A survey of students commissioned by the University System of Georgia suggests that political oppression by the faculty is not as severe as some (like "Academic Bill of Rights" advocate David Horowitz) have suggested. Instead, students actually perceive more intolerance of each other's differing political views than intolerance by their professors. "I didn't see any systemic ideological bias to be of great concern," Susan Herbst, executive vice chancellor of the Georgia system, told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Students and faculty [aren't] crushing each other's free speech with great force."

About 21 percent of students feel that their peers aren't tolerant of the political views of others, and only 47 percent said their peers were accepting of their views. As for professors, 13 percent of students said professors presented their views inappropriately.

The pursuit of an 18-year-old drinking age saw new light today, as more than 100 college presidents called on lawmakers to reconsider the current minimum. The movement is called the Amethyst Initiative, which is named after the gem the ancient Greeks credited for warding off drunkenness. It contends that the "21-year-old drinking age is not working, and, specifically, that it has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking on their campuses."

The group has been quietly gaining ground over the past year, recruiting presidents and chancellors to sign on to its mission of provoking debate about the drinking age, and it now plans to take out newspaper ads over the next few weeks.

Critics of the initiative include Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who accuse the presidents of misrepresenting science and looking for an easy way out of an inconvenient problem. MADD even goes as far as warning parents to think about the safety at colleges represented on the list, the Associated Press reports.

Prominent universities on the list include Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Morehouse, Ohio State, Spelman, Syracuse, and Maryland.

The University of North Carolina saw a drop in its minority enrollment this year, even as applications from and acceptance letters to minority students went up, the Daily Tar Heel reports. For the past two years, black enrollment has been declining: This year's freshman class will be 10.7 percent black, while it was 11.14 percent last year and 12.3 percent in 2006. Growth of Hispanic enrollment also slowed, after two years that saw increases of 20 percent or more.

Admissions officials blame the decrease on top schools like Yale and Harvard that have expanded their aid packages, making it increasingly difficult for UNC to compete financially.

The city of Ames has installed rubber sidewalks in the Campustown neighborhood, just south of Iowa State University, to address the area's keg problem, the Ames Tribune reports. More specifically, the shock-absorbent shredded recycled tires will soften the blow of hundreds of 140-pound kegs plummeting to the ground. Turns out all that alcohol being delivered to nearby restaurants was not only making students extremely happy but also cracking and ruining the sidewalks.

A debate is raging at the University of Massachusetts Amherst about how necessary the "Amherst" part of its name really is, the Boston Globe reports. The Amherst campus is the system's flagship university, and some alumni are worried that the regional designation gives the 25,000-student research institution the air of a commuter or provincial school. "The Amherst label diminishes its flagship status by lumping them in with all the others," says one graduate.

The University of Missouri shed its "Columbia" appendage last year, and critics of the current name point to schools such as the University of Michigan, Ohio State University , and Penn State , which are easily identified as flagship schools among a more broad system. Supporters of "Amherst," however, cite the University of Tennessee Knoxville , the University of Wisconsin Madison, UC Berkeley, and the University of Texas-Austin as schools that have done just fine with a regional designation.

With $11,000, a Yale grad student is building a house and bringing it with her to campus, the Hartford Courant reports. An incoming student at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Elizabeth Turnbull has built an 8 by 18 foot "Tiny House" atop a flatbed trailer. The space has a mini-sleeping loft, a storage loft, a study nook, a kitchen area, a living area, and a bathroom—and was built as environmentally friendly as possible.

It is completely solar-powered and is made almost completely from green, recyclable, used, and leftover parts. Think: recyclable aluminum roof, recycled sailboat sails for ceilings, soy insulation, and leftover fixtures, tiles, lumber, and hardware.

University and New Haven officials are still working out the details on where to place Turnbull's home.

Like UCLA's massive shooting simulation, Cal State-Long Beach held its own Active Shooter Drill on campus Wednesday, the Daily 49er reports. Using fake weapons and rounds to replicate the chaos of an incident, university and Long Beach police (but no SWAT or FBI) responded to students and volunteers acting out the role of wounded victims.

Two University of Nebraska-Lincoln wrestlers were kicked off the team Tuesday after appearing nude in pictures and videos on a gay porn site, the Daily Nebraskan reports. School officials said that by receiving money from the site, senior Paul Donahoe and junior Kenny Jordan violated NCAA rules that prohibit athletes from using their own image for commercial use. The two used the stage names "Cal" and "Nash" on the site Fratmen.tv.

Jordan told the Daily Nebraskan that he had "messed up." He added, "My punishment is definitely fair." Donahoe did not respond to the Associated Press's requests for comment.

It's unclear how much money the students received, but the Nebraska athletic department told the Nebraskan and the AP that the porn site was not the only reason the two were dismissed. The AP said they had past run-ins with the law. Both athletes competed in the 2008 national championship, and Donahoe was the national champion in his weight class in 2007.

An Ohio University student was kicked out of her Semester at Sea program and dropped off in Greece after being accused of plagiarism, according to the Post, the student-run newspaper at OU. Her expulsion, along with the dismissal of a student from California Baptist University, has put the spotlight on the strict, single-sanction honor code enforced by the University of Virginia, which sponsored the program.

OU senior Allison Routman says she was expelled for taking three sentence fragments verbatim from Wikipedia and for paraphrasing a movie synopsis from the site. According to Routman, a day before the papers in question were to be returned to students, the instructor told the class plagiarism was suspected and asked students to come forward and make a "conscientious retraction." Routman says she did not think she had done anything wrong at the time, so she did not come forward. "Had I had any idea I had done something wrong, I would have absolutely come forward," she said.

She was later confronted and expelled. The appeal she mounted was also dismissed.

She says the three phrases she had taken were "when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa"; "German-speaking minority outside of Germany"; and "who had just been released from a concentration camp."

In response to the incident, students on the ship mounted a letter-writing campaign in which they expressed their "disbelief" over what they called a "shocking...jaw-dropping" decision.

School officials defended the decision, saying that students were well informed about the honor code beforehand. Critics said the expulsion followed a path that was not consistent with the disciplinary system at the University of Virginia. Because of fewer resources, Routman was judged by a panel of professors, as opposed to a panel of her peers, which is the norm at Charlottesville.

First we reported on students using food pantries, and now we have some numbers on food stamps. The number of college students receiving stamps in the state of Florida was up 44 percent in July compared with last year, which is about twice the rate of increase in the Florida population as a whole, the Miami Herald reports. That's 54,116 students in the state.

An applicant could receive up to $162 per month, depending on income, to buy food, but the stamps can be used only for staples such as milk, bread, cereal, meat, fruits, and vegetables. Not surprisingly, alcohol, cigarettes, toilet paper, toothpaste, and the like are not allowed. Also not allowed: "prepared deli foods such as hot cooked chicken." Good to know.

To help students cope with rising gas prices, the University of Hawaii has reopened an online ride-sharing program, the Ka Leo reports. The program, which allows students to search for people who offer rides, was first launched five years ago after more than 1,300 Oahu bus workers initiated a strike of the transit system. The service has now been expanded to all 10 Hawaii campuses.

Three MIT students were ordered by a federal judge not to give a presentation at the annual DEF CON hacker convention on vulnerabilities in Boston's public transit's fare-card system, the Tech reports. The judge issued a temporary restraining order on behalf of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. "The injunction prevents them from disclosing ways to hack into the system," an MBTA spokeswoman told the Boston Herald. "It's a preventive matter for us."

The students were planning to show their research on how the MBTA's CharlieTicket could be reprogrammed to contain up to $655.36, essentially allowing the hacker to ride the public transit system free.

The students say they were shocked to hear the MBTA was pursuing legal action, saying they had been in contact with MBTA as early as July 31 about the DEF CON presentation and that relations between the two were generally cordial. One student added that he had left an August 4 meeting with the MBTA thinking the "issue had been resolved" and "that they would not face legal action." The lawsuit was filed late Friday afternoon, four days after that meeting and two days before the presentation.

The University of Southern California won a six-year logo conflict against the other USC, the University of South Carolina, the Los Angeles Times reports. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled the West Coast USC has priority when it comes to the "SC" logo. South Carolina essentially cannot trademark the logo but will most likely still be able to use "SC" in its marketing and may still be able to collect royalties, a South Carolina official said.

The 93-page decision hinged on how long each school had used its current version of the "SC" logo, the State reports:

Southern California showed it had used its interlocking "SC" logo for a longer, continuous time. South Carolina was ruled to have abandoned its "SC" logo in 1982 and used the current one since only 1997. Southern Cal had adopted its logo "no later" than 1967, according to the patent office.

South Carolina argued that its use of "SC" represented the state as a whole and not just the university, and that its use predated the Revolutionary War. But the patent office relied on the actual registration of the logo.

It found that if both schools kept using the "SC" logo, there was a likelihood of confusion. The patent office also pointed out that South Carolina used different versions of the interlocking logo before adopting the current one in 1997.

South Carolina's "USC" logo, however, is safe from legal prosecution, thanks to an agreement between the schools in the early '80s. Check out the Times for more on both USC's trademark troubles.

In what's billed as the largest security collaboration of its kind, 300 Los Angeles police officers, firefighters, FBI agents, and SWAT team members staged a huge shooting simulation at UCLA last week, the Daily Bruin reports.

More than 100 students volunteered to participate in the mock campus shooting, and the "victims" playacted their way through an evacuation, "screaming and moaning about their injuries," most splattered with fake blood. Triage was also kept as realistic as possible, with firefighters finding out the extent of the students' so-called injuries only as the situation unfolded.

"Hopefully this will serve as a model for other large universities," said the UCLA chancellor.

Quick on the heels of its "honor" as Princeton Review's top party school, the University of Florida announced a proposal to revamp the university's alcohol and drug policies, the Independent Florida Alligator reported. The student code of conduct may be amended to ban the possession of "common source containers" such as kegs, minikegs, and beer balls. The proposal also would prohibit "any extreme alcohol consumption activity that constitutes, facilitates, or encourages competitive, rapid, or excessive consumption of alcohol." That includes drinking games, keg tipping, and alcohol luges (aka. ice luges, which are best served with peppermint schnapps). Inside Higher Ed adds that "keg standing" would be prohibited, which is interesting only because I've never seen "keg stand" used as a verb before.

All these regulations would apply to off-campus housing, although school officials say they do not intend to go after off-campus kegs unless the students were part of a UF group, sorority, or fraternity, or if a serious incident occurred.

The university's Board of Trustees will consider the proposal in September.