
Archive: Colleges























The LA Times maintains its silence despite fair questions about what else Jason Felch was reporting on and whether the editors and lawyers botched handling of Occidental College stories.





























Three federal grand jury indictments led to the arrest of 18 members of the Harpys, which claim territory just north of USC and are "one of more than a dozen Latino gangs across a wide swath of South Los Angeles allegedly controlled by Mexican Mafia member Danny Roman."








Confirmation of the craft's complex soft landing on the surface of Mars came in to Pasadena at 10:31 p.m. PDT, about 14 minutes after it happened. (It takes that long for the communications data to burst across space.) The first thumbnail photos flowed a couple of minutes later, including scenes of the Mars horizon and a picture of a shadow cast on the surface by Curiosity.




The LAPD says robbery was the motive for the April 11 killings of Ming Qu and Ying Wu as they sat in a car about a mile from the USC campus. Two men were arrested Friday, possibly based on cellphone signals and forensic evidence tying the gun to other recent crimes.
The Coliseum Commission voted 8-1 Monday to give up day-to-day control of the historic facility to neighboring USC. Commissioner Bernard Parks, the City Council member who has been skirmishing with the commission for years, voted no.
USC professor of physics and astronomy Clifford Johnson has been waiting for a train line to campus. He's been known to pedal his bike to USC and to ride transit all over Los Angeles. On Saturday he finally rode the Expo Line and shot a video.




Republican candidate Rick Santorum claimed he read somewhere that 7 or 8 UC and CSU campuses don't even offer U.S. history — and isn't that outrageous, angry real Americans?


George Dohrmann, the Pulitzer-winning senior writer for Sports Illustrated, has a story in the March 5 issue detailing alleged recreational drug use and other disciplinary problems he says were allowed to fester in recent years in the UCLA men's basketball program.
Martin Gomez, the head librarian for Los Angeles since 2009, will become vice dean in the USC Libraries on April 2.





The producers of the documentary on the troubled life of USC football phenom Todd Marinovich premiering tonight on ESPN write that "for six months we tried to track him down and were greeted with radio silence."
Raphael J. Sonenshein, the Cal State Fullerton professor, author and analyst of Los Angeles politics, has been named executive director of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs.


UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero relieved football coach Rick Neuheisel of his duties this morning.

Why bring in a cop, and pay his consultants' fee, when there's a whole university worth of independent scholars who could recommend how to revisit the use of pepper spray against UC Davis students.

The national focus of the Occupy activities has suddenly become the University of California at Davis, showing the massive power (once again) of YouTube to capture relatively unfiltered events and disseminate them widely to great effect.


A 32-year-old student shot Tuesday by UC Berkeley police after he brandished a handgun in a computer lab has died at a hospital.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today announced the death of USC professor of public policy Harry Pachon, founding board member and past executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund.
First a fake referee stops play and takes off his clothes, then UCLA and Arizona players brawl on the field.
The line of California nerd-dom remains unbroken from Howard Hughes and hotrodders to Steve Jobs and the aerospace engineers who made surfing culture possible.


Gov. Jerrry Brown has been busy disposing of the bills sent to his desk by the Legislature.
Chris Jeon shows video he shot with the Libya rebels and reveals them to be fans of Justin Bieber.
Cover story in The Atlantic by Taylor Branch is the longest piece the magazine has run in four years.


The Lakers' Ron Artest and former Clippers star Elton Brand are among the NBA players taking part in informal workouts this summer.

Metro reporter Scott Gold will focus on stories about "the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the modern era" — and also earthquakes. The challenge of the beat will be to...
Kristy Edmunds, who comes to UCLA from Australia, talks about programming the performing arts and how she intends to get to know what Los Angeles audiences want.
Ronald Macaulay, an emeritus professor of linguistics at Pitzer College, is the author of last year's "Seven Ways of Looking at Language." When he heard that the Claremont Colleges Library...


It's just coincidence I'm sure, but the same week that Eli Broad is profiled for his philanthropy on "60 Minutes," three major local gifts have been announced.
'SoCal Connected' ties together two stories — on the animal rights activists who terrorize UCLA researchers and the clashes involving movie and TV characters who wait for tourists outside Hollywood and Highland — into an episode with a limits-of-free-speech theme.





Alexandra Wallace, the UCLA political science student whose video mocking Asian students and their families became a huge social media sensation, says in a letter to the Daily Bruin that...
Video goes viral and sparks angry comments, death threats, official denunciations and mocking remixes.
The gift of $200 million from David and Dana Dornsife is the largest ever to USC, surpassing the $175 million from George Lucas.

Zocalo Public Square is joining with Arizona State University and the New America Foundation to launch the non-partisan Center for Social Cohesion, "dedicated to studying the forces that shape our sense of social unity."







Applications are being accepted until Dec. 17 for the Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion.
Installation artist Jorge Pardo, who is a graduate of Art Center, and Caltech biophysicist John Dabiri, who studies the theoretical engineering behind jellyfish propulsion, have been named 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellows.
L.A. Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein and USC just jointly announced that next year's Festival of Books will be moving from UCLA, where it started and was held for 15 years.
In the San Fernando Valley secession election in 2002, state Assemblyman Keith Richman received the most votes and would have become the first mayor of the newly formed sixth-most populous U.S. city if voters had allowed the split.
The former Trojan and L.A. Rams quarterback takes over from Mike Garrett on Aug. 3, the same day that USC's new president takes office.
The author and OC Weekly "Ask a Mexican!" columnist gave the keynote address at tonight's main UCLA commencement ceremony.
The NCAA has given USC a two-year bowl ban and stripped more than 20 football scholarships after a four-year investigation into allegations involving Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo, the L.A. Times' Gary Klein reports.

I noticed quite an outpouring of grief and and surprise on Facebook from friends, labor activists and colleagues on today's death of John Delloro, reportedly of a heart attack.
It will be C. L. Max Nikias, currently executive vice president and provost at USC. He will succeed Steven Sample, who previously announced he would retire on Aug. 2.
Former U.S. Solicitor General Kenneth Starr is leaving as dean of Pepperdine University Law School to become president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Ten USC Annenberg graduate students who work on the Annenberg News21 team will produce Web-exclusive multimedia reports for the SoCal Connected website at KCET.

I have to wonder if the Times' near-total surrender of its award-winning tradition of covering a major local industry — cutting-edge science — helps explain why the New York Times beat the locals on the apparent suicide of a world-class Caltech scientist.


L.A. Times editor-at-large Jim Newton is now teaching a course in journalism ethics at UCLA, part of his appointment as a senior fellow in the School of Public Affairs. In...


Phil Wallace got into the details of the Trojans' self-imposed sanctions at Native Intelligence, and also wonders whether it will be enough to keep the NCAA from coming down harder....

The National Autonomous University of Mexico, said to be the largest in the western hemisphere, has operated out of the Mexican consulate here for three years. But now UNAM has...
The Trojans dominated in a sloppy game by both sides, but what they'll be talking about for days (at least) is this: USC throwing a touchdown bomb one play after...
Anh Do, a former columnist for the Orange County Register and vice president of Nguoi Viet Daily News (the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in the U.S.), will be the managing editor...
The first L.A. Times/USC poll will run in Sunday's and Monday's papers and will cover a bunch of topics. Some of the findings the Times is teasing: 51% of Calfornia...
Six statewide polls will be conducted between now and the November 2010 election, to be called the University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts & Sciences/Los Angeles Times Poll....
Clearing the decks for the new week: USC president Steven Sample announced that he would step down in August, after 19 years. Honors student Melody Ross, 16, was shot and...
When USC freshman Adrianna Bachan was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver at 3 a.m. last spring, the 18-year-old had a high level of alcohol in her system, according...
With fall quarter classes starting today, protests over budget cuts and employee furloughs are expected at many University of California campuses, including at UCLA. LAT...
Firefighters from Tuolumne and Calaveras counties knew well the history and scientific treasure that was at stake when the Station Fire threatened the Mount Wilson Observatory. They made it their...
Tim McOsker, who was the chief of staff for Mayor James Hahn, is taking a leave from the Los Angeles law office of Mayer Brown to become Senior Director for...




A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal has sided with Jet Propulsion Lab scientists who are resisting a government requirement that they detail past and present financial...
Both new assistant professors come billed as multi-media journalists. Seattle Times news producer Robert Hernandez and new media researcher and author Andrew Lih, whose new book is "The Wikipedia Revolution:...
SoCal Minds is a new blog that bills itself as presenting "Intriguing research, ideas, activity, people -- tracked from universities, cultural-intellectual institutions in Southern California." Recent posts have come out...
Fifteen digital journalists from 10 states have been selected for the inaugural class of the Knight Digital Media Center’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. Local fellows are Julia Scott, who blogs...
Josue Luna, husband of the woman charged in the hit and run death of USC student Adrianna Bachan, was arrested Friday afternoon while entering the U.S. from Mexico at the...
Irvine's new law school — the one that was, then wasn't, and now is run by Erwin Chemerinsky — got a huge number of applicants for its first class and...
Peter H. King has been the Los Angeles Times city editor, California columnist, roving reporter and a writer of big stories over almost 30 years at the paper. He's jumping...
That's the good news, of course. The bad news is that it even came up — blame "an ill conceived and unfortunate prank." From: Office of the Provost Subject: Pathogen...
Editors at UCLA's student paper "begrudgingly" ran a full-page ad for Haagen-Dazs wrapped around today's front page, and say in an editorial that it's a "regrettable but relatively unavoidable consequence...
Essentially nobody voted anywhere in this week's special election to pick Mark Ridley-Thomas's successor in the 26th state Senate district. But in the precinct that covers the USC campus, the...
Cinny Kennard, Managing Director/Managing Editor of National Public Radios West Coast production center in Culver City, found a good exit gig. She's going to USC Annenberg as senior fellow at...
NeonTommy.com at USC Annenberg is an "online digital news Web site created to fill a void in local and national news while providing news and commentary across multiple platformsaudio, video...
The Bruin Rangers, UCLA's official women's rugby club team, held their annual Prom Dress Rugby game on Thursday. "I got into rugby because I got tired of getting yellow cards...
Credit to the UCLA student newspaper, which sent a reporter and photographer to China for two weeks for a series of stories that began today on UCLA's presence there as...
One of my favorite assignments ever while at the Daily News (pre-web so I can't link) was a profile of Robert Jastrow, the brilliant physicist who, in addition to helping...
Andrea Ghez, the UCLA professor of astronomy and physics who showed that a monstrous black hole resides at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, was named a 2008 MacArthur...
Here's the most interesting blog post I read all day. Political scientists at UCLA who asked students to rate the faces of hundreds of American candidates found that Alaska Gov....
At noon today Eli and Edythe Broad will break ground on another local institution with their names on it: the Eli and Edythe Broad California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM)...
On an average day, USC theater students Peter Vack and Troian Bellisario bring in $100 performing lines from "Romeo and Juliet" on the New York City subway. "Several people thanked...
When OJR suspended publication last month, the move ended a ten-year run in which the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications was a high-profile player in the emerging...
The Online Journalism Review had survived for ten years under the stewardship of USC's Annenberg School of Communications. No more. Editor Robert Niles posted today: I'm pleased to say that...
They were pretty happy out at JPL today after scientists guided the Phoenix lander to a spot near the north pole of Mars, just one degree of tilt off perfect...
At yesterday's unveiling of a plaque for UCLA legend John Wooden at the Coliseum, Vin Scully told a fun story about how Wooden was one of the first people he...
Officials at the California Science Center in Exposition Park are reportedly miffed about an email from a top doctor at the UCLA Medical School, putting down the museum's skills as...
Anthony Pesce, next year's editor in chief of the student newspaper at UCLA, and photo editor/columnist Dharmishta Rood won a Knight News Challenge award to "create online publishing software geared...
For the past few months Kareem Abdul-Jabbar posted to a blog on LATimes.com. As of Monday, it has moved to Abdul-Jabbar's own website (with sound, so turn down your speakers.)...
Cal State Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald is a hero of the anti-Semitic crowd for writing that Jews have evolved as a tribal elite that conspires against the interests...
The host of the long-running "Connie Martinson Talks Books" gave nearly 3,000 tapes of her cable show to Claremont Graduate University. "It's a pretty extraordinary gift," said Rick Wartzman, director...
As reported Saturday, Geneva Overholser was just announced as the new journalism director at USC Annenberg....
Geneva Overholser, former editor of the Des Moines Register, will be introduced Monday as the new director of the journalism school at the USC Annenberg School of Communication, according to...
Loyola Law School Dean David Burcham has been named provost at Loyola Marymount, a new position at the law school's parent institution. The new interim law dean is Victor Gold,...
An open letter from Athletic Director Mike Garrett. Excerpt: It gives me no pleasure to write a letter of this kind, but there are issues facing our university that you...
USC alumni don't want to gather on campus Saturday mornings, touch the statue then get on a bus. They want to walk to the stadium. Skepticism abounds over the Times...
The newly reinstated dean-to-be of the future UC Irvine law school will be next year's commencement speaker at the rival Chapman University law school. The dean there, John Eastman, has...
Liberal legal scholar and pundit Erwin Chemerinsky will become dean of the new UC Irvine law school after all. Chancellor Michael V. Drake spent the week in North Carolina —...
Former L.A. Times reporter and editor George Ramos has stepped down as chairman of the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo journalism department. No explanation was given in the report in...
Video of the columnist addressing journalism graduates at today's USC Annenberg commencement, at LAist....
Full professors at Harvard average $177,400 a year, those at Yale $157,600. Which full professors in California do you think make the most? Here's the top 10 from the newest...
From Roy Rivenburg in Sunday's LAT: When a vampire expert allegedly seduced a tipsy UC Irvine student four years ago, he inadvertently set off a chain of events that now...
Jonah at la.foodblogging got invited to the private club on a corner of the Caltech campus in Pasadena. The first formal dinner at The Athenaeum, in February 1931, celebrated the...
Records containing the names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of students, faculty, employees and some applicants since the early 1990s may have been accessed. The online intrusion went on...
USC says that Zach Fox, already elected once as spring editor of the Daily Trojan but blocked by administrators, can run again. He tells Jacob Soboroff on video over at...
The Grill downstairs in USC's Commons was shut down by the county health department after an inspection turned up insects. After closure for 48 hours and fumigation, the dining area...
Zach Fox edits the USC student paper this semester and was reelected by the staff to do it again in the spring, but he quit last night after the university...
For the fifth year in a row the University of Southern California has more international students than any school in the United States. The Open Doors report says the 6,881...
This weekend — apparently for the first time ever — both L.A. pro football teams play in the Bay Area on the same day: USC at Stanford and UCLA at...
Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes extensively on what he sees as the abuses of copyright and the law's dampening effect on free exchange of ideas and art. Just because he's...
After El Vaquero reported accurately last month on two suicides by students in the nursing program, Glendale College president John Davitt complained that the story reflected poorly on the institution....
Boi from Troy is checking out a report that the male yell leaders won't be back on the sidelines at Trojans football games this fall. Known officially as yell leaders...
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's commencement speech Friday at UCLA praised his mother Natalia for supporting him and addressed the news that African American enrollment is down. "I worry for the future....
Unable to conclude the search for a chancellor at UCLA, the University of California today said that professor emeritus of law Norman Abrams will become acting chancellor. Abrams has been...
My favorite blog reading is not about politics or Los Angeles (or even ice hockey.) What I enjoy is eavesdropping on aficionados in some field I know nothing about. Hence...
Joseph Aoun, a linguist and dean of USC's College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, will be announced later this week as the new president of Northeastern University, the Boston Globe...
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Clinton fundraises in LA

Brown declares disaster area

Performing arts with cheer
