Administrators

The National Collegiate Athletic Association on Friday rejected the University of Connecticut's request that the association waive a penalty that will ban the Huskies from the NCAA men's basketball championship in 2012-13 because of its players' past academic underperformance, the university announced. UConn officials, who said they would ask an NCAA appellate panel to review the decision by the association's Committee on Academic Performance to an appellate panel, had argued that it would be unfair to penalize next year's UConn players for the academic woes of players who have long since left the university. Connecticut proposed a set of alternative penalties, including forgoing revenues that its conference would have received from the university's participation in the tournament and restricting recruiting by its head coach, Jim Calhoun.

 

The board of Kean University on Thursday night heard impassioned speeches in favor of keeping and getting rid of President Dawood Y. Farahi before a lengthy executive session at which no decision was made, The Star-Ledger reported. Farahi has clashed with faculty leaders for years, and has to date had strong backing from his board. But the current debate is over the veracity of numerous résumés for Farahi that show papers that never appear to have been published. Farahi has said that he did not prepare the résumés in question, but that staff members he did not name made the errors when preparing versions of the documents.

At Thursday's meetings, supporters of Farahi accused faculty members of having a vendetta against Farahi and said that they were using the résumé issue. Jose Sanchez, head of social sciences, said he couldn't understand the "hatred" many feel for Farahi. Apparently addressing faculty critics of the president, he said: "It may be a lot of fun for you to do all this, but it is sadistic and wrong." But Ashley Kraus, a junior who spoke at the meeting, read from Kean's academic integrity policy and asked why requirements should apply to students but not administrators. "It’s just wrong. It teaches the wrong morals," she said.

A contentious lawsuit by a law professor against the dean of the Widener University law school has been settled, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The suit by Lawrence Connell charged that Dean Linda L. Ammons defamed him by making false statements that he was racist and sexist. Connell argued that those statements were made because of his conservative political views. No terms of the settlement were announced, except that Connell no longer works at Widener.

Facing banishment from the 2012-13 National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament because of its men's basketball players' academic underperformance, the University of Connecticut has proposed an alternative set of penalties in exchange for remaining eligible for the postseason, ESPN and the Associated Press reported. The AP said that the university's waiver request to the NCAA -- which the news service obtained through an open-records request -- said that if the team was allowed to participate in the 2012-13 tournament, UConn would limit the number of regular season games it played, limit Coach Jim Calhoun's role in recruiting, and forfeit the funds due to the Big East Conference because of UConn's participation in the 2012-13 tournament. "Collectively, the university's proposal will clearly send the message that the institution fully accepts the responsibility for past failings," the AP quoted the university as saying in its waiver request. "It will result in the economic equivalent of a postseason ban without harming the very students the NCAA is trying to protect." (Note: This item has been updated from an earlier version to correct the reason for UConn's postseason ban.)

UConn faces the penalties under the NCAA's system for imposing penalties on teams that fail to reach minimum scores on the Academic Progress Rate, the association's measure of athletes' classroom performance. The university's president, Susan Herbst, said in a statement to the AP that the university had made significant progress in improving on its historical performance and that its officials will be "deeply disappointed if our request for a waiver ... is denied."

Northern Essex Community College has taken an unusual approach to sharing its new strategic plan with various constituents: it is using a theme song. Jeff Bickford, chief information officer at the institution, wrote and performed the song, now available on YouTube:

The never-ending saga of the University of North Dakota's Fighting Sioux nickname and logo has been extended again, with the university tentatively embracing the controversial moniker while a statewide referendum plays itself out, the Associated Press reported. After several years of machinations and stops and starts, the university stopped calling its teams the Fighting Sioux in late 2010 under pressure from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, whose 2005 campaign to end the use of Native American nicknames and mascots considered to be "hostile and abusive" targeted about 20 colleges. At risk was the university's ability to play host to NCAA championships, among other things. But state legislators approved a law last March requiring the university reinstate the Fighting Sioux name, which was promptly repealed in a special legislative session last November, citing the continued threat of NCAA retribution.

Now a group of Fighting Sioux advocates are petitioning to force a statewide vote on the matter, and the university's president said he had reinstated the name and logo to honor the state's referendum process, which mandates that a law must be in effect if it is to be legally challenged. The AP said that state officials would meet soon to decide whether to once again seek legal action to block reinstatement of the law, since the NCAA remains poised to punish North Dakota if the Fighting Sioux nickname is retained.