Quick Takes

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has cut off the access its lobbying branch had to the student information database, The News-Gazette reported. A university spokesman said that there was no reason for those who lobby for the university to have immediate access to student records. Some university officials have worried that the access allowed lobbyists to see and share information about students -- possibly in violation of privacy protection laws. The university has been facing a scandal over the last week, following reports in the Chicago Tribune about the way the university admitted students based on their political connections, sometimes over the objections of admissions officials.

The Georgia Board of Regents has increased the cap on the use of lecturers at public colleges from 10 to 20 percent of a public college or university's faculty, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Lecturers do not have tenure or research responsibilities, and so tend to teach more courses each semester than do professors. Board officials said that they raised the cap to allow colleges to make more hires, despite tough budget times, in high-demand areas. At the same time, the goal of the program is to keep the tenure-track as the norm for the faculty. The cap does not apply to part-time positions, which have been used to date by many colleges, and some faculty leaders questioned why those slots should not also be capped so more tenure-track positions would be created.

Bryn Mawr College on Wednesday announced a new "flexible" testing policy that will still require some standardized testing of all applicants, but that will make it possible for applicants to bypass the main SAT and ACT tests. Up until now, applicants had to either take the main SAT and two SAT subject tests, or the ACT. Now applicants will have a third option, to submit three Advanced Placement or SAT subject exams: one in English, history or languages; one in math or science; and one in a subject of the student's choice that is different from the other two. "Our new ‘test flexible’ policy will allow Bryn Mawr applicants to select the standardized tests that they believe best represent their academic potential,” said Jenny Rickard, Bryn Mawr dean of admissions and financial aid, in a statement. She added that "these tests are just one of the many factors we look at as part of our holistic evaluation process and that’s not going to change. A student’s course selection and performance in high school will continue to be the most important academic information in an application.” Bryn Mawr is one of a group of colleges that have not abandoned testing, but have moved to give students options beyond the traditional choice of the main SAT.

An advocacy group for public higher education in Massachusetts has filed a federal complaint charging the state with diverting federal stimulus funds from higher education to other areas, The Boston Globe reported. Massachusetts received a waiver, allowing it to spend stimulus funds designated for education on other areas for the next fiscal year, but the complaint charges that the state is trying to "frontload" spending so that more funds are used under the waiver and less will be available for public higher education. State officials said that they were spending the dollars consistent with their obligations under the waiver, and that they needed the flexibility because of the severity of the budget crisis in the state.

The University of the Pacific is being criticized over remarks last week by a a spokesman who suggested that there is a difference between "date rape" and "outright rape," The Stockton Record reported. After the remarks were published, the spokesman, Richard Rojo, said that he wanted "to clarify that, under the university's sexual-assault policies, date rape is rape." He made the original comments in discussing a lawsuit by a former women's basketball player over the way the university treated her after she opposed a decision not to expel all three men's basketball players she accused of raping her. (A university judicial board recommended that one of the players be expelled and the other two be suspended.) Rojo said that he made the "ill-thought-out statement" because he was trying to talk about a "threat perspective" and to point out that -- given that the woman who brought the complaint knew her alleged attackers -- "we did not want to suggest that there was a threat of a random rapist attacking women on campus."