Quick Takes

The Arizona Legislature has voted to place on the 2010 state ballot a proposal to bar state agencies -- including public colleges and universities -- from considering race, ethnicity and gender in decisions such as admissions and hiring, The East Valley Tribune reported. Last year, groups backing a similar proposal tried to place the item on the state ballot by citizen petition, but failed to turn in enough signatures. While some state proposals to bar the consideration of race in admissions have focused on undergraduate admissions, the biggest impact of such a measure in Arizona would likely be on graduate and professional school admissions, and on some financial aid programs.

Last August, Congress pulled the plug on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, amid a sense that the Bush administration had overly politicized the U.S. Education Department's advisory panel on accreditation. On Monday, the Education Department announced that it would take nominations for the six seats that Education Secretary Arne Duncan can fill on the newly reconstituted 18-member panel; the House and Senate will each appoint six members, too.

On Monday, an article in The San Francisco Chronicle reported on a plan by the City College of San Francisco to save some of the courses being canceled due to budget cuts by letting donors sponsor them for $6,000 -- in return for which the donors would have courses named for them. One problem: The board was never consulted. Now the newspaper is reporting that board members have put the plan on hold until they can discuss it, and while they acknowledge that the severe budget crisis the college is facing may require unusual approaches, some are indicating discomfort with this response. Milton Marks, president of board, told the newspaper: "Public education is not for sale.... If someone wants to give money, that's great. But getting publicity or feel-good points shouldn't be necessary. It smacks of some sort of paternalism."

LIberty University, which has been under criticism for denying recognition to a campus Democratic group, on Monday announced a new policy on political clubs that will treat Democrats and Republicans the same way. Under the new policy, both the Democratic and Republican clubs will be "unofficial," although they can use the university's name and meet on campus, The Lynchburg News & Advance reported. If these unofficial clubs endorse candidates who differ from the university's Christian views, they may not use university facilities for activities on behalf of these candidates. Student Democrats said that they were pleased to be on equal footing with the Republicans.

Just days after DePaul University ousted a popular law dean in a dispute over how much of the law school's budget should be shared with the university, an associate dean has quit to protest the way the interim dean was selected without faculty involvement. The Chicago Tribune reported on an e-mail sent by Stephen Siegel, the associate dean, following the selection of Warren Wolfson, an Illinois judge, to serve as interim dean for two years. The e-mail from Siegel said: "In my 37 years of service to DePaul I have served under 5 deans. (I'm not counting interim and acting deans.) Four of them were replaced mid-term.... But every previous time, the university turned to the faculty with expectation and trust that we would step into the breach -- and we did, superbly, working cooperatively to bring the best out of the situation. This time, although we have the most talented and prestigious collection of faculty we ever have had -- we have effectively been put into a two year receivership -- with no consultation, dialogue, trust."

Raising the drinking age to 21 two decades ago has decreased the rates of excessive drinking by many, but not by college students, according to a new study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. The study, based on national databases involving more than 500,000 individuals, found that binge drinking by male college students was unchanged, while binge drinking by female college students increased dramatically after the drinking age went up.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Friday vetoed House Bill 103, which would have made Texas the first state to require its high-enrollment colleges – those with 20,000 or more students – to bill students’ private insurance for care they receive at campus health centers. The bill had passed relatively effortlessly through the Texas Legislature, by votes of 143-4 in the House and 27-4 in the State Senate, with supporters saying the measure would bring in significant revenue by tapping into the private insurance plans that 70 percent of Texas students bring with them to campus. In listing his objections, Perry said the bill “would likely increase health service costs for college students and their families without increasing the level of service or care.” The governor pointed out, as have other critics of HB 103, that colleges already have the power to bill students’ private insurance plans, but most choose not to because of efficiency issues and the potential for raised cost to students.

LANSDOWNE, Va. -- The higher education pipeline in 16 southern states is filled with the very students who historically have had the most difficulty graduating from college, the Southern Regional Education Board reported at its meeting here Monday. Hispanic students in the South, 43 percent of whom graduate from college in six years, will make up 31 percent of the region's public high school graduates in 2022, more than doubling their presence in the pool of students potentially headed to college, according to the 2009 SREB Fact Book on Higher Education publicly released today. White students, who have the region's highest graduation rate -- 56 percent -- will be increasingly less represented in the high school graduate population, falling 17 percentage points to 43 percent of the cohort. Black students, who have a 40 percent graduation rate, are expected to decline slightly as a proportion of the region's high school graduates, falling 3 percentage points in 2022 to 20 percent of the cohort. In other news at the conference, West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin was elected chair of the SREB, succeeding Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

Two higher education experiments have received high-profile financial boosts. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, has invested more than $2 million for a 12 percent stake in Chancellor University, a for-profit college that was formerly Myers University, in Cleveland, the Wall Street Journal reported. In return, Chancellor will name its M.B.A. program for Welch. And on Monday, 2Tor, which last fall unveiled plans to help the University of Southern California take its master's degree in teaching online and ramp up its scale, announced that it had received $10 million in venture capital funds.

Four members of Congress have sent a letter asking the National Academies to appoint a national commission to identify the "top 10 actions" that Congress, state governments and others could take to strengthen the international competitive position of American research universities, saying: "We are concerned that they are at risk." The signers were Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), and Reps. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) and Ralph Hall (R-Texas).