Professors

For more than three decades, epidemiologist James Enstrom has labored quietly at UCLA, studying the effect of tobacco smoke on human health. In recent years, his work has challenged the conventional view that second-hand smoke poses a serious health risk. He calls himself a lone wolf, a maverick and a rebel. His critics call him a turncoat. Enstrom once worked closely with the American Cancer Society, but today his sponsor is the tobacco industry. Over the last 15 years, he has received $1.

The faculty union and the Cal State University system announced a tentative settlement Tuesday in their long simmering contract dispute, boosting professors' pay by at least 20.7% over four years and averting threatened walkouts at the 23 campuses across the state. Both sides predicted that the new contract would be ratified over the next few weeks and that labor peace would be restored to the nation's largest four-year university system, which enrolls about 417,000 students.

The Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday called for an investigation into the campus activities of Kevin MacDonald, a Cal State Long Beach psychology professor whose writings about Jews have been used to support the views of white supremacists.

Yahoo Inc. hired two professors to bolster its research organization. Preston McAfee, a California Institute of Technology business professor, will oversee a microeconomics research group. Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociology professor, will lead research on social networks. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are hiring researchers and engineers as they develop products and try to take a larger share of the booming Internet-advertising market.

A University of Colorado committee has recommended that a controversial professor accused of faulty research be suspended for one year rather than fired. Ward L. Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies who touched off a national firestorm with an essay about the 2001 World Trade Center victims, was accused in this case of misrepresenting the effects of federal laws on American Indians and claiming the work of a Canadian environmental group as his own.

FOR much of his career studying scripture, professor David Scholer of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena puzzled over a line from 1 Thessalonians: \o7Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. \f7He resisted a part of the verse: How did one "give thanks in all circumstances"? In tragedy? Sickness?

Israeli historian and UCLA professor Saul Friedlander will receive the top prize of the Frankfurt Book Fair in recognition of his narratives documenting the Nazi Holocaust, the German Book Trade association said Thursday. Friedlander, 74, is to be given the $33,000 peace prize during the annual book fair in October. Among his best-known works is his two-volume collection, "Nazi Germany and the Jews."

Dan Lowenstein passionately opposes the war in Iraq and recently helped stage an antiwar teach-in at UC San Francisco. "We must listen to our conscience and speak out," he told the hundreds of people who had gathered. Lowenstein is no student organizer; he's a noted professor and vice chairman of the department of neurology at UCSF.

The University of Colorado on Tuesday fired professor Ward L. Churchill, whose controversial statements comparing victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to Nazis triggered a debate over free speech and scholarship. The university system's regents insisted that their decision was unrelated to Churchill's 2001 essay that called workers in the World Trade Center "little Eichmanns," a reference to Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of sending Jews to death camps.

In the latest and most dramatic move to elevate a small Orange liberal arts campus to a world-class institution, Chapman University announced Thursday that it had hired a cutting-edge Nobel laureate in economics and his entire research team. "This is a defining moment," university President James L. Doti said in announcing the appointment of Vernon L. Smith, who won the Nobel Prize in 2002 and is known internationally as the father of experimental economics.