After a six-month investigation that found a pattern of academic abuses in North Carolina State University's men's basketball program, the University of North Carolina system's Board of Governors has adopted a broad package of sports reforms. Some of these recommendations are presented. (MLW)

In March, after two years of debate that followed complaints by minority students, Stanford's faculty voted to replace the university's year-long Western culture requirement with a new requirement called "Cultures, Ideas and Values." Courses will be required to give attention to the issues of race, gender, and class. (MLW)

The Advanced Placement Program has become a "program of academic opportunity" for students in high schools that enroll large numbers of minority groups. These schools are raising the expectations of minority students and helping them achieve higher goals, and they are bringing them into professional and graduate schools. (MLW)

At the annual meeting of the National Interfraternity Conference, the national presidents of 59 fraternities voted to study alternatives to pledging. Some think that pledging has become synonymous with hazing, and that eliminating pledging would reduce the chances for abuse. (MLW)

Indiana University is offering parents the opportunity to purchase credit hours at 1988 rates and use them for their children's college education after 1990. The university will place money from certificate sales in a trust managed by an independent financial adviser, who will invest the funds. (MLW)

Research anthropologists are using experimental ethnographic writing to reveal the kinds of hidden agenda that both researchers and informants bring to anthropological field work, questioning what constitutes truth in an ethnographic account. (MSE)

Dollar amounts of research support from federal, state and local, industry, institutional, and other sources are charted for each state, the District of Columbia, and the territories. (MSE)

As campus student volunteer activities have grown, colleges have acknowledged the need for better organization by hiring recent graduates to coordinate them. The young deans have proven to be both enthusiastic and effective at this task. (MSE)

While most states require standardized teacher certification tests and many require testing to enter teacher training, there is little consensus on the skill level needed for teaching or the tests' validity. Concern about high minority group failure rates has also slowed implementation of testing requirements in some states. (MSE)

Federal government enrollment projections are charted for men, women, public four- and two-year institutions, private four- and two-year institutions, full-time and part-time students, undergraduate, graduate, and first-professional students, and full-time equivalency for each year from 1988 through 1997. (MSE)

Proposed National Collegiate Athletic Association rule changes address issues of academic standards, financial aid, program administration, association administration, championships and extra events, athlete eligibility, association membership and institutional classification, playing seasons, and aspects of program deregulation. (MSE)

A growing number of mathematics professors are asking their students to keep journals, write papers, and answer essay questions on tests, arguing that students learn mathematical concepts better by articulating them. This is part of a trend toward teaching mathematics for understanding rather than by rote. (MSE)

An annual survey found administrator salaries faring better in 1988-89 than the previous year, when the average salary increase fell below the inflation rate for the first time in five years. Administrators of private institutions made especially good salary gains. Variations by job type and personal characteristics were found. (MSE)

Editors of scholarly journals are looking again at their role and that of peer reviewers as guardians of the academic enterprise, in light of recent revelations of fraudulent research data in scientific literature and continuing concerns about bias toward particular institutions, individuals, issues, or theories in editorial decision-making. (MSE)

Professors and computer-industry representatives working to establish a peer-review process for academic software have had to pause to consider how software should be reviewed. They are turning away from the familiar book-review format in favor of a more scholarly, comparative approach focusing on classroom use of the materials. (MSE)