Professors

Arguing that UCLA admissions policies are being manipulated to circumvent the state's ban on consideration of applicants' race, a professor there has resigned from a faculty committee that he says refused to allow him to study the matter.

Rueben Martinez is known for his many callings: Barber. Longtime bookstore owner. MacArthur award winner. Speaker at high schools, colleges and universities across the country. Holder of more honorary degrees than he can count. And now Martinez, 68, is a college professor. A presidential fellow, to be exact. Starting next month, Martinez will be responsible for Chapman University's efforts to recruit first-generation students, especially Latinos, into science and math programs.

For a guy who's four-fifths of a century old, Jack Rothman is a million laughs. Take, for example, this bit he wrote: \o7Two important factors \f7\o7place constraints on the prototypical rationalistic mode. The first is the intensification of constituency politics, a contemporary development that makes planning highly contentious and interactive. \f7Oh, wait. Wrong bit.

Re "The shallow end of the think tank," Opinion, Feb. 13 Bravo to Joel Stein for his hilarious account of a week at the Hoover Institution. But he is too kind when he alleges that Hoover fellows "are kind of like professors who don't teach." They are also unlike professors in that their political position is bought and paid for, period. In truth, they are no more than propagandists for the organized right. If they want to call themselves "fellows," whatever that may mean, fine. But we should not tolerate them affecting the title of "scholar," as so many think tankers do. Nor should we equate them in any way with university professors, whose biases, at least, are their own. TONY ZITO \o7Poughkeepsie, N.Y. \f7 Thank you, Joel Stein, for the first accurate piece on the Hoover Institution I've read in this paper in 40 years.

A retired UC Irvine math professor who has never been to Sicily is running for a city council seat in Palermo -- the island's capital and the homeland of his ancestors. Frank Cannonito, who says of his age only that he's in his early 80s, is running in the May elections on the ticket of L'Altra Sicilia, a political organization that calls for the preservation of traditional Sicilian culture and language. "There's been a continual denigration of Sicilian culture by the dominant culture.

Seeking to avoid threatened walkouts in the massive Cal State University system, the faculty union and administration agreed Sunday to defuse their labor dispute and extend the current contract for 10 more days of negotiations. Their conciliatory move came after the public release Sunday of an impartial fact-finder's report that both sides said could form the basis of an agreement in the two-year standoff at the 23-campus system.

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.