Brown University President Ruth Simmons, who is stepping down from the Brown presidency on June 30, will join Princeton University's Board of Trustees in July, according to The Brown Daily Herald. Simmons is one of seven new trustees named to Princeton's 40-person Board, which already includes numerous prominent individuals in the fields of finance, academia, politics and journalism. Simmons served in a number of administrative positions at Princeton before acting as the university's vice provost from 1992 to 1995 and earning an honorary degree from Princeton in 2006, The Daily Herald reported. Simmons' four-year term on the Princeton Board of Trustees will begin in July following the end of her 11-year tenure at Brown. Christina Paxson, the dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, will begin her tenure at Brown as Simmons' successor on July 1, according to The Daily Herald.
Former Pennsylvania State University assistant football coach and defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was convicted on Friday of sexually abusing 10 boys, according to The New York Times. A Centre County Court jury found Sandusky guilty on 45 of the 48 counts against him, including rape and sodomy. The crimes each carry long prison sentences, and Sandusky will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, The Times reported. The verdict, however, does not mark the end of the scandal that has engulfed Penn State since the allegations against Sandusky were made public in November. The university faces numerous lawsuits, and the former director of athletics and the former director of campus police still face criminal charges for failing to act on evidence that Sandusky had molested a child in 2001 and for lying about the incident to a grand jury, according to The Times.
The National Labor Relations Board announced that it will revisit a 2004 ruling involving Brown University that prevented graduate school assistants from unionizing, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. With a 3-to-1 vote, the NLRB decided that it would reconsider the decision, which declared that graduate student assistants who perform services with a connection to their studies could not be granted the right to unionize because they "have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university," the decision stated. The board will now allow a review of two new cases involving unionization attempts by graduate student assistants from New York University and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, according to The Chronicle. The vote will take place two years after the submission of a petition by NYU graduate students to the NLRB demanding union representation.
