By Charles Huckabee. The trustees of California State University voted on Wednesday to give students more say over the “success fees” some campuses tack onto their tuition bills, The Sacramento Bee reports. Critics have accused institutions of using the controversial fees, which are now in place on 12 of the system’s 23 campuses and can run to several hundred dollars a semester, to circumvent a tuition freeze that Cal State and the University of California agreed to in 2012 in exchange for increased state support. More...

By Steve Kolowich. Writing useful comments on students’ work can be a fine art. And for instructors who put a lot of effort into crafting a critique, there’s always a substantial risk students will skip the written feedback and go right to the grade. More...

By Nick DeSantis. A controversy among scholars of Russian studies has resulted in the death of a proposed gift to a major association that would have provided much-needed financial support for the discipline, The New York Times reports. More...

By Nick DeSantis. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are teaming up on a new grant program that seeks to turn out-of-print books in the humanities into freely available e-books. The project is known as Humanities Open Book. More...

By Nick DeSantis. A federal appeals court has ruled that Case Western Reserve University can deny a student a medical degree if it determines the student lacks “professionalism,” The Plain Dealer reported. More...

By Andy Thomason. President Obama has backed away from his proposal to roll back tax breaks for 529 college-savings plans amid mounting political pressure, The New York Times reports. The proposal was slated to be a piece of Mr. Obama’s budget plan for the 2016 fiscal year, due on Monday. More...

By Andy Thomason. Officials at the community college announced on Thursday that it would close its second campus in three weeks out of earthquake-safety concerns, the San Francisco Examiner reports. The announcement three weeks ago—one day before classes were set to begin—that the college’s Civic Center campus would close was greeted with consternation from faculty members. More...