News
Quick Takes: MIT President Wants Professors to Get Along, More Opposition to Upward Bound Changes, El Camino to Run Compton, Leaving Beirut, Cleaning Up Plagiarism Mess
July 19, 2006
- Amid accusations that a prominent neuroscientist discouraged a rising star in the field from accepting a position at MIT, the president of the institute has appointed a special committee to encourage collaboration among professors. Susan Hockfield, the president, said that collaboration was particularly important "because the most important intellectual challenges of our time call for interdisciplinary approaches."
- A coalition of higher education associations is weighing in against an Education Department proposal to narrow the eligibility criteria for the Upward Bound program. The letter states that the department's proposed changes ignore Congressional intentions for the program and its record of success.
- El Camino College will take over the management of Compton Community College in the wake of the latter institution's loss of accreditation, the Los Angeles Times reported. While Compton has been plagued by financial and managerial problems, many in its California region have relied on it for higher education.
- Seventy-three American students at the American University of Beirut were evacuated Tuesday, on a ship that took at total of 200 Americans from the city. A spokeswoman in the university's New York City office said that about 190 American students remain on its Beirut campus. Most of them are enrolled at colleges in the United States and were in Beirut for summer programs in Arabic. She said that some students are waiting to leave, and others are staying, hopiong that the university will be able to resume classes.
- Ohio University has sent letters to more than 50 people who earned master's degrees with material believed to be plagiarized, asking them to return their degrees, rewrite their theses, or demand a hearing, The Athens News reported. In May the university found "rampant and flagrant plagiarism" among some graduate students in its mechanical engineering department.
