the appointment of Steven G. Salaita to a professorship on the Urbana-Champaign campus, in the latest chapter of a month-old saga that has inflamed academe.
That Mr. Salaita’s appointment appeared on the list of proposed faculty hires to be voted on by the board came as a surprise. The campus’s chancellor, Phyllis M. Wise, who has been the subject of several no-confidence votes at the college, maintained in recent weeks tha…
Ohio State University has agreed to revise its policies after the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found the institution to be in violation of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX, the department announced on Thursday.
The department’s office, known as OCR, began a review in 2010 to determine whether the university had responded properly to complaints of sexual harassment and assault. During the course of that review, Ohio State investigated allegations of sexu…
The University of Connecticut’s mascot appeared recently alongside a bottle of Coors Light beer on four billboards in the Hartford, Conn., area, with the slogan “Huskies love the cold.” But not all Huskies loved the ad.
University leaders moved on Wednesday to have the billboards taken down after determining that the advertisements “sent the wrong message” by appearing to endorse underage drinking, The Courant, a Hartford newspaper, reported.
The ads were posted by IMG, the licensing company that holds the marketing rights to the university’s athletics program as well as a contract with the Coors Brewing Company. That allows Coors to use college brands marketed by IMG in its ads, said the university’s athletic director, Warde J. Manuel. The university gets roughly $8-million a year from IMG in exchange for the marketing rights.
Four billboards featuring UConn’s Husky mascot, a towering Coor’s beer bottle and the slogan, “Huskies Love the Cold,” caused a flap that had school officials scrambling Wednesday to have the advertisements taken down. Ads had been removed from the two electronic billboards and would soon come down from the two “static” billboards as well, said Michael Enright, spokesman for UConn athletic department.
Ten scholars have criticized history textbooks under consideration for use in Texas high schools for, among other things, portraying Islam in a negative light and exaggerating the influence of Christianity in the founding of the United States, The Texas Tribune reports.
The criticism, common in recent years, stems from the State Board of Education’s 2010 decision to alter the social-studies curriculum in Texas, lending it a conservative spin. The scholars—hired by the Texas Freedom Network, a…
The American Council on Education announced on Wednesday a project intended to make it easier for nontraditional students to earn four-year college degrees. Financed by a $1.86-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the new program will create roughly 100 free or inexpensive general-education courses that will earn students as much as two years’ transfer credit at some 40 participating colleges.
Some of the courses already exist, while others are yet to be created. Some will be …
Kentucky State University has re-enrolled 70 percent of the students it kicked out last week for failing to pay their tuition bills, the university announced on Wednesday.
One week ago, Kentucky State said it had dropped 645 students from its enrollment, citing their outstanding debts in the form of unpaid tuition, fees, or room and board. It said on Wednesday that it had re-enrolled 452 of those students, who have “paid their balances in full.” Enrollment at the historically black university no…
Organization: Association of University Technology Managers
Summary: Despite a slight decline in federally funded research support, universities and hospitals responding to the latest AUTM survey executed 5,198 licenses on inventions arising from academic research in the 2013 fiscal year, an increase of about 1 percent over the number reported in 2012.
The respondents—170 universities, 30 hospitals and research institutions,…
