Academics

COLLEGE PARK -- Maryland defensive back Orlando Strozier will miss spring practice while recovering from surgery for a torn anterior cruciate ligament, coach Mark Duffner said in a statement released yesterday.Strozier, one of the Atlantic Coast Conference's leaders in interceptions and punt returns as a freshman, should be ready for the 1994 season, the statement said.Seven other athletes will miss practice to concentrate on academics during the spring. Defensive ends Tim Watson and Jason Brown, occasional starters as freshmen, will not practice, along with sophomore outside linebacker Cleveland Everhart (an occasional starter)

Senior guard/forward Terrence Wright has quit Morgan State's basketball team to concentrate on academics.The fifth-year senior was averaging 6.6 points and 4.7 rebounds, and leaves as the school's all-time leader in steals with 185.Wright had been granted an extra year of eligibility this season because of a 1991 injury that limited him to three games.

After a 30-year estrangement, in which union leaders shunned academics as too far to the left and the liberal intelligentsia scorned big labor as part of the establishment, many academics are forging a new alliance with the revived labor movement.Academics are counseling students to become union organizers and are donating time to teach courses to union officials.Cornell University professors held a conference with the AFL-CIO on how to do more organizing, while many sociology professors are revamping their courses to focus more on labor's role in society.

When Anthony Gunn transferred to Arundel last season, coach Chuck Markiewicz saw potential. He also realized patience was going to be required. The Wildcats run a no-huddle offense that takes a while to learn. When it's running smoothly, though, it's the opposing defense that has trouble picking it up. And when Gunn got comfortable, Arundel was able to make the opposition very uncomfortable. The proof is in the numbers. Thirteenth-ranked Arundel outscored its opponents, 321-106, in 10 regular-season games.

Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, by Jill Watts. Oxford University Press. 374 pages. $35. If the mere mention of that rusty triad of words so beloved of academics everywhere -- race, class and gender -- doesn't send you into immediate paroxysms of rage against the p.c. machine, then you won't be bothered in the least by Jill Watts' new biography of Mae West. And if you're sufficiently inured to that other irritating academics' tendency to shuttle all available information into the prescribed categories of a distinctly postmodernist worldview, then you'll have all your cherished notions about "subversiveness" gently reaffirmed by this book.

Led by Wal-Mart's longtime opponents in organized labor, a new coalition of about 50 groups - including environmentalists, community organizations, state lawmakers and academics - is planning the first coordinated assault intended to press the company to change the way it does business. In the next few months, those critics say, they will speak with one voice in print advertising, videos and books attacking the company. They plan to put forward an association of disenchanted Wal-Mart employees, current and former, to complain about what they call poverty-level wages and stingy benefits.

The recent editorial regarding the sanctions imposed on Penn State by the NCAA ("Penn State sanctions aren't enough," July 24) concluded with the statement that the NCAA "needs to make this penalty the first step toward reining in a sport that has grown too rich and too powerful. " Here are three suggestions that the NCAA could adopt reasonably quickly to put college athletics back in its proper perspective on college campuses: First, eliminate athletic dormitories so that athletes can experience life on a college campus more broadly.

WASHINGTON -- Tears and Chinese takeout food were recently on Tufts University's political menu. The episode illuminated the paradoxical condition of political passion on America's campuses, where there is an inverse relationship between the prevalence and the importance of political passions.Almost everything on campuses has become politicized. But given the peculiar notion of ''the political'' that obtains on campuses, academics have little political resonance outside their cloistered settings.

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. -- John Gennari of the University of Virginia argued that the tough Dolly Sinatra, "a political ward heeler, a saloonkeeper," should be seen in the context of "larger discourses of mother-bashing that pervade American culture." That way, people may gain an understanding of her son that "peels back his tough-guy disguise and reveals, ironically, a nurturing maternal figure."James E. Bruno of the University of California in Los Angeles offered a "Jungian psychological perspective" of the star, exploring his use of "archetypes that tap into the American collective unconscious."

Washington.--It is easy to remain dry-eyed about the trouble that colleges and universities have brought on themselves from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, one of the non-governmental accrediting agencies approved by the U.S. Education Department. Still, resistance to WASC's political agenda is gratifying because academic freedom matters.WASC, which accredits 140 institutions, mostly in California, wants to use its considerable power -- unaccredited institutions lose government funds -- to promote racial, ethnic and sexual ''diversity'' in admissions, faculty hiring and curriculums.