While staging The Little Prince with puppets, students at Gonzaga University learned lessons in teamwork and creativity. The creators of an Internet cartoon called Zombie College are dying to turn it into a television series. Fearing a decline in admissions standards, Swarthmore's board caused an uproar by eliminating several athletics programs. Rice University shut down the student-run radio station after disk jockeys protested administrators' push for the station to broadcast more campus sporting events. The volatile basketball coach fired by Indiana University in September was a motivational speaker at the University of Florida last month.
Dormitories are scarce, rents are high, and commutes are long.
A public and a private university in Japan have agreed to share students and faculty members. An American academic delegation will visit P'yongyang next spring in the hope of forging ties between universities in North Korea and the United States. A bank will help pay for a new chemistry building at the University of Oxford in exchange for a share of the profits from any companies spun off from research conducted there. An annual study that ranks colleges and universities found serious erosion this year in the quality of many of the institutions. Scholars in 39 developing countries are benefiting from a project, financed by George Soros, to subsidize libraries' access to commercial databases.