In an address to faculty and students of Columbia University, President Ruth Simmons says that “diversity is a vital and intrinsic aspect of higher education.” By embracing diversity concepts, “universities can present knowledge from a more critical perspective,” she says.

A team from Brown University will visit the Hall County School System next month to study how the district teaches its high population of students learning English as a second language. The school district is one of five in the Eastern U.S. that Brown may choose for its comprehensive school reform project.

Facing threats of litigation and pressure from Washington, colleges and universities nationwide are opening to white students hundreds of thousands of dollars in fellowships, scholarships and other programs previously created for minorities.

History Professor James Campbell is a key resource for the third installment of the newspaper’s six-day series about the slave trade in Rhode Island. This day’s story focuses on the Brown family’s involvement in the slave trade of the 18th Century. Online at http://www.projo.com/slaver, Campbell discusses the voyage of the slave ship Sally in the series’ audio component.

A new report commissioned by the Lisbon Council, a Brussels-based think tank, warns that Europe is quickly losing ground to the United States and Asia in several key higher-education indicators, including the quality and quantity of the university graduates it produces.

The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling upholding the Solomon amendment, which allows the federal government to deny funds to colleges that don’t give military recruiters the same access to their campuses as other employers, suggests that many constitutional-law professors should receive failing grades in their own field. Not only were they unable to convince conservative members of the court of their position, but even the most-liberal justices rejected their arguments.

Brown University undergraduate Patrick Cook-Deegan will bike through Laos this summer to raise money to build and stock schools in some of the villages he will pass through, or to rebuild others destroyed by war or neglect.

This article reports on a series of robberies that have targeted five Brown students.

The College Board last week reported that it had rechecked the scores of thousands of SAT tests taken this past fall. Yesterday (March 14), it reported that as many as 1,600 tests never made it through the earlier, wide-scale rechecking. In the wake of last week’s rescoring, Brown University had to review about 75 applications.