Faculty Members

Governor's race a dead heat Less than a week before Election Day, the Maryland governor's race was a dead heat, as Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s attacks on Mayor Martin O'Malley's record on crime and schools have apparently eroded the Democrat's support in the Baltimore suburbs, a new poll showed. Court rules for public review Maryland's highest court ruled that the agency overseeing Baltimore's economic development must open its meetings and its paperwork for public review.

Johns Hopkins University students and faculty members will have more diversity training, and the history of racism will be incorporated into the campus curriculum and workshops, Hopkins President William R. Brody announced yesterday, responding to an outcry over a racially offensive fraternity party.

Their list of grievances is long and varied: Insinuations that school admission policy unfairly favors black students. Racial epithets glimpsed on campus. Faculty members they feel are racially insensitive. For many members of the Black Students Union at the Johns Hopkins University, there is an overall feeling of discomfort, that this home of theirs for four years does not fully accept them. Such feelings came to the surface this week amid reaction to a Sigma Chi "Halloween in the Hood" party that included a skeleton pirate dangling from a rope noose - a symbol, most students agreed, of a lynching.

The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is setting up eight new research centers to attract scientists, win grants and probe medical issues that range from the effects of obesity to how our senses work. Existing medical school departments will remain intact, but the centers will help doctors who treat patients and conduct research work more closely with geneticists, biologists, chemists and computer scientists who design and conduct long-term studies. For years, clinical and basic researchers at medical schools have typically been housed separately.

Are there too many liberal professors on American campuses? Is this a danger to students or society? The dominance of liberal faculty, particularly in the humanities and social sciences and at more prestigious American colleges, has long vexed conservatives. It was a bother to Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University's long-time president, before World War I, and it enraged Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy after World War II. Newspapers held liberal faculty (predominantly from Harvard), who had vocally opposed President William McKinley's intention to declare war on Spain, largely responsible for his assassination.

Dr. Hugh M. Clement Jr., a retired Timonium dentist and former University of Maryland faculty member, died of cancer May 30 at St. Joseph Medical Center. The Timonium resident was 85. The son of a dentist, he was born in Baltimore and raised on Edmondson Avenue. He was a 1937 graduate of City College, and earned his degree at the University of Maryland Dental School. During World War II, he served in the Army Medical Corps in Africa, where he met his future wife, Enrica Calandra. They were married in August 1946.

The University of Virginia will announce a $3 billion fundraising drive in the fall. New York University is in the middle of a $2.5 billion campaign. And officials at Columbia University say they are moving ahead with plans for the largest university campaign so far, a push to raise $4 billion over seven years. These efforts are a sign of the fierce competition among major universities as they look to improve their rankings and images, attract students, and grab star faculty members. Officials at elite institutions nationwide say that simply to keep up they must build athletic facilities and science centers, pursue research grants and donors, court big-name faculty members and stave off raids, and lay the foundation for eye-popping fundraising campaigns.

DURHAM, N.C. -- One of the first phone calls that Duke University's president made after learning about an alleged rape by members of the men's lacrosse team was to the chancellor of North Carolina Central University, on the other side of town. President Richard Brodhead, a 19th-century American literature expert in just his second year at the school, was feeling his way in a budding crisis. He hoped to head off racial tensions by reaching out to the historically black public university, where the alleged rape victim - a 27-year-old stripper and mother of two - is a student.

WASHINGTON -- Iraqis have just undergone a vigorous election campaign on their way to a hoped-for future of democratic development. Whatever the circumstances surrounding the Iraqi adventure since 2003, the election will be understood as the Iraqis' response to their need for a democratic and safer state and society. However, working toward a safer and democratic Iraq involves more than traditional mechanisms and institutions such as elections and security and armed forces. Iraq's universities and scientific institutes are responsible for educating more than 400,000 Iraqi young people who make up the country's future leadership.

NEWARK, N.J. --The board of one of the nation's largest health care universities, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, agreed yesterday to allow a federal monitor sweeping oversight of its finances and management to avoid criminal prosecution for health care fraud. The U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Christopher J. Christie, said his investigation showed that the university had defrauded the federal and state governments of at least $4.9 million in a scheme that involved the "purposeful overbilling of Medicaid."