Quick Takes: Fire Kills Marshall Student, Storm Shuts Missouri Colleges, Ethics Course for U. of California Employees, Restoring Honor to Honorary Degrees

A Marshall University student was killed in a fire that destroyed a Huntington, West Va. apartment building late Saturday. Nine deaths have been reported in the fire, which struck a building that housed both Marshall students and local residents. At least seven Marshall students have been moved into dormitories and others are staying with friends. The university indicated that most students who lived in the building lost everything they had in their apartments.

By

Scott Jaschik

January 16, 2007

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A severe snow and ice storm around Springfield, Mo. has led Drury University to close its campuses until Monday. Missouri State University will be closed today.

All 230,000 employees of the University of California -- from the system president to junior faculty members, academic and non-academic employees alike -- will be required to take a 30-minute online course on ethics, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. The course follows a series of scandals about compensation and financial reporting issues in the system.

Officials at the University of Edinburgh, fed up with trends in honorary degrees, are creating new rules that would ban or make it more difficult to give the degrees to movie stars, politicians currently in office, or "serial" collectors of such degrees, The Scotsman reported. Another reform will be new procedures to strip honorary degrees to people who have gone on to do dishonorable things. That reform is prompted by a desire to revoke a degree given to Robert Mugabe, whose leadership of Zimbabwe has included widespread human rights violations.