Highlights from April 6, 2007

Most black doctoral candidates are in education, a field that burdens them with student debt.
Angela E. Lee, who earned a Ph.D. in counseling psychology at Howard U., holds two jobs at North Carolina Central U. and works weekends at a Barnes & Noble to make ends meet: "You don't want to feel like you're just in the ivory tower. You want to have a hand in the community." (Photograph by Les Todd)

A Purdue scientist's claim to have achieved a new kind of fusion has sparked a furious reaction among his critics.

Purdue's efforts to license tissue-engineering technologies have entangled it in lawsuits involving a leading researcher and a commercial partner.

The Education Department wants to know: Are colleges benefiting improperly from the lenders they put on their preferred lists?

He's not an academic, but a writer for the well-known blog Boing Boing is teaching a class at the University of Southern California on flaws in copyright law.

Lowering the legal drinking age to 18 would protect college students, says the president emeritus of Middlebury College, who has begun a campaign to do just that.

The leaders of four American universities in the Middle East visited Washington and New York last week to spread the word about their work.

The college pranks of old live on as oral history. Today's best pranks, videotaped and cataloged on the Web, will be watched and rewatched forever.

Hundreds of leaders in higher education, philanthropy, and business are focusing on how to recruit and retain more low-income students. We asked some of them to weigh in.

• Ronald G. Ehrenberg
• Michael Dannenberg
• Robert Gordon, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger
• Susan M. Dynarski and Judith E. Scott-Clayton

Jeffrey J. Williams, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, first learned about professional responsibilities, risks, discipline, and collegiality in a different kind of institution.