Higher Education Quick Takes

An article in The New York Times details the common practice of drug companies offering to ghostwrite articles in scientific journals in the names of prominent professors. The article describes how professors are recruited, an apparent reluctance by universities or federal agencies to police the practice and the growing pressure from Sen. Charles Grassley to get the National Institutes of Health to crack down on the practice.

Ever since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, Southern University has complained that its campus there has not received the federal help to which it was entitled. On Monday, that dispute was settled with the announcement from Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, that Southern's New Orleans campus will receive $32 million to allow it to rebuild four academic buildings, The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported.

Nicholls State University’s redesigned mascot has angered some alumni who find it has a striking resemblance “to a soldier from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich or a member of Soviet Russia's Red Army.” The Times-Picayune reports that the university spent $30,000 to rebrand the logo of Col. Tillou – the mascot named after Francis Redding Tillou Nicholls, university namesake, former Louisiana governor and Confederate officer. The new logo replaces an older one – with a white-bearded man wearing a gray uniform – that was retired in 2004 after a local chapter of the NAACP found it offensive. One alumnus told The Times-Picayune that “the new image seems evil, faceless and inhuman." The university plans to stick by the new mascot logo, for now. Those skeptical of it are reserving judgment until they see the university's soon-to-be-unveiled costumed mascot. (This corrects an earlier version of this brief.)

Authorities arrested four people Monday at a protest at the University of California at Berkeley over the continued tenure there of John Yoo, a law professor who during work in the Bush administration wrote several memos used to justify the use of torture on suspected terrorists, the Associated Press reported. Yoo's position at Berkeley has been defended by law school leaders on academic freedom grounds, but others have argued that his actions were so reprehensible that normal standards shouldn't apply.