Milton Ochieng '04 and Frederick Ochieng '05 will be featured on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson and honored in the show's Person of the Week segment on Friday night. The brothers will be recognized for their work in establishing the Lwala Community Health Center and the non-profit Lwala Community Alliance in their hometown in Kenya. They are also being honored Friday at Dartmouth's Eighth Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Social Justice Awards. Milton graduated from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 2008, and Frederick is expected to graduate from the school next year, according to the Alliance web site. College President James Wright was honored as a Person of the Week on the May 25, 2007 episode of World News for his work on providing college counseling to injured veterans.
Brown University's endowment is expected to lose approximately 30 percent of its value, or $800 million, by the end of the school year, according to The Brown Daily Herald. As a result, the university will need to cut $60 million from next year's budget, Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning, told The Herald. Brown President Ruth Simmons wrote in a campus-wide e-mail that the university predicts that the endowment, which was valued at $2.8 billion in mid-2008, will drop to $2 billion by the end of June. Simmons proposed a plan to deal with the budget shortfall, which includes suspending pay increases for most university employees and postponing the scheduled expansion of its graduate school, The Herald reported. The university expects to continue to meet students' need for financial aid, Simmons wrote.
The Brookings Institute is proposing that Congress give at least $6 billion to universities nationwide to create "energy discovery-innovation institutes," The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Brookings' proposal, to be presented to federal legislators next month, calls for the investment of up to $20 to $30 billion annually in energy research and development, including the $6 billion for the new institutes. The institutes would focus on specific energy issues like biofuels and energy efficiency, and analyze the political and economic roadblocks to their successful implementation, The Chronicle reported.
