Princeton University sophomore Richard Tuckwell surrendered himself to the Princeton Bureau Police on Friday after another student accused him of invasion of privacy, The New York Times reported. The students were acquaintances before they attended Princeton's annual Lawn Party weekend. While the two were together in a residence hall room following the party, the victim fell asleep and Tuckwell proceeded to take sexually explicit photographs of him without his consent. The victim, who had been drinking, awoke to Tuckwell standing above him with a camera. Princeton has not suspended Tuckwell but plans to investigate the case in an independent inquiry. Tuckwell's lawyer said that his client will not plead guilty, according to The Times.
The chaos of the ongoing civil war in Syria has dramatically disrupted the country's education programs, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Some university residence halls now serve as prisons, and police have killed students who recently rebelled against President Bashar al-Assad's government. Because of the country's internal turmoil, the Institute of International Education will pair with Jusoor a nonprofit devoted to advancing Syria's economy and the Illinois Institute of Technology to provide support to Syrian scholars and students in need. The organizations have already committed $2 million to the project, and plans for expanding the project are already underway. IIE's Scholar Rescue Fund has already received three times as many Syrian applicants this year as it did between 2002 and 2011, according to The Chronicle.
A study conducted by the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities revealed that federal funding for historically black colleges dropped 13 percent between 2010 and 2011, Inside Higher Education reported. Higher education has seen an overall drop in public funding in the United States, but many supporters of historically black colleges still consider the drop in funding disconcerting. Federal funding for science, technology, engineering and mathematics saw an especially large drop, decreasing by nearly $88 million in 2011. Most federal agencies, including the Department of Education and the Department for Health and Human Services, saw their own budgets slashed during the 2011 fiscal year. In addition, funding for higher education that was part of President Barack Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which successfully increased federal funding for historically black colleges from $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion between 2007 and 2010 ceased in 2011. Despite the cuts in public education funding, the federal government increased financial aid assistance to individual students during the 2010-2011 period, according to Inside Higher Ed.
