Students at Columbia University and Cornell University have recently been charged with drug-related offenses, the Columbia Spectator and The Cornell Daily Sun reported. Five Columbia students were arrested on Dec. 7 for selling cocaine, marijuana, MDMA, Adderall and LSD following a five-month investigation. The students, who pleaded not guilty, had made drug sales totaling approximately $11,000 to undercover city police officers since July. The majority of the sales occurred in common areas and bedrooms of three Columbia fraternities, according to the Spectator. Although Columbia was not involved in the investigation, university officials assisted the police in making the arrests, the Spectator reported. At Cornell, Ithaca police made its largest seizures in University history when officers arrested a student for possession of six ounces of heroin with a street value of between $50,000 and $150,000, according to The Daily Sun. The student admitted to the distribution and possession of heroine and was remanded to the Tompkins County Jail without bail, according to a police statement.
Female representation on universities' search committees may increase a woman's chance of being hired for a full professorship, Inside Higher Ed reported on Monday. Manuel Bagues and Natalia Zinovyeva, scholars at the Foundation for Applied Economics Research, conducted a study last month in Spain that found that each additional woman added to a seven-member search committee for a full professorship hire or promotion led to a 14 percent increase in the likelihood that a woman would obtain the position. The study determined that a female serving on a search committee for associate professor jobs had no significant impact on a woman's chance of receiving the position.
Executives at the University of California have threatened to sue the UC system if it fails to increase the executives' pensions as promised under a 1999 agreement, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The 36 executives, who are among the highest-paid employees in the UC system, claim their pensions should be based on their actual salaries and that UC should abolish the current system under which all employees earning above $245,000 receive the same pension. The demand, which the executives articulated in a Dec. 9 letter and position paper to the UC Board of Regents, comes as the University looks to reduce retirement benefits in order to address a deficit in its pension funds. The pension increase demanded in the letter would add $5.5 million to UC's pension obligations, as well as $51 million to make the increases retroactive, the Chronicle reported. The 1999 agreement cited by the UC executives was approved by the Internal Revenue Service in 2007.
