Evelynn Hammonds, Harvard University's undergraduate dean, will step down on July 1 after a controversial five-year tenure, The New York Times reported. Hammonds came under fire this spring for authorizing searches of faculty emails. In March, the university revealed that Hammonds, Harvard's first African-American and female dean, approved the search of 16 resident deans' email accounts in an attempt to find who had leaked information about students suspected of cheating. Hammonds said that the controversy surrounding the email searches, which many faculty members protested, was not a factor in her decision to step down as dean and that she had planned to return to academia for several years. Hammonds will remain at Harvard, where she will lead a new program exploring the intersection of gender and race in science.
After receiving negative student feedback, Stanford University will not ban hard alcohol on campus during this year's summer term, The Stanford Daily reported. The policy, which began last July, banned any drink with an alcohol content above 20 percent. Under the policy, students over 21 were allowed to keep beer and wine in their dorms, but would face punishment for possession of hard alcohol. Concerns arose that the ban conflicted with the university's student alcohol policy, which does not explicitly ban hard alcohol. The ban was enacted to reduce high-risk drinking among both Stanford students and visiting students. The university will continue to offer alcohol-free events and support for students who engage in high-risk drinking.
Due to a simple typo, a question on a Cambridge University physics exam was unanswerable, The Telegraph reported. Over an hour passed before students taking the exam realized a variable essential to solving a problem had not been included. University administrators gave the students an extra 15 minutes to complete the exam, but many students said that the extra time did not alleviate the stress caused by the problem. This error follows a series of mistakes in British higher-level exams. Two years ago, several A-level exams, including those in geography and business, were determined to have unanswerable questions. A Cambridge spokesperson said that around 300 students took the physics exam and around 75 percent of test-takers had attempted the problem.
