Professors

In Berkeley, city leaders branded him a war criminal and human rights activists put up a billboard to denounce him. But in suburban Orange County, Professor John Yoo -- the primary architect of the Bush administration's policy on harsh interrogation techniques that many consider torture -- has found relatively calmer waters. Yoo is a visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, on leave from his tenured post at UC Berkeley to teach foreign relations law.

The University of Colorado professor who likened 9/11 victims to a Nazi leader was fired in retaliation for his controversial remarks, a Denver jury ruled Thursday. Jurors in the wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by Ward L. Churchill agreed with the embattled professor's contention that he was the victim of a "howling mob," not the perpetrator of academic misconduct. However, they awarded him only $1 in damages, an amount Churchill dismissed after the verdict as unimportant.

President Obama on Wednesday injected himself into the national debate over how law enforcement treats minorities. Responding to a question during his news conference, Obama said that the Cambridge, Mass., Police Department had acted "stupidly" in arresting his friend, prominent African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Harvard University professor was handcuffed and charged with disorderly conduct last week after police responded to a possible break-in at his home.

Controversy has erupted at UC Santa Barbara over a professor's decision to send his students an e-mail in which he compared graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza offensive. The e-mail by tenured sociology professor William I. Robinson has triggered a campus investigation and drawn accusations of anti-Semitism from two national Jewish groups, even as many students and faculty members have voiced support for him.

Shawn Alexander can recognize the look immediately. It's one of surprise when a student enters his African American studies class and finds, standing at the front, a white guy. "Years ago, it happened more," said Alexander, 38, who teaches at the University of Kansas. "I'd see the kids walk into my room, look down at their registration cards and up at me, and then walk out to make sure they had the right classroom."

She's an assistant professor at UCLA who specializes in ancient Egyptian art and architecture. But Kara Cooney doesn't teach only in the lecture hall. She teaches on the small screen too. Cooney, who has been in the university's department of Near Eastern languages and cultures since January, traveled the world -- visiting sacred sites, looking at mummified baboons and disembodied heads, even getting spit on by a Mexican shaman in a cleansing ritual -- for "Out of Egypt," a six-part series premiering tonight on the Discovery Channel.

A UCLA professor who taught the student accused of slashing a female classmate's throat last week said Saturday that he told a university administrator 10 months ago that he had concerns about the student's mental health, but strict federal privacy laws prevent UCLA officials from disclosing how they handled the issue. Stephen Frank, an associate professor in the university's history department, met the suspect, undergraduate student Damon Thompson, when he enrolled in the instructor's Western civilization class late last year, Frank said in an interview.

Does your grade on a college term paper still tug at you years or decades later? Well, join the man in the White House. Last week, President Barack Obama had a warm reunion in the Oval Office with Occidental College politics professor Roger Boesche. The two hadn't seen each other since 1981, when Obama, then known as Barry, was about to transfer from the Los Angeles college to Columbia University in New York. Over the years, Obama has cited Boesche as one of his most influential teachers, but the two had had only sporadic contact via e-mail.

David Lesch remembers how, as the first-round winter draft pick for the Dodgers in 1980, he was singled out by Tommy Lasorda to throw against all-stars Ron Cey, Reggie Smith, Davey Lopes and Bill Russell on his very first day of spring training. His initial pitch to Cey sailed over his head. Cey got up from the dirt and shot him an angry glance. But Lesch calmed down and pitched the rest of the practice without a hitch.

Shakespeare, Edith Wharton and Internet poetry were supposed to be among the main topics of discussion at the largest gathering of humanities professors in the nation. But the sour economy and shrunken job market for academics proved to be more dramatic than any novel or play. An estimated 8,500 professors and wannabe professors of English literature, composition and foreign languages gathered for the annual meeting this week of the Modern Language Assn.