Highlights From October 5, 2007

Gifts to sports programs now account for more than one-quarter of all contributions to some colleges, cutting into the proportion given for academic purposes.
Jeffrey L. Stinson, a marketing professor at North Dakota State U.: As athletics donations grow, "you do see donors cut back a little on that academic gift because they just don't have the capacity." (Photograph by Mark Anthony)

Colleges struggle to find emergency-notification systems, whether high-tech or low, that quickly reach everyone on a campus.

Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, raised bitterly contested issues of free speech at a campus appearance last week by the leader of Iran. It was not the first such controversy during Mr. Bollinger's tenure.

In a potential windfall for sports programs, a proposal before the NCAA would broaden the use of athletes' likenesses in commercial ad campaigns.

Thwarted by legal restrictions, stem-cell researchers explore new ways to get human eggs — and to make them.

In an arrangement that raises questions about conflict of interest, the University of California at Irvine collects a bounty for sending students to an online for-profit institution.

Strategic plans, which migrated to higher education from corporations, have quickly become de rigueur at colleges. The most successful plans share some important elements. Honesty, for one.

College police chiefs discuss the proper role of the Taser in campus law enforcement.

Biology makes us want to retaliate for aggression even if we can't direct the retaliation at our aggressor, writes David P. Barash, author of a forthcoming book about redirected aggression.

The near poor outnumber the poor, include a fifth of the nation's children, and are largely absent from the national conversation on inequality, write Katherine S. Newman, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, and Victor Tan Chen, a doctoral student in the sociology and social-policy program at Harvard University.