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The Undead Soul of Today’s College Best-Seller List

College students’ reading habits ain’t what they used to be, laments Ron Charles, a senior editor at The Washington Post’s Book World.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s monthly list of best-selling titles on college campuses, Mr. Charles notes, has lately been dominated by the vampire tales of Stephenie Meyer and the inspirational stories of Barack Obama. Forty years earlier — amid the passion of civil rights, Vietnam, and the women’s movement — student tastes ran more along the lines of Howl, Soul on Ice, and the poetry of Sylvia Plath.

Today “we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents,” he writes. “The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.”

Not everyone shares his alarm, reports Mr. Charles. Mike Connery, who writes for the Web site Future Majority, says that the top titles are simply what people are reading to escape. They absorb their politics through blogs and social networks, he says.

Mr. Charles isn’t buying that argument. “For the Twitter generation, the new slogan seems to be ‘Don’t trust anyone over 140 characters,’ he writes. “What you see at the next revolution is far more likely to be a well-designed Web site than a radical novel or a poem. Not to be a drag, but that’s so uncool.” —Don Troop

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New Education Secretary Makes First Appearance on a College Campus

For his first official visit to a college, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan chose the nation’s largest and most diverse community college: Miami-Dade College.

Mr. Duncan, who spoke there on a panel today with Jill Biden, the community-college professor who is Vice President Joseph Biden Jr.’s wife, touted the recently enacted economic-stimulus law and highlighted the role community colleges will play in the nation’s economic recovery and competitiveness.

He also empathized with the fiscal challenges facing Florida’s colleges and universities, which have been forced to cut jobs and student aid in the face of deep reductions in state education spending. “You are all too familiar with the challenge of trying to serve your students amid this economic crisis,” he said.

But the new secretary was noncommittal when asked if the Education Department would grant Florida a waiver that would allow it to receive .5-billion in federal stimulus dollars to offset the state cuts. Under the stimulus legislation, states must maintain education spending at levels set in the 2006 fiscal year to receive a share of the money. Florida has not done that, so it must apply for a waiver.

“Let’s just say that we want to help,” he said, according to the Palm Beach Post. —Kelly Field

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West Virginia U. Hires Towson U. Provost as President

James P. Clements is West Virginia University’s next president, university officials said today. Mr. Clements has been provost of Towson University since 2007. He will take over from C. Peter Magrath, West Virginia’s interim president, on June 30.

A politically charged scandal shook the university through much of last year, resulting in the ouster of several top administrators. Tensions have eased under Mr. Magrath’s tenure, although some challenges linger.

Mr. Clements, 44, an expert in management and information technology, has been a faculty member at Towson for 20 years. He holds a Ph.D. in operations analysis from the University of Maryland at Baltimore. His annual salary at West Virginia has been set at 0,000.

The search committee that selected Mr. Clements was led by Gene A. Budig, the former chancellor of the University of Kansas and official with Major League Baseball. —Paul Fain

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Obama to Lift Ban on Federal Funds for Stem-Cell Research on Monday

Washington — President Obama will sign an executive order lifting restrictions on federal support for embryonic-stem-cell research on Monday, The Washington Post reported this afternoon, citing anonymous sources.

For background on the implications for scientists of overturning the ban, see past Chronicle coverage. —David Shieh

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Colleges Worry Their Credit Ratings May Suffer

College investment officers are worried that their institutions’ tight finances put them at risk for a credit-ratings downgrade, a new survey has found. The officials’ biggest concern: a lack of diversification in their investment portfolios.

The survey, conducted by SEI, an asset-management company in Oaks, Pa., included 57 executives overseeing college or university endowments, with assets ranging from -million to more than -billion.

Credit ratings determine how much interest organizations must pay when they borrow money or issue bonds. (Those with a higher rating pay less.) The ratings are also an indicator of an organization’s financial health.

Not all higher-education institutions have a credit rating. Among the institutions represented in the survey, nearly three-quarters do have such ratings and more than half had taken on debt in the past 12 months.

While none of the institutions in the survey had experienced a credit downgrade in the last 12 months, almost all of the officials (97 percent) said their institutions’ financial state put them at risk for such a demotion.

Among the problem spots indicated by the respondents, nearly one-third said a drop in income from fund raising was a concern.

But the greatest concerns focused on the institutions’ investment portfolios.

Eight-four percent of the respondents said credit agencies would look unfavorably at a lack of diversification, and 65 percent said that a lack of liquidity could lead to a credit downgrade.

Two-thirds of the participants did not feel that poor investment performance would result in a downgrade.

A complete summary of the poll is available by sending an e-mail message to seiresearch@seic.com. —Debra E. Blum

Note: This article was cross-posted from the Web site of The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

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Alleged Cyberbully Is Arraigned on Charges Stemming From Dead Sea Scrolls Dispute

Raphael Haim Golb was arraigned this morning in a New York criminal court on charges that he used dozens of aliases to conduct an Internet-based campaign to smear and harass scholars who disagreed with the theories of his father, Norman Golb, a University of Chicago professor who is a prominent expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The charges against Raphael Golb, who is 49, include 21 counts of identity theft in the third degree, one count of identity theft in the second degree, 30 counts of criminal impersonation in the second degree, 18 counts of forgery in the third degree, and one count of aggravated harassment in the second degree, according to court documents.

Raphael Golb was arrested on Thursday, after the police served a search warrant at his Lower Manhattan home, and held overnight.

Mr. Golb allegedly used computers at New York University’s Bobst Library — one block from his home — to assail a number of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars on message boards, on blogs, and through e-mail.

In one case highlighted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Mr. Golb allegedly created an e-mail account in the name of Lawrence H. Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at NYU, and sent e-mail messages from the account to various people at the university “admitting” to plagiarism.

Norman Golb told The New York Times yesterday that his son “is an honorable man” and “could not have done such a thing.” The elder Mr. Golb suggested that the charges brought against his son were “a setup” designed to discredit the theory about the origin of the 2,000-year-old scrolls that he and his son share. He did not immediately return a message seeking comment from The Chronicle.

Raphael Golb was not required to enter a plea at his criminal arraignment. He was released on his own recognizance. His next court date was set for June 11, when a grand jury will decide whether to indict him on the charges. —Steve Kolowich

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NCAA Orders Florida State U. to Forfeit Wins Over Cheating Scandal

The National Collegiate Athletic Association has ordered Florida State University to forfeit wins in 10 sports in response to an academic-cheating scandal involving 61 athletes who competed while ineligible in 2006 and 2007.

The NCAA has also placed Florida State on probation for four years and stripped the university of scholarships in the 10 sports, according to a report released this afternoon by the NCAA’s Division I Committee on Infractions.

According to the report, three staff members in the university’s Athletics Academic Support Services department “gave improper assistance resulting in academic fraud” to the 61 athletes. A large number of the violations were committed in an online music course. One of the three staff members had typed portions of at least three athletes’ papers.

“This case was extremely serious because of the large number of student-athletes involved and the fact that academic fraud is considered by the committee to be among the most egregious of NCAA infractions,” the report reads.

The sports — football, baseball, softball, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s swimming, men’s and women’s track and field, and men’s golf — all face scholarship restrictions, including six fewer in football and two fewer in men’s basketball.

The 61 athletes have already had to sit out 30 percent of their playing schedules as punishment.

The forfeiture of wins could hurt football coach Bobby Bowden’s pursuit of the all-time record for major-college football coaching victories. (He has 382 career wins, one behind Penn State coach Joe Paterno.) The Seminoles coach must forfeit all wins during which ineligible students competed in 2006 and 2007. It is not clear how many games that might be.

Florida State said it would consider appealing the NCAA’s order to forfeit wins, saying it never knowingly played ineligible athletes and followed eligibility guidelines agreed to by the NCAA.

“We just don’t understand the sanction to vacate all wins in athletics contests in which ineligible student-athletes competed because we did not allow anyone who we knew was ineligible to compete,” Florida State President T.K. Wetherell said in a written statement. “Our position throughout the inquiry was that as soon as we knew of a problem, they didn’t play.” —David Shieh

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Student-Newspaper Staff Ends Strike at U. of Oregon

Reporters and editors at the Oregon Daily Emerald, the student newspaper at the University of Oregon, announced today that they would end their strike and the paper would resume publication on Monday. The staff, which walked out on Wednesday morning, said that the newspaper’s Board of Directors had taken steps to address the students’ concern that they were losing editorial control of the paper. —Elyse Ashburn

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Plagiarism in Science Research Is Often Ignored, Studies Find

Washington — Shock. Denial. Disbelief. Sadness. Regret. Embarrassment.

Those, according to a commentary published today in Science magazine, are some of the reactions from both scientists and science journals when they are found to be involved in cases of potential plagiarism.

The commentary was offered by researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, who used a computer-based text-searching tool to analyze millions of randomly selected research abstracts.

The analysis of Medline, a database of biomedical research articles, found 9,120 entries “with high levels of citation similarity and no overlapping authors,” including 212 pairs of articles “with signs of potential plagiarism,” the researchers wrote.

The lead author, Harold Garner, a professor of biochemistry and internal medicine at the medical center, said he and his colleagues then conducted a survey of the authors and journal editors, promising them anonymity. The survey responses, Mr. Garner wrote, included explanations, denials, embarrassed apologies, and some retractions. Among the original authors, he wrote, 93 percent were not aware of the duplicate article.

Mr. Garner also wrote an article for Nature, published in January 2008, titled “A Tale of Two Citations,” that reported a similar finding: His computerized search of several million scientific-journal articles revealed thousands of cases in which one article had large similarities with another article.

Both of Mr. Garner’s articles were based on research involving the Medline database and UT Southwestern’s computer-based text-searching tool, eTBLAST. And in both articles, Mr. Garner suggested that the size and severity of this problem continued to be ignored by publishers.

The Nature article warned against both plagiarism by another author and “self plagiarism,” in which the same author or authors present duplicate findings to different journals.

Mr. Garner nevertheless said that his Science magazine report represents a significant advance over his earlier article in Nature. The survey published in Science, while anonymous, prompted 83 internal investigations at scientific journals, which in turn led to 43 cases in which an article was retracted, he said.

That compares to only 17 such retractions last year, which is a more typical annual figure, he said.

Such a case of plagiarism or duplication can have serious medical consequences, Mr. Garner said, as it could lead a doctor who is investigating a patient’s condition to believe a scientific finding is more recent, or perhaps more reliable, because of its repeated appearance in medical journals. —Paul Basken

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Student-Body President at Abilene Christian U. Is Ousted

The student-government association at Abilene Christian University voted to oust its president in a closed meeting on Wednesday night, saying he had failed to fulfill the duties of the office and to adhere to ethical standards of conduct, according to the Abilene Reporter News. Of the 32 students who participated in the impeachment hearing, the newspaper said, 25 voted in favor, five opposed, and two abstained.

Complaints about the president, Daniel Paul Watkins, which were raised by several students, included accusations that he failed to perform the required 20 hours of work each week as an executive officer, that he was often late to meetings, and that he had spoken disrespectfully to one professor and had called others derogatory names.

Mr. Watkins was at the center of national news reports last fall, when he reported finding a noose on his office chair. University officials said none of the accusations against Mr. Watkins were related to the noose report, which the campus police are still investigating.

He told the Associated Press today that he had not decided whether to challenge his impeachment. He denied having been disrespectful to anyone and said he had missed work or been late after breaking his leg last fall. “It feels like there’s a concerted effort to get me out of office for whatever reason,” he said. —Charles Huckabee

Update (3/6, 3:30 p.m.): An official at Abilene Christian University writes to say that Mr. Watkins was not the first black president of the student government, as this blog post originally reported.

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