Higher Education Quick Takes

Nearly 140 ineligible Southeastern Louisiana University athletes in all 16 sports were allowed to practice, compete and receive scholarships because of the institution’s failure to monitor its eligibility certification process, the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced Tuesday. The NCAA cited Southern Louisiana with a lack of control over its athletics department and issued penalties including a $25,000 fine, scholarship reductions and vacation of wins from 2005-9 for teams that played ineligible athletes. The mistake stemmed from a compliance coordinator’s misunderstanding of NCAA progress-toward-degree requirements and failure to verify those rules, the public infractions report says, and the subsequent failure of other staff to step in and correct the system.

The college commission of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools took several institutions off of probationary or warning status at its meeting this week, including the University of Virginia, Fisk and Florida A&M Universities, and Greensboro College. UVa had faced scrutiny from the accreditor because of an effort by a cadre of trustees in summer 2012 to dump President Teresa A. Sullivan. SACS' president, Belle Wheelan, said the university had presented evidence that it had changed its governance policies to ensure that a small minority of the board could not bring about change in leadership. "The board has right to fire president -- in fact, it has the responsibility to do so in some cases. But it is the board that has that right, not a minority of the board -- that was the issue with them," Wheelan said.

Fisk, which has faced significant financial problems that most visibly led it to sell its high-profile art collection, came off probation because the SACS commission was persuaded that its new president had raised sufficient money and had it "heading in the right direction," Wheelan said. Florida A&M, which has undergone enormous turmoil and turnover in the face of a fatal hazing scandal, was taken off probation even though most of its top officials are serving on an interim basis, Wheelan said. Greensboro has resolved many of its financial troubles, the agency determined.

SACS placed or continued another set of institutions on warning status at the meeting, including several because of financial issues (Newberry College, Allen University, Midcontinent University), Norfolk State University (financial and governance issues), Hampden-Sydney College (failure to have sufficient representation of full-time faculty), and Erskine College. (Note: This article has been updated from an earlier version.)

Zhang Xuezhong, a law professor at East China University of Political Science and Law, said Tuesday he had been fired after refusing to apologize for publications championing constitutional law in China, The New York Times reported.

Officials at the Shanghai-based university did not respond to the Times’s requests for comment. However, Zhang obtained and circulated an internal university memo that accuses him of breaking university rules by “forcibly disseminating his political views among the faculty and using his status as a teacher to spread his political views among students.”

The memo cites an e-book he authored, New Common Sense: The Nature and Consequences of One-Party Dictatorship. 

The dismissal of Zhang, who had been banned from the classroom earlier this year, comes amid concerns regarding increasing restrictions on political speech in China and in the aftermath of the controversial dismissal of Xia Yeliang, an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party, from the economics faculty at Peking University. Peking maintains that Xia was fired for his poor teaching and research record, but many believe his criticism of one-party rule was the real reason.

Students in courses hosted by Coursera, the massive open online course provider, can now access lessons on the go -- as long as they have an iPhone. The MOOC provider launched an official mobile app on Tuesday, allowing iPhone users to browse courses, receive notifications from the courses they are enrolled in, and stream and download lectures.

Additional features such as in-video quizzes and private courses are not yet available. The official app is in development for other platforms, according to Coursera's website, but for now, Android users have to make do with several unofficial options. Coursera is the first of the larger MOOC providers to create an app, but competitors such as edX may soon follow. "We are working on a mobile solution for a global audience -- we think of mobile from the [inexpensive Android tablet] Akash to the iPhone," an edX spokesman said in an email.