Quick Takes

Three campuses experienced fatal shootings of students in the last week:

• Police shot and killed Danroy Henry, a football player at Pace University, early Sunday morning after he allegedly tried to drive away from a bar fight, crashing into two police officers, The New York Post reported.
• A student at Lane College, in Tennessee, died last week after being accidentally shot by his roommate, the Associated Press reported.
• A student from Hampton University was shot and killed early Sunday morning at a post-homecoming party at California University of Pennsylvania, and two students were injured in the shooting, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

Ronald Mason Jr., president of the Southern University System, set off a controversy last week when he suggested that the University of New Orleans be merged into the system. The University of New Orleans is part of the predominantly white Louisiana State University System, while Southern is historically black. Headlines about Mason's comments led some to believe he wanted to merge the UNO campus into Southern's New Orleans campus -- an idea he has since stressed isn't what he was talking about, The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported. The idea he wanted to put on the table -- likely equally controversial, but different -- was to move the University of New Orleans into the Southern system. Mason has experience with controversial merger proposals and black colleges, having in January, while president of Jackson State University, backed a plan to merge Mississippi's three public black colleges. (That plan didn't advance.)

The U.S. Department of Education announced in today's Federal Register that it will hold public meetings on Nov. 4 and 5 in Washington, where individuals and groups that submitted official comments about the department's proposed regulations on "gainful employment" can deliver oral presentations and answer questions posed to them by department employees. After receiving more than 90,000 comments and citing flexibility in its timeline for publishing final rules, the department in September said it would delay the release of a final version of the most controversial part of the regulations -- metrics to hold programs accountable for loan repayment rates and the debt service-to-income ratios of their graduates and dropouts -- to allow for public and private meetings on the proposal. The rules are expected early next year and would take effect on July 1, 2012.

Montreal's Concordia University announced last week that it had suspended a professor who made what officials there called “unfounded allegations” against administrators and repeatedly referenced a former faculty member who killed four colleagues in 1992. The Montreal Gazette reported that Vesselin Petkov, a philosophy professor, has been alleging for months that he is the victim of “academic mobbing,” or bullying on the part of his colleagues. Petkov said a department “doctored” its minutes and the university canceled courses he taught. According to a university statement, the suspension is an “exceptional step,” but justified because Petkov’s behavior “is inappropriate and is perceived as threatening” by some people at Concordia. The university said Petkov had disputed the integrity of Concordia administrators, as well as members of an internal panel charged with reviewing his complaints against the university. The statement also said that after his suspension, Petkov e-mailed students about his situation, which the university called “highly inappropriate.” Petkov has filed a grievance with the university, which is not commenting further, citing confidentiality and legal obligations.

Purdue University has begun a new branding campaign, under the theme of "Makers, All," playing up the institution's entrepreneurial, science and technology focus. But news of the campaign, posted to the university's Facebook page, immediately drew skeptical responses from some alumni. Some think the new tag line sounds like Maker's Mark bourbon. Others said it was "goofy" and questioned why funds were spent on the new slogan. A new Facebook group has been launched, called "We Are Boilermakers!!! 'Makers, All' Makes Us Dumb." Teri Lucie Thompson, vice president for marketing and media at Purdue, told The Lafayette Journal and Courier that some of the anger is coming from people who believe (incorrectly) that the university is abandoning the use of Boilermaker. She said some backlash is inevitable to any branding campaign. "This is pretty typical in branding," she said. "If people feel like you are messing with something that is sacred to them, there is some added passion."

Although an Arizona law added two seats to the board of the Maricopa Community College District, the seats have been delayed because of a federal review of the civil rights implications of the change, The Arizona Republic reported. The new seats would be elected at large, while the five current seats are all elected by districts within the district. The federal review focuses on whether the creation of at-large seats would dilute minority representation.

The "It Gets Better" campaign, a response to a recent string of suicides of gay youth, features gay people making videos about how life for gay people improves as they get older. The latest such video is from Neal King, president of Antioch University Los Angeles and one of the small number of gay college presidents. He notes in the video that he was raised in an era when children were taught that gay people were "sick, sinners and criminal." His message for gay youth is that "bullies are losers," that there are many people "who care about you," and that "it gets better." He closes by saying: "You are wonderful. You are complete, just the way you are."

The "It Gets Better" campaign videos are on YouTube, including this new one by King:

Faculty members at the University of Mumbai are demanding that the vice chancellor tell them why a novel was ordered removed from a reading list for second-year students, The Times of India reported. The novel, Such a Long Journey (Vintage), is about India in 1971; it is by Rohinton Mistry, who was born in India but is now living in Canada. CBC News reported that the novel has won many awards, but offended some students at the university for what they view as unfair portrayals of right-wing politicians.

President Obama on Friday announced the 10 researchers who have been named recipients of the National Medal of Science. They are:

• Yakir Aharonov of Chapman University.
• Stephen J. Benkovic of Pennsylvania State University.
• Esther M. Conwell of the University of Rochester.
• Marye Anne Fox of the University of California at San Diego.
• Susan L. Lindquist of the Whitehead Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Mortimer Mishkin of the National Institutes of Health.
• David B. Mumford of Brown University.
• Stanley B. Prusiner of the University of California at San Francisco.
• Warren M. Washington of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
• Amnon Yariv of the California Institute of Technology.