Higher Education Quick Takes

The University of Colorado has filed a legal request to recover $52,000 in legal costs from Ward Churchill, the controversial professor it fired for research misconduct and who sued unsuccessfully to get his job back, The Daily Camera reported. Colorado law allows prevailing parties in some court cases to seek legal fees from the losing party. Churchill is appealing a judge's ruling denying him his job back and his lawyer indicated that he disagreed with Colorado's legal bill as well.

The University of California is investigating whether a lecture by a pro-Palestinian speaker -- sponsored by the Muslim Student Union -- violated university rules by becoming a fund raiser, and the university has forwarded to the U.S. Justice Department allegations that some of the funds raised were eventually given to Hamas, The Orange County Register reported. Organizers of the event deny any wrongdoing, and say that the allegations are part of a campaign by pro-Israel groups to limit the activities of groups critical of Israel.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $385,000 to the libraries of Columbia and Cornell Universities to explore collaboration in ways that the announcement says could create "the most expansive collaboration to date between major research libraries." While details on how the collaboration will work remain under development, Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell, said possibilities include several models in building collections. The universities might "separately build collections in and share via expedited document delivery or electronic access," or "we might also collectively build one collection in some fields, or continue to collect materials at the local level to support instruction and collectively build at the research level." Other areas of possible collaboration include "combining forces for technical processing," such as acquisitions, cataloging, electronic resource management, and data management, or developing a "shared technology infrastructure," with a possible focus on digital preservation, she said.

Nikole Churchill was crowned as Miss Hampton University this month, a victory that was seen by some as significant because Churchill is not black and Hampton is a historically black university. Churchill wrote a letter to President Obama about both her win and concerns that "my crowning was not widely accepted" and that many "negative comments" have been made on the campus because she is not black. She invited the president to visit Hampton "so that my fellow Hamptonians can stop focusing so much on the color of my skin and doubting my abilities to represent." She told the president that some have called her "lil Obama." The Daily Press published an article about the controversy Tuesday, noting that the campus was divided by whether Churchill should have won, and quoting a pageant official as saying that Churchill did not have the university's permission to have posted her letter to Obama online. Later Tuesday, Churchill gave the newspaper an apology to the university, in which she said of her letter to Obama: "I have now come to regret writing this letter and disappointing the very students that I now represent. I took the comments of a few and blew it out of proportion. In reality, all comments that have been directed towards me and the reception I received at the Hampton University versus Howard University football game on Saturday, October 10, 2009 were genuinely supportive."