Harvard University

Vietnam veteran John Otte did his best to forget the war. He got married, raised two sons and made a career working at credit unions. But as Otte neared retirement, memories of combat flooded back. Starting in 2005, he filed a series of claims with Veterans Affairs for disability compensation, contending that many of his health problems stemmed from the war. The VA agreed, and now the 65-year-old with two Purple Hearts receives $1,900 a month for post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes - and for having shrapnel scars on his arms.

This is not the kind of news Harvard University would like: First, an allegation of widespread cheating, then an internal hunt for an email leak at the university, and now, a partial apology by the administration for searching the correspondence of resident deans. The story begins in 2012, a dark time for Harvard University. More than 100 students had been accused of cheating on a take-home exam for an introductory-level class on Congress -- a humiliating scandal for the institution, whose graduates so often become the elected officials their undergraduates study.

Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion. She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another's hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze. Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework. "No wonder you're going to Harvard," a girl teased her. Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago. What students don't know is that she is also a homeless girl.

The nation's top fund-raising institution last year, Stanford University, raised $1.03 billion from donors, the first to raise more than $1 billion in a given year. Out of the nation's top 10 fund-raising institutions, two others were in California, with the University of Southern California raising $492 million and the University of California, Berkeley raising $405 million, according to a list by the Council for Aid to Education. Among other California schools, UCLA raised $344 million and Caltech pulled in $100 million.

This ambitious, speculative work won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1978. Edward O. Wilson, professor of science at Harvard University, is probably best known as a proponent for the discipline of sociobiology, which combines biological principles with the social sciences. "On Human Nature" applies Darwin's evolutionary theory to social organization--to heredity, sex, altruism, religion, aggression--with fascinating conclusions.

Cosmology--the study of the universe and its origin--is perhaps science's grandest stage. But galaxies don't lend themselves to experiments as, say, atoms do. As a result, cosmology has historically occupied a place on the edge of science, say MIT physicist and essayist Alan Lightman and MIT graduate student Roberta Brawer in "Origins," a fascinating, surprisingly accessible and altogether human collection of conversations with today's leading cosmologists.

"If you're a storyteller," the filmmaker Howard Hawks is quoted in "Naturalist," "find a good story and tell it." For more than 40 years, Edward O. Wilson, one of the preeminent evolutionary biologists of our time, has been finding and telling good stories in unlikely places, from fire ants in Alabama, to bulldog ants in Western Australia, to army ants in Costa Rica. ("Most children have a bug period," he says, "and I never grew out of mine."

Two premed students died and a third woman was injured in a murder-suicide at a Harvard University dormitory Sunday morning in what school officials termed "a tragic incident." Sinedu Tadesse, a 20-year-old junior from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, "viciously stabbed" her roommate, Trang Ho, 20, of Lowell, Mass., just after 8 a.m., police said. The attack awoke 27-year-old Thao Nguyen, also of Lowell, who was visiting Ho and sleeping in the other bedroom of a two-room suite.

Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, whose term ends Friday, said he will return to the school as a professor next year. Summers said he is looking forward to teaching, writing and researching.

The first woman to head Harvard University's history department, Angeliki E. Laiou, will begin her three-year term Monday, officials said. The post rotates among tenured professors.

The number of free college-level courses offered online has surged this year, with some of the nation's most prestigious universities getting involved. The classes are open to anyone, and although you won't earn college credit, you will get a chance to learn from professors and other experts at no charge. Some key websites: • Coursera.org: Thirty-three universities, including Stanford, Caltech, Princeton and Duke, have joined together to offer more than 200 courses. Among them are 21 classes in economics and finance, 13 in business and management, and 20 in artificial intelligence and robotics.

Stuart Taylor Jr. was in my law school class. Or, more accurately, I was in his law school class, since he graduated at the top of the class and I graduated. Now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Taylor has co-written, with Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at UCLA, an influential book highly critical of affirmative action. I am hesitant to write about it, first because he is a friend I'd like to keep, and second, because the book is intimidating, both in its statistics and in its evident goodwill.

  President Obama nominated a former Treasury official from the George H.W. Bush administration and a Harvard economist to fill two vacancies on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The nominees, Jerome H. (Jay) Powell and Jeremy C. Stein, would serve 14-year terms on the board if they are confirmed by the Senate. "I am grateful that these individuals have agreed to serve their nation at this important time for our economy," Obama said Tuesday. "Their distinguished backgrounds and experience coupled with their impressive knowledge of economic and monetary policy make them tremendously qualified to serve in these important roles.

Caltech celebrated the announcement Wednesday that it has been ranked the world's best research university by a British higher education magazine, beating Harvard University in the listing for the first time. The Pasadena institution, which specializes in science and engineering, was first in the World University Rankings by the Times Higher Education magazine in London. Harvard had topped the list since the ranking began in 2004 but slipped to second this year, tied with Stanford University.

Oscar Handlin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Harvard University whose classic portrait of 19th century European emigrants launched the modern study of immigration as the predominant American story, died Sept. 20 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 95. The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Lilian. Handlin, who taught at Harvard University for nearly 50 years, was a prolific scholar best known for "The Uprooted: the Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People.

Amid deepening anxiety over the slow place of recovery from the recession, President Obama on Tuesday announced the departure of one of his top economic advisors. Lawrence Summers, known as a brilliant economic thinker with a prickly personality, will step down at the end of the year to return to Harvard University, where he had a controversial five-year stint as president. He will be the third key member of Obama's economic team to leave in a mid-term election year in which the anemic economy could lead to large Democratic congressional losses in November.

Two paintings reported missing from Harvard University's collections more than three decades ago have been recovered and will be returned to Harvard. One painting is a 1790 portrait of William Ponsonby, second earl of Bessborough, by John Singleton Copley, that went missing from private university property in 1971. The second painting, a portrait by Gilbert Stuart of 19th century Harvard president John Thornton Kirkland, was reported missing in 1968.

Two Californians were among 32 American students named Sunday as Rhodes scholars. The winners of the two-year scholarships to Oxford University in England were selected from 1,059 applicants at 333 colleges and universities, said David Alexander, American Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, based at Pomona College in Claremont. The estate of Cecil Rhodes, a British philanthropist and colonialist, established the scholarships after his death in 1902.

It is not uncommon for international journalists who come to Harvard University as Nieman fellows to be out of favor with their governments. They often work in countries where free expression and the rule of law exist in name only. They report in an atmosphere of danger where threats, and sometimes violence, are common tools to encourage self-censorship and silence truth-telling. Colombian journalist Hollman Morris has long worked in challenging conditions, producing probing television reports that document his country's long and complex civil war. He has built contacts with the left-wing guerilla group known as the FARC and told stories of the conflict's victims.

Harvard University has agreed to digitize more than 51,000 rare Chinese books, making them freely available. The Harvard College Library and the National Library of China signed the deal Friday.