July 1, 2009

Former Professor Gets 4 Years for Allowing Unauthorized Access to Sensitive Technology

A former professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville was sentenced today to serve four years in federal prison for allowing unauthorized foreign citizens access to restricted military technology, The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported.

J. Reece Roth, a retired professor of electrical and computer engineering, was convicted last September of violating the Arms Export Control Act. Prosecutors said he did so by giving two graduate research assistants — one from Iran and one from China — unauthorized access to sensitive military arms information and by disclosing some of the information in lectures abroad. Mr. Roth, who is 71, was working at the time for a company on a contract to study the use of plasma technology on unmanned military aircraft.

The former professor pleaded not guilty to the charges. But A. William Mackie, the assistant U.S. attorney who led the prosecution, said that Mr. Roth had deliberately broken the law. While government officials have stressed that the case does not signal a crackdown on enforcing regulations about who can work with sensitive technologies, Mr. Mackie said he hoped the case would make university researchers more careful about how they handle such information. —Marc Beja

June 21, 2009

Former Chief of General Electric to Put His Name on an Online M.B.A.

Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, is buying a stake in a company that is forming a new online university, and the university is putting his name on its M.B.A. program, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The company, Chancellor University System LLC, is converting the former Myers University, a Cleveland institution that went bankrupt, into Chancellor University, according to the Journal. Mr. Welch is paying more than $2-million for a 12-percent stake in the business, it said, and the university will name its M.B.A. program the Jack Welch Institute.

The company’s leading investor is Michael K. Clifford, who led the group that bought Grand Canyon University in 2004 and is also a principal in Bridgepoint Education Inc., which operates Ashford University, in Iowa, and the University of the Rockies, in Colorado.

Mr. Welch does not plan to teach any courses at the institute that will bear his name, but he and his wife, Suzy, are involved in recruiting faculty members and planning the curriculum. —Charles Huckabee

June 10, 2009

Education Department's Web Sites Lack Proper Security, Audit Finds

Washington — The U.S. Education Department’s Internet-security features fail to protect confidential, personal information held on its Web sites, says the department’s Office of Inspector General in an audit report released today.

The portion of the report that is available to the public does not name specific departmental Web sites, so it is unclear whether those holding confidential student information are properly secured. For instance, the student-aid Web site has password-protected records of student finances that are used to determine eligibility for federal grants.

A hacker could exploit security vulnerabilities to gain access to sensitive data, the report says. The department has 30 days to develop a corrective outlining how it would better secure its Web sites. —Austin Wright

June 6, 2009

Facebook Campaign May Have Led UCLA Graduation Speaker to Pull Out

Controversial commencement speakers are hardy spring perennials on American campuses. A college invites a speaker hoping for an inspirational oration or a celebrity presence or something, in short, to make the day memorable for the graduates and their families, and to reflect well on the institution at large.

Inevitably some of those invited speakers bring controversy with them, whether because of something they did or said on a hot-button issue, or just because of who they are. Critics, typically more from off campus than on, then speak out, assailing the choice of speaker, demanding an alternative, and making various threats (refusing to attend, withholding alumni gifts, embarrassing the institution, etc.) if they are ignored.

In most cases, of course, the college and the speaker ride out the storm and the commencement goes ahead as planned. Case in point: President Obama’s appearance last month at the University of Notre Dame’s graduation ceremony.

But not every speaker may have the stature to face down the critics, and not all critics are outsiders. The Los Angeles Times reported today that the scheduled speaker at the University of California at Los Angeles’s commencement next Friday — the actor James Franco — had backed out apparently because of a months-long campaign by hundreds of students against his selection that was carried out via the Facebook social-networking site.

Mr. Franco, who has received acclaim for several movie roles and who won a Golden Globe Award, was said by his UCLA critics to be too young (at 31 he would be the youngest commencement speaker in university history). In fact, he was a classmate of some of those who will receive degrees next week: He originally enrolled at UCLA in 1996, but dropped out to pursue his acting career, and only completed his degree last year.

In a written statement issued by UCLA, the actor said preparation for his next film had made it impossible for him to speak as scheduled. He said he regretted not being able to honor his commitment to appear at commencement.

For its part, UCLA had no comment on Mr. Franco’s withdrawal. Officials there were busy lining up a last-minute understudy: Brad Delson, a UCLA alumnus and lead guitarist for the Grammy Award-winning band Linkin Park. Mr. Delson’s age? 31. —Andrew Mytelka

June 4, 2009

10 University-Press Directors Back Free Access to Scholarly Articles

In a move that puts them at odds with the official stance of the Association of American University Presses, a group of university-press directors yesterday issued a position statement that endorses “the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication.”

The statement was signed by the directors of a group of small and medium-size presses, including Penn State University, Rockefeller University Press, the University of Michigan Press, and the University Press of New England. It was posted on Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog.

“The signatories think that it is important to publicly align ourselves with the stance taken by many university faculties and administrators on scholarly communication,” Mike Rossner, the Rockefeller press’s director, told The Chronicle by e-mail on Wednesday. His press makes its content publicly available six months after publication, he said, “and our revenues have increased every year since then.” That experience has led his press to conclude that “providing public access to scholarly-journal articles after a short delay is compatible with our subscription-based business model.”

Mr. Rossner added that his press supports legislation, such as a requirement touching research backed by the National Institutes of Health, that promotes open access. That public-access mandate has come under threat from a bill, the Fair Use in Research Works Act, that’s sponsored by Rep. John Conyers Jr., a Democrat of Michigan. The bill was tabled in the last session of Congress and reintroduced by Mr. Conyers in the current session. The press association and the Association of American Publishers have expressed support for the legislation.

The 10 press directors who signed yesterday’s statement did not refer to the Conyers bill by name. “We support the principle that scholarly research fully funded by governmental entities is a public good and should be treated as such,” they wrote. “We support legislation that strengthens this principle and oppose legislation designed to weaken it.”

Although the statement will gladden the hearts of open-access advocates, the signers represent only a fraction of the press association’s members, and it’s hard to tell what impact their action might have. In a telephone conversation with The Chronicle yesterday, Peter J. Givler, the association’s executive director, said that its executive board had polled the membership recently and found that a majority still agreed with the group’s take on the issue.

He noted that individual presses had the liberty to set their own course. “It’s a free country,” Mr. Givler said. —Jennifer Howard

May 28, 2009

Canadian Think Tank Recalls Reports on Intellectual Property After Plagiarism Allegation

The Conference Board of Canada on Thursday recalled three controversial reports dealing with intellectual-property rights, saying in a statement on its Web site that an internal review had determined that the reports “did not follow the high-quality research standards” that the independent research organization demands.

The reports, which were published last week, warned that Canada was the file-swapping capital of the world. That finding drew a strong response from Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. In a blog entry on Monday, he accused the think tank of releasing “a deceptive, plagiarized report” that relied on outdated and unattributed information from the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which represents American producers of books, motion pictures, music, computer software, and video games.

Shortly afterward, the Conference Board of Canada issued a statement defending the report Mr. Geist had challenged, saying only one citation had been missing. The issue continued to make headlines, however, culminating in the recall this evening of all three reports.

The Conference Board’s president and chief executive, Anne Golden, told The Gazette, a Montreal newspaper, that the reports had been recalled not only because of citation oversights but also because they had not gone through external review. “I want to make it clear that I’m not responding to Geist,” she added. “We recalled the reports when we found out that all three … didn’t go through our process.” —Karen Birchard

May 18, 2009

Former Florida A&M Student Gets Prison Term in Grade-Changing Case

A former Florida A&M University student was sentenced Monday to 22 months in prison in a case involving unauthorized changes to grades and other student records at the university, the Tallahassee Democrat reported, citing information from the U.S. attorney’s office.

The former student, Lawrence Secrease, pleaded guilty to charges that included aggravated identity theft, unauthorized access of a protected computer, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his part in a scheme that involved grade changes for about 90 students, prosecutors said. Mr. Secrease and two co-defendants also changed the residency status for some out-of-state students to in-state, reducing tuition revenue to the university by thousands of dollars, the prosecutors said.

One co-defendant, Christopher Jacquette, also pleaded guilty and received the same sentence as Mr. Secrease last month, the newspaper reported. A third defendant, Marcus Barrington, was convicted at a trial in March and is scheduled to be sentenced next month. —Charles Huckabee

May 9, 2009

Iowa Private College Sells Assets to For-Profit University

Waldorf College, a financially struggling private institution in Iowa, has agreed to sell its assets to Columbia Southern University, an online institution based in Alabama.

“This is an exciting day — the culmination of many months of hard work,” Dick Hanson, Waldorf’s president, said in a statement.

The 580-student college, which is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is expected to maintain its name and its campus in Forest City while adding five new majors, in international management, criminal-justice administration, fire-science administration, sports management, and organizational leadership, The Des Moines Register reported. —Jeffrey J. Selingo

April 29, 2009

What's College Admissions Without a Blog?

College-admissions offices overwhelmingly consider social media important for recruiting students, and more institutions are creating blogs and online profiles, new studies show.

Thirty-three percent of admissions offices kept blogs in 2007, and 29 percent maintained social-networking profiles, according to a report released today by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, known as NACAC. The report, “Reaching the Wired Generation: How Social Media Is Changing College Admission” (available to NACAC members) is based on survey responses from 453 colleges in the spring of 2007.

But social media evolve quickly, show more-recent data published by the author of the NACAC report, Nora Ganim Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. A survey of 536 colleges in the fall of 2008 found that 41 percent of admissions offices kept blogs and 61 percent maintained social-networking profiles.

Private colleges were more likely than public institutions to keep blogs, according to Ms. Barnes’s report. Over all, it says, information-technology units typically set up blogs, and admissions, marketing, or public-relations offices maintained them. Forty-eight percent of colleges said they kept video blogs, and 16 percent reported using podcasts.

The NACAC report raises some concerns about colleges’ use of social media, primarily that they don’t sufficiently promote, evaluate, or keep dynamic various online ventures. The report offers bullet-point advice, telling colleges to focus their blogs but to line up several contributors, including students, with only minor supervision. It also recommends starting blogs in languages other than English to recruit international students.

For some colleges, social media are not only for sharing information but for seeking it, the studies show. In 2007, 26 percent of colleges examined some applicants with Web searches, and 21 percent checked them out on social networks. Nowhere did the practice involve every applicant; instead, colleges looked up candidates when considering them for scholarships or other special programs, the NACAC report says. “In all these cases,” it says, “the intent was to protect the school from potential embarrassment.”

By last fall, however, those searches had decreased, says Ms. Barnes’s report. Twenty-three percent of colleges reported using Web searches and 17 percent said they had used social networks to look at applicants. —Sara Lipka

Delays Beset Google Settlement, as Judge Extends Deadlines and Justice Dept. Steps In

It’s beginning to feel like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the case in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House that drags on, and on, and on. As speculation grows about the impact that the Google Book Search settlement will have on readers and publishers — will it result in a universal library or a worrisome monopoly? — an actual resolution of the case continues to recede in the distance.

In the latest delay, reported by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the federal judge in charge of the proceedings responded to authors’ pleas by giving them an extra four months to opt out of the settlement. They now have until September to take that step. The judge, Denny Chin, also bumped the date for a final hearing on the settlement from June to October.

Another piece of news threw the future of the settlement into greater doubt. The Justice Department has taken an interest in the agreement too. It wants to know whether the deal violates antitrust regulations, the Times reported yesterday.

“Lawyers for the Justice Department have been in conversations in recent weeks with various groups opposed to the settlement, including the Internet Archive and Consumer Watchdog,” the Times reported. “More recently, Justice Department lawyers notified the parties to the settlement, including Google, and representatives for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, that they were looking into various antitrust issues related to the far-reaching agreement.”

The federal interest in the case doesn’t necessarily doom the deal, the Times noted. But it “suggests that some of the concerns raised by critics, who say the settlement would unfairly give Google an exclusive license to profit from millions of books, have resonated with the Justice Department.” —Jennifer Howard