In a statement released by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the officials said, “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not require any school to determine a student’s status.” The statement, issued at the request of the newspaper, noted that illegal immigrants were subject to being prosecuted and deported. But the statement said colleges were not required to report such students unless they had violated the terms of their student visas under the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System.

Earlier this week, a lawyer in the North Carolina attorney general’s office issued a letter advising the colleges to drop their policy of admitting all illegal immigrants who meet the institutions’ other eligibility criteria. The lawyer said the policy appeared to conflict with federal law.

The letter, which said admission should be limited to students who meet standards outlined in federal law, contradicted a community-college policy based on a 1997 opinion by the state’s attorney general at the time — Michael F. Easley, a Democrat who is now governor. Governor Easley said this week that the colleges should continue enrolling illegal immigrants while any confusion over federal law was sorted out.

In a short statement on Friday, the attorney general’s office said that its advisory letter earlier in the week had told colleges to “rely on the Department of Homeland Security for guidance,” The News & Observer reported.

Also on Friday, community-college officials released a new estimate of how many illegal immigrants were enrolled in the system: 112 out of 297,000 degree-seeking students. —Andrew Mytelka

Mr. Bork’s lawsuit, filed last year, accused the club of “wanton, willful, and reckless disregard for the safety of its guests,” and blamed it for the “excruciating pain” he has suffered since the accident and subsequent surgery.

According to the Associated Press, the terms of the settlement are secret, so it’s not clear if Mr. Bork, who is 81, won justice or the $1-million he sought.

One thing’s for sure, however. The settlement keeps the case out of court, and spares the litigants any further unwelcome moments in the spotlight. —Andrew Mytelka

Mr. Goodwin has close ties to the university’s embattled president, Michael S. Garrison. And Mr. Goodwin himself has come under fire as part of the wide-reaching controversy over the university’s awarding of an unearned degree to the daughter of West Virginia’s governor. He acknowledged that his decision to cede the leadership role was related to the uproar over the degree, which led two top administrators to resign last week.

“I don’t anticipate it will satisfy my critics,” Mr. Goodwin told the AP. “I just don’t want it to be the story. I want to take it out of the equation.”

Mr. Goodwin’s announcement came four days after the university’s Faculty Senate voted overwhelmingly to call for Mr. Garrison’s resignation. And it came on the same day that The Chronicle reported that Mr. Garrison and other university officials were considering appointing the governor’s daughter, Heather M. Bresch, to key advisory committees at roughly the same time she was awarded the unearned degree.

Mr. Goodwin has been a staunch supporter of Mr. Garrison. But it is unclear if his departure as chairman will harm Mr. Garrison, who appears to have the backing of the rest of the board. —Paul Fain

Among the institutions that suspended classes are the American University of Beirut, Lebanese American University, Lebanese University, and Beirut Arab University.

LAU, which posted a brief statement on its Web site, also canceled entrance exams to be held on Saturday.

Ada Porter, AUB’s communications director in New York, said in an e-mail message that most people seemed to be staying home until the situation changes. But many people are leaving Beirut for safer cities around the country, and others are trying to leave Lebanon altogether, she said.

Beirut was paralyzed by strikes earlier this week. Tensions escalated after Hezbollah said that a government threat to shut down its private telephone network was an act of war. Fighting broke out on Thursday, but had calmed down by this morning, reported The New York Times. —Beth McMurtrie and Andrew Mills

Mr. Bhatia graduated from Brown University in 1999 and was pursuing a doctorate in political science and international relations at the University of Oxford. Since late last year, he had been working with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division as part of the Human Terrain program, a controversial effort in which scholars advise military personnel about local social structures.

The program has prompted widespread criticism, but Mr. Bhatia strongly supported it, according to a memorial notice that was posted on Thursday by Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

The institute quoted a November 2007 letter in which Mr. Bhatia wrote, “The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/ISAF strategy becomes better attuned to the population’s concerns, views, criticisms, and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan.”

The Watson Institute’s notice does not describe the circumstances of Mr. Bhatia’s death, but an e-mail message circulated on Thursday said that he had been killed by a roadside bomb near Khost, an eastern city near the Pakistan border, perhaps in an incident reported by the Voice of America. Two NATO soldiers died in that same attack.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense declined to comment on Thursday, citing a policy that forbids public discussion of casualties until at least 24 hours after the next of kin have been notified.

After graduating from Brown, Mr. Bhatia worked for several nongovernmental organizations and conducted research in East Timor and Kosovo. He was an author of two books, one of which was published just last month.

In a 2004 paper, Mr. Bhatia and two colleagues criticized the management of the NATO-led intervention in Afghanistan, arguing that U.S. and NATO troops relied too heavily on local militias and warlords and had done too little to help ordinary citizens feel secure. —David Glenn

The earlier advice, in a letter to the system’s general counsel, suggested that the policy conflicted with federal law, but Gov. Michael F. Easley, a Democrat, said in a written statement today that federal law on the issue was not settled. He added that he was asking the attorney general to seek clarification from Washington on whether illegal immigrants were eligible to attend community colleges. —Charles Huckabee

The cuts are a response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed state budget, which would reduce spending on Berkeley by $30-million to $40-million, the Daily Californian reported. The university has asked several academic departments to make cuts to courses and faculty members to close the gap, but hardest hit will be departments that employ many adjunct lecturers and graduate-student instructors.

As a result, the East Asian department, which expects to lose $300,000 in support, will cut 40 percent of its courses in Japanese, 54 percent of those in Chinese, and 66 percent of those in Korean. It will also not renew contracts for 13 lecturers. According to a notice on its Web site, the department will restrict enrollment in its courses to students in the College of Letters & Science.

The English department, which faces a $400,000 cut, has appealed to faculty members with endowed chairs to donate a portion of their private research grants to the department.

Berkeley students have organized an afternoon rally today to protest cuts in the East Asian language programs. An online petition asking university administrators to reconsider the cuts and to provide emergency funds for East Asian languages has collected 900 signatures so far. —Paula Wasley

A draft bill introduced by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat, would promote the use of workshops “to increase awareness of implicit gender bias in grant review, hiring, tenure, promotion, and selection for other honors based on merit,” according to a news release issued by the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education. The committee has not yet released the proposed legislation, and the details of such workshops remain unclear. The workshops would be based, at least partly, on ones organized by academic chemists and by the American Physical Society, which have in the past two years convened gatherings of federal officials and the chairs of top university departments.

The legislation, titled “Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Act of 2008,” would also seek to gather better demographic data from federal grant-making agencies. But that may be a difficult endeavor. Lynda T. Carlson, director of the division of science-resource statistics at the National Science Foundation, told committee members that scientists who receive grants “are not, nor can they be, required to provide demographic information because of the Privacy Act.” Many scientists who win grants do not indicate the race and gender of the people working under their grants, she said. “NSF cannot support the proposed legislation as its requirements will be excessive as they exceed current data-collection capabilities,” according to a statement submitted by Ms. Carlson.

Although the hearing was devoted to the issue of female academic scientists, the witness list contained no practicing scientists, male or female. The lone academic was Donna K. Ginther, an associate professor of economics at the University of Kansas, who has studied gender differences in academic science. In her statement, she endorsed the idea of gender-bias workshops for academics and grant reviewers, but she cautioned that the sessions should be tested for effectiveness. While past workshops have focused on department chairs, Ms. Ginther said that it would be important to reach principal investigators who oversee postdoctoral fellows. Her data indicate that most women leave academic science during the postdoctoral years.

The best way Congress could help women in academic science, she said, would be to improve their access to child care. She proposed allowing universities to support child-care facilities with the indirect costs that they take from research grants made to faculty members.

At today’s hearing, Congress itself inadvertently showed how far the nation has to go in promoting the success of women in academe. Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers of Michigan, the top Republican on the subcommittee, said in a statement that “effective institutional change must be systemic since bias may hide behind even the simplest language used in recommendation letters.”

His Republican colleague Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett of Maryland demonstrated the power of language while smiling at the trio of female Ph.D.’s who were testifying. Mr. Bartlett hailed them as “effective representatives,” but then proceeded to call them “three very attractive women.” —Richard Monastersky

Implausible as it might seem, a new study suggests that there might be some truth to such a sentiment. Based on the survey responses of more than 13,800 young Texans polled during their senior year of high school and then again a year later, the study concludes that seniors who reported having good relationships with their mothers and fathers were actually less likely than others to enroll in a four-year college.

Yep, it’s true: Parents just can’t win.

One reason such findings are counterintuitive is that a large body of other research shows that children who have good relationships with their parents do better at school. The new study — by Ruth N. López Turley, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Matthew Desmond, a doctoral student in the department — reached the same conclusion, finding that students who reported getting along well with the folks generally reported having better grades and higher class rankings than their peers did.

How, then, does a strong parent-child relationship hurt college-going prospects? It makes a high-school senior substantially more likely to express a strong desire to live at home during college. And those seniors who said it was important to them to live at home after high school were more than 40 percent less likely to enroll in a four-year college than their peers were.

The study found that many other traits — including socioeconomic disadvantage, being foreign-born, or not having degree aspirations — increased the likelihood that a young person would not want to leave the nest right after high school. Above and beyond the effects of such factors, Hispanic students were more than twice as likely as white students to report that it was important for them to stay home, suggesting that culture also plays an important role.

But, after using regression analysis to separate out the other possible factors, the researchers found that the unwillingness to leave home that comes from having good relationships with the parents has a negative-enough influence on college-going to cancel out the positive influence derived from the higher academic performance associated with such family relations.

In a paper summarizing their findings and submitted to the American Sociological Review, Ms. Turley and Mr. Desmond say: “Through our research, a paradox has come to light: Strong family ties, considered vital to a child’s success in school, can serve as an impediment to a child’s educational attainment. Parents who strive to develop an encouraging and communicative relationship with their children might produce a high-school honors student but not a four-year college graduate.” —Peter Schmidt

Mr. Thorpe, 43, is not only a North Carolina native but also an alumnus of the Chapel Hill campus. He has climbed the ranks there, beginning as an assistant professor of chemistry in 1993 and becoming chairman of the chemistry department before being named dean last summer. If Mr. Thorpe is appointed, he would succeed James C. Moeser, who announced last fall that he would step down at the end of this academic year. —Eric Kelderman