University Students

Christopher B. Weaver, a student at Hampton University and Gilman School graduate, was pronounced dead at a hospital in Hampton, Va., on Wednesday after being shot by an intruder who entered his apartment and opened fire with a handgun. The Northwest Baltimore resident was 22. Christopher Brandon Weaver was born and raised in Baltimore. He is the son of Dr. Jesse R. Weaver, a Baltimore dentist, and Alice G. Pinderhughes, an attorney. He is the grandson of the late Alice G. Pinderhughes, who in the 1980s was the first woman to serve as city school superintendent.

As Morgan State University students and officials organized candlelight vigils last night to remember a senior slain at a nightclub during the weekend, police in Baltimore and New York searched for the former student accused of the crime. Rashed Z. Tolliver, 21, who would have graduated next month, died Saturday morning at Maryland General Hospital. A first-degree murder warrant has been issued against Damon Anthony Williams, a frequent campus presence known around area nightclubs as DJ Action.

WESTOVER - Betsy Mueller rarely speaks up in her philosophy classes at Salisbury University. But there's one place she comes alive - surrounded by convicted felons at the state prison. "On the outside, I don't have a voice. But here, I've realized that to entertain discussions with inmates sparks the discovery that I do have things to say," the senior from Cockeysville said this week at the Eastern Correctional Institution. "It's been a breakthrough in my world." Mueller is one of 20 Salisbury students who belong to a most unusual book group - and one of the bolder town-gown ventures a college has ever tried.

Dr. Bettye Floyd, a former campus counselor upon whom generations of Towson University students came to rely for straightforward advice, died of cancer Feb. 8 at St. Joseph Medical Center. She was 74. Born Bettye Zane Alexander and raised in Kannapolis, N.C., she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in English and Spanish from Wake Forest University in 1949. She earned a master's degree in counseling and guidance in 1961 from the College of William and Mary, and her doctorate in counseling and human development from George Washington University in 1993.

TEHRAN, Iran - A student demonstration in support of a popular reformist professor who has been sentenced to die for blaspheming Islam turned bloody yesterday when extremists supporting Iran's theocracy clashed with the students at Tehran's Sharif University. One student speaker suffered a cracked skull and cuts and was carried off by friends during the attack by roughly 500 members of the hard-line militia group Ansareh Hezbollah, or Friends of the Party of God, witnesses said. A number of other students also were injured.

Many public colleges and universities around the country are caught in financial crunches, prompting midyear tuition increases and belt-tightening measures such as enrollment limits and faculty cuts. The financial problems stem from strains on state budgets because of the slow economy over the past year and a bulge in the number of youths reaching college age. "This is the first time in the modern history of higher education that we've had enrollment pressure and a bad economy at the same time," said Patrick M. Callan, president of the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose, Calif.

MANY Marylanders rushed to New York City Sept. 11 and after, to help. They were firefighters, paramedics, rescue workers, police officers, physicians, nurses and others whose special skills were needed. Volunteers all. They were helping not only the victims of the atrocity and the overworked first rescue workers, but also their neighbors in Maryland, knitting it into the nationwide fabric of concern that next time may help - God forbid - Marylanders in need. Mentioned here, as a stand-in for them all, is Tim Kane, a senior at Salisbury University on the Eastern Shore.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - On the streets of Pakistan, the argument goes largely unchallenged: The U.S. government brought terrorist attacks on itself by unfair policies in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world. And some, shouting at the top of their lungs, insist that Osama bin Laden is a hero. But Islamabad's Quaid-I-Azam University, the Harvard of Pakistan, is not the local bazaar, and students must defend their positions. Professor Rifaat Hussain likes to ask his students to examine their assumptions.

"TYING ONE ON" will take on a new meaning at Carroll Community College this week as students, faculty and staff members commemorate National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week with a variety of activities. The week, sponsored by BACCHUS groups at schools across the country, is meant to help college students think before they drink or use drugs. BACCHUS - an acronym for Boosting Alcohol Consciousness Concerning the Health of University Students - enlists students to help educate their peers about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse.

WASHINGTON - The murder of a Gallaudet University student last week has shaken this campus, a community knitted tightly together by the traits few outside its borders share - deafness and fluency in sign language. Student body president Chris Soukup said yesterday that it is certainly possible that a fellow student was responsible for the death of Eric Franklin Plunkett, a 19-year-old freshman from Minnesota whose body was found last Thursday night in his single room in the Cogswell Hall dormitory.