The vice president’s wife, who has long taught at community colleges and currently serves as an adjunct professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College, told delegates to the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education that community colleges are of vital importance to President Obama’s goal of the United States’ having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.

American universities are often cited as models of global excellence, but international attention is usually on elite research institutions, and the role community colleges play is neglected. In a time of economic crisis, that role is becoming increasingly important, Ms. Biden said. “More and more often in these difficult financial times, community colleges are an affordable way for students from middle-class families to complete the first two years of a baccalaureate degree before moving on to a four-year university,” she said.

Community colleges have for the past three decades been the fastest-growing sector in American higher education, Ms. Biden said, and the country’s 1,200 community colleges account for nearly half of all American undergraduates. A class she taught last year to a group that included students from 22 countries illustrates the essential role these locally focused institutions play in integrating recent immigrants — who have in many cases obtained degrees in their home countries — into their communities. —Aisha Labi

The state’s 12 community colleges, which lost more than 70 faculty members, are concerned that they may have to cap enrollments, just as record numbers of potential new students are turning to them for training.

The University of Connecticut also lost more than 70 professors, through the retirement program. Jeremy Teitelbaum, dean of its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, told the newspaper that while each department was making its own plans, most would probably meet course demand this fall by employing more adjunct professors and increasing some class sizes.

The four-campus Connecticut State University System lost more than 75 faculty members. The system hopes to maintain academic quality, a spokesman, Bernard Kavaler, said, by “doing more with less.”

Over all, the early retirements are expected to save the state at least $110-million a year as it struggles to close a projected $8.7-billion budget gap over the next two years. —Charles Huckabee

Three other fraternities also moved from the property, in an area of the campus known as the Northwest Precinct, but instead of cash those chapters accepted space in a new Greek Park that will open this fall. The university’s plans for the property being vacated include new facilities for the School of Family and Consumer Sciences and the Terry College of Business.

Contracts obtained by the newspaper show that the university paid the Chi Phi fraternity $1.75-million to move from its house on South Lumpkin Street, but a lawyer said the organization did not get a sweetheart deal. “We had owned and built our own fraternity house on Lumpkin Street with our own money,” said Jim Wimberly, who is a Chi Phi alumnus.

Another fraternity, Kappa Alpha, got $600,000 to move from its nearby house on South Lumpkin Street. Both fraternities are in negotiations to buy or build new houses in Athens. —Charles Huckabee

This latest disclosure resembles other tales, unearthed by the Tribune, of how political ties — often to Illinois’s ousted governor, Rod Blagojevich — helped applicants whose mediocre credentials made it impossible to admit them based on what they knew, only on who they knew.

The difference in today’s news is that the episode appears to tie the university’s former provost, Linda P.B. Katehi, to the leg up given to the priest’s family friend. Ms. Katehi, formerly the engineering dean at Purdue University, supervised the admissions office as provost at Illinois but has insisted she was kept in the dark about the special treatment accorded certain applicants.

She was named in May as the new chancellor of the University of California at Davis and is scheduled to take office next month, but since the Tribune started its series of articles on the alleged admissions abuses, one California lawmaker has questioned her appointment. The University of California’s president, Mark G. Yudof, told the San Francisco Chronicle two weeks ago, however, that “I have 100-percent confidence in her.” —Andrew Mytelka

The Sonoma State University Academic Foundation issued more than two dozen loans to individuals and businesses during the 1990s and earlier this decade, according to the newspaper, The Press Democrat, in Santa Rosa, Calif. One of the recipients, Clem Carinalli, told the nonprofit foundation that he would stop making interest payments on his loan because the real-estate crash had ruined his financial position. He said he might be able to repay the principal in three to four years. That means the foundation stands to lose up to $350,000 in interest payments, and more if Mr. Carinalli is unable to repay the principal in full.

In addition to being a former board member of the foundation and the largest landowner in Sonoma County, Mr. Carinalli leads a business that arranged more than two-thirds of the foundation’s loans, the newspaper reported. The organization will be forced to issue fewer scholarships in the 2010-11 academic year because of a diminished endowment, said Patricia McNeill, Sonoma State’s vice president for development.

News of the loan prompted the leader of Cal State’s systemwide faculty association to call for clamping down on auxiliary organizations, which she said hold 20 percent of the university’s budget and operate largely outside of public view. Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association, urged passage of legislation that would apply state public-record laws to university foundations.

“The irony is not lost on the CSU faculty that in the same week Bernie Madoff is sentenced to jail, we learn that money meant to help students get a college education is being lost to an insider scheme, supported by executives who hold the public trust,” Ms. Taiz said in a written statement. —Josh Keller

The coach, Jerry Baldwin, one of the few African-American coaches in big-time college football, was fired in 2001 after three losing seasons. He sued the university, asserting he had been dismissed because of his race. In 2007 a state-court jury awarded him $2-million.

The university appealed that verdict, and on Wednesday the state’s First Circuit Court of Appeal ordered a new trial in the case. Among other problems, the appeals court said jury selection and expert testimony in the trial had been flawed.

The coach’s lawyer, G. Karl Bernard, told the Associated Press he would ask the appeals court to reconsider its decision, or appeal to the state’s Supreme Court. —Libby Sander

According to the Denver Post, there was “no evidence of mass infestations” in the area. Nonetheless, the event’s organizers feared that continuing the sofa swap was just asking for trouble — annoying, blood-sucking trouble — because bedbugs love to hang out in upholstered furniture, as many colleges have discovered in recent years (see a Chronicle video).

“You can get them in nice hotels,” Jane Viste, a spokeswoman for the Larimer County Health Department, told the Post, “anywhere you don’t know exactly where the furniture came from.” For now, the future of the Great Sofa Roundup is uncertain. —Eric Hoover

J. Reece Roth, a retired professor of electrical and computer engineering, was convicted last September of violating the Arms Export Control Act. Prosecutors said he did so by giving two graduate research assistants — one from Iran and one from China — unauthorized access to sensitive military arms information and by disclosing some of the information in lectures abroad. Mr. Roth, who is 71, was working at the time for a company on a contract to study the use of plasma technology on unmanned military aircraft.

The former professor pleaded not guilty to the charges. But A. William Mackie, the assistant U.S. attorney who led the prosecution, said that Mr. Roth had deliberately broken the law. While government officials have stressed that the case does not signal a crackdown on enforcing regulations about who can work with sensitive technologies, Mr. Mackie said he hoped the case would make university researchers more careful about how they handle such information. —Marc Beja

While it is not uncommon for academic organizations to get embroiled in disputes over invention rights when faculty members from several institutions have collaborated on research, as these organizations’ researchers did in the 1990s, such disagreements usually are resolved without a court fight.

The case revolves around two groups of inventions related to RNA interference. Patent rights to one group of inventions belong solely to the German institution, the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. Rights to the other group of inventions are shared among the four institutions.

According to the lawsuit, filed last week in state court in Boston, Whitehead and the other defendants have “misappropriated inventions owned by Max Planck and misrepresented those inventions as their own.” Max Planck says that by seeking to have those invention rights considered as part of the patent jointly owned by all four academic institutions, the three defendants are undermining the chances that Max Planck will be awarded a patent for the inventions that it owns solely.

By prior arrangement, the parties agreed that Whitehead would be responsible for obtaining patents on the jointly owned inventions, the lawsuit says.

The technology-transfer arm of Max Planck and a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that has licensed rights to both sets of inventions, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc., have joined the German institute in the suit.

The lawsuit asks the court to order Whitehead to stop its pursuit of patents on the jointly owned inventions. It also seeks an undetermined amount in damages. —Goldie Blumenstyk