Graduate Students

"Poisoning the Ivy," by Michael Lewis. M.E. Sharpe Inc. 203 pages. $27.95."Poisoning the Ivy: The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Vices of Higher Education in America" is a rant against nasty things Michael Lewis has witnessed or has been told occurred on college campuses.Yet Lewis, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, promises something much more grandiose, and he has cast this book as a cri de coeur, a stirring manifesto for reform, a lone temper tantrum being thrown in the wilderness, etc. etc.Leave aside that Lewis is far from alone in attacking academic life these days.

A group of M.B.A. students at the University of Maryland are proving that the school can excel in the boardroom as well as on the basketball court. As part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's annual venture capital investment competition, the five-student Maryland squad bested such business schools as those of Duke University and Wake Forest University to win second place in the regional competition and a $2,000 prize. UNC-Chapel Hill won the regional contest. Now the UM students are competing against seven schools in the national competition, which began last night.

The University of Maryland, College Park is beefing up security, and worried women are walking with escorts after dark in the wake of two assaults and a rape reported on campus in the past week.Last night, about 80 students and staff turned out for a vigil in front of the student union to vent their anger over the incidents."All the women on campus are frightened," said Kristy Wright, a Student Government Association vice president."No one's walking alone," she said. "We never should have walked alone in the first place."

So. You're a graduate student teaching two sections of English literature to freshmen at State University Tech each term. You're responsible for discussing texts, assigning and grading essays, giving tests and issuing final grades. You're not paid much, just a thousand dollars or so per class, but it helps pays the bills.Are you a student? Or are you an employee?The question has taken center stage at campuses across the DTC nation, from New Haven to San Diego, where graduate student instructors are seeking to gain recognition as employees, with guaranteed benefits and the right to bargain collectively.

It would be great to have a permanent site for Western Maryland College's first on-campus, televised aerobics program, says program originator and co-instructor Ranee Deyo.And co-instructor Sally Hall would really like a weight-training room where she could continue her current program of working out with weights, Ms. Deyo says.Western Maryland students will gain an aerobics room and a weight-training center outside the regular campus athletic facilities if college officials can raise about $67,000 in cash and donated equipment to meet a challenge pledge.

Jessica Soto Perez was working toward a doctorate in biochemical engineering, hoping, her fellow students said, to one day return to her native Puerto Rico to teach. Yesterday, her classmates and professors at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, mourned the loss of a friend who, as one put it, "radiated her love for learning." Perez, a 26-year-old graduate student at UMBC, was fatally shot Tuesday night in the parking lot of the school's Catonsville campus by her husband, who then shot himself, witnesses told Baltimore County police.

Baltimore Hebrew University turned to a trusted friend yesterday, naming well-regarded political scientist Robert O. xTC Freedman to be the fifth president of the small Jewish campus as it seeks to have a greater influence in the region.A dean at the Northwest Baltimore campus since 1975, Freedman has been acting president since March 1995, when President Norma Furst died of cancer."We had a search committee that looked at a dozen resumes and unanimously felt that he was the best one for the job," said George Hess, chairman of the board of trustees.

When it comes to Ph.D.s, Frank L. Morris Sr. wants universities to buy American -- especially black American.The scarcity of black American Ph.D.s has long troubled educators. And the number of foreign doctoral students at U.S. universities has been growing for years.Now Dr. Frank L. Morris Sr., dean of graduate studies at Morgan State University, has stirred up the nation's higher-education establishment by suggesting that the two facts are directly related.U.S. universities often pay the way of foreign doctoral students and leave Americans, especially minorities, to fend for themselves, Dr. Morris argues.

If you're short of financing your college education by as much as $10,000, someone is looking to help you.That would be Helen London, executive director of a private Baltimore agency that has announced it is expanding its last-resort, interest-free loan program.Since 1924, the Central Scholarship Bureau has lent more than ** $4.5 million to 5,000 Maryland college and graduate students. Now, it has liberalized its criteria and will award an additional $100,000 this year -- for a total of $360,000.

For years American educators have worried about the small number of black students going on to receive Ph.D.s, the degrees that make them eligible to become the professors and researchers of tomorrow. In particular, they have been unable to explain why the number of black men who get their doctorates, small to begin with, has been cut in half since 1975.The numbers are sobering. Of the 36,027 Ph.D.s granted in 1990, only 320 -- less than 1 percent -- were awarded to black men. And 508, or just over 1 percent, were given to black women.