World & Nation
Nearly 200 Iraqi professors have been killed and more than 100 kidnapped since the United States invaded Iraq, according to a report on Azzaman.com, an Arabic news service.

The news service quoted the Iraqi minister of education Abed Dhiyab al-Ajili as saying that incidents of violence and the fear they have spawned have led “thousands” of Iraqi academics to flee to other countries.

Several human-rights groups have reported that insurgents in Iraq were purposely making Iraqi academics their targets in a concerted campaign to drive out its intellectual class, according to Azzaman.

Native-born African-American students are even more underrepresented at the nation’s selective colleges than is commonly understood, according to an article in the February issue of the American Journal of Education.

Selective colleges have expanded their enrollments of black students by “increasing the number of immigrant and multiracial black students,” according to the article, “Black Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the United States.” More than one-quarter of black students at selective colleges and universities are the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, the authors noted. The article is available through the AJE Web site www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJE/.

The number of billionaires around the world has increased to almost 1,000—946, at last count by Forbes magazine—up 19 percent since last year, with a total net worth of $3.5 trillion.

On the other hand, from 2003 to 2004, the average incomes of the bottom 99 percent of households in the U.S. grew by less than 3 percent, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent of U.S. households—annual incomes above about $315,000 in 2004—garnered 53 percent of the income gains in 2004.

The share of total U.S. income that the top one percent of households received in 2004 was the third highest since 1929 (after 1999 and 2000).

Faculty & Staff
For the 10th consecutive year, the median salary increase for college administrators outpaced inflation, according to an annual survey released this week by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. CUPA-HR reported the median salary increased by 4 percent in the 2006-07 academic year for presidents, chief academic officers, deans, vice presidents, and other high-level administrators. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for urban consumers in 2006 was 3.2 percent higher than in 2005.

The Montana House of Representatives has defeated a bill that would have required public colleges and universities to report on how they promote intellectual diversity on their campuses. The bill also stated “teachers should not take unfair advantage of students by indoctrinating them with the teachers’ own opinions before the students have had an opportunity to examine other opinions.”

Professional News
Nearly half of U.S. college students binge drink or abuse drugs, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reports in a new study.

Forty-nine percent of full-time college students—3.8 million students—ages 18 to 22 binge—consume five or more drinks at a time or abuse prescription drugs or illegal drugs like cocaine and marijuana, according to the report.

The percentage of students who drink was similar to that in a 1993 report—70 percent then and 68 percent in 2005. But the proportion who binge drink frequently rose by 16 percent. Daily smoking among college students fell from 15 percent in 1993 to 12 percent in 2005.

The study was based on a survey of 2,000 students and 400 college and university administrators, as well as interviews with researchers.

You can find Wasting the Best and the Brightest: Substance Abuse at America’s Colleges and Universities on the Center’s Web site www.casacolumbia.org.