Brown University armed its campus police force with semiautomatic pistols yesterday afternoon, making it the first college in Rhode Island to have its police officers carry guns.

Philanthropist and liquor importer Sidney Frank of New Rochelle, who created Grey Goose vodka and made record donations to area medical centers and Brown University, died Tuesday in San Diego, where he had a second home, his company said.

Gordon Wood is a professor of history at Brown and author of The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004, The Penguin Press). Even Gordon Wood can't really define Benjamin Franklin. But the more he talks about him the more complicated Franklin becomes – and the more fascinating.

Frances Goldscheider, professor of sociology at Brown University who studies family issues, compares the current campaign against"deadbeat dads" to the punishments once given to "wayward women" for having illegitimate children.

Higher education returned to New Orleans this week as colleges opened their doors for the first time since Hurricane Katrina damaged their campuses and sent their students, professors, and administrators into exile across the country. Some colleges reopened on their own campuses, which had suffered little more than a loss of electricity after the hurricane hit, on August 29. Others, beset by hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to their campuses, were forced to reopen using borrowed facilities, and even trailers, for student housing, office space, and classrooms.