By Colleen Flaherty. It was there and then it wasn’t: the University of Tennessee System’s plan, announced in a news release, to “de-tenure” some faculty members as part of its new cost-savings strategy. While the university has backed down on that specific language amid faculty outcry -- focusing instead on a “comprehensive review” of existing tenure and posttenure review processes -- some Tennessee professors say any plan by any name to strip professors of tenure, especially one linked to financial, not academic issues, smells sour. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. The chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison came under fire last month for publicly admitting to a tactic common among her counterparts at research universities. To keep top faculty members from accepting outside offers, she sometimes will reduce their teaching loads. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The Obama administration, under pressure from Congressional Democrats and consumer advocates, is deciding whether to relieve the debt of some federal student loan borrowers who attended Corinthian Colleges. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. A new analysis released Wednesday shows, in stark detail, how those increased costs to students are impairing the success of students in the state, particularly low-income students. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The U.S. Department of Education said Friday it will end contracts with five companies that collect defaulted federal student loans after finding they made “materially inaccurate representations” to struggling borrowers. Read more...

By Jake New. A University of California at Los Angeles student was nearly denied a position on the student government’s judicial board last month after student representatives questioned whether her ties to the Jewish community were a conflict of interest. Read more...

By Jake New. The filmmakers behind “The Hunting Ground” -- a searing new documentary about how colleges mishandle cases of campus sexual assault -- have removed a statement featured in an earlier print of the film that claimed leaders at 35 institutions declined to be interviewed. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Rate My Professors is a student evaluation site that frustrates many professors, who say that the nonscientific standards leave faculty members open to unfair ratings.
Last month, a study documented the extent to which students use different sets of words (many of them with gender implications) to discuss their male and female professors. Now a new study looks at how students on Rate My Professors rate instructors who have Asian-sounding last names, and the results suggest that these instructors are getting significantly lower scores than those with other last names in Rate My Professors' categories of clarity and helpfulness. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Purdue University announced last week that it was it was replacing a "complicated" and outdated system for calculating how many paid days off employees would receive each year. But when employees actually counted up the days they could receive off in the old and new systems, many were dismayed to find that the "simplified" one was substantially less generous than the current one. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The median base salary for senior leaders at colleges and universities has gone up 2.4 percent in 2014-15, the same as the year before. Read more...