The American Political Science Association announced Friday that it will move its summer workshop for African scholars from Uganda to a yet-to-be-determined location elsewhere in Africa. The association planned the meeting well before the current debate there about legislation that would impose severe penalties -- including execution in some cases -- for gay acts. A statement issued by the association noted that "legal hostility" toward gay people is a problem in almost all African nations. But Uganda poses "unique" problems, the association said, in part because of the breadth of the proposed legislation, which covers some thought as well as behavior, the statement said. The association has been studying the issue and hoping that the legislation would be withdrawn or defeated, but at this point, plans need to be made, so the APSA decided to move the meeting. "We cannot commit today to send staff and scholars to work in Uganda safely on topics that include the study of sexual identity in politics, and we of course must not remove these topics from our agenda for the workshops," the statement said.

Albion College, in Michigan, has announced plans to eliminate the equivalent of 15 full-time faculty positions (about 10 percent of the faculty), in anticipation of enrollment declines in the years ahead, The Jackson Citizen Patriot reported. The college says that some of the job cuts will come through early retirement, but others may not. Faculty leaders say that they are concerned about how positions -- especially of tenured or tenure-track faculty -- are going to be selected for elimination.

After days of intense debate, much of it with racial overtones, over a recent step competition, Coca-Cola, the sponsor has declared co-winners, the Associated Press reported. Step has historically been associated with historically black fraternities and sororities, so many were surprised when a white sorority from the University of Arkansas won the Sprite Step Off on Saturday, and some observers charged that there must have been scoring irregularities. In the discussion on YouTube of the winning performance by the Zeta Tau Alphas, many of the comments reference that they are white. On Thursday, Coca-Cola announced that a review had uncovered a "scoring discrepancy" and that the scores between the first and second place teams were so close that they would share the prize money and the first place honor. The new co-winning team, whose members are black, is from Alpha Kappa Alpha at Indiana University.

Microsoft announced Wednesday it is extending its "identity federation" services to its college and university clients who use [email protected], the company’s integrated e-mail, calendar, instant messaging, and online file storage suite. An “identity federation” is a group of institutions that allows students, researchers, and employees who need to access password-protected Web sites at multiple institutions to use a single log-in identification and password. With thousands of institutions worldwide already using [email protected], the federation is already built, said Cameron Evans, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, in an interview yesterday. Evans compared the service to the driver’s license system, where a person who acquired a driver’s license in Maryland can use it to drive or verify I.D. in each of the other 49 states, rather than having to acquire and carry around 50 different licenses. Identity federations are currently a hot topic in campus IT; Educause last year recognized several companies that had applied the concept to higher education with its Catalyst Award.