Three stained glass windows at Duke Chapel were broken Wednesday night during Duke's Last Day of Classes celebration.

The vandalism occurred during the university-sanctioned party celebrating the end of the semester. It included a series of activities all day long, including a performance by the rapper Ludacris.

Students prepped early for a long day of fun, setting up lawn chairs and sipping beer on the quad by early afternoon. (The university allowed each person of drinking age to possess a six-pack of beer, but no wine or hard alcohol)

Duke officials don't yet know who broke the Chapel windows, nor the motivation, according to an email from Sam Wells, Dean of Duke Chapel.

"The Chapel is a symbol of the university as a whole, but also a building with religious and specifically Christian resonances," Wells wrote. "We can't know whether the action was simply reckless, or had more sinister intent; whether the target of this gesture was the university as a whole, Christianity in particular, or simply a beautiful and relatively unprotected building."

An investigation is ongoing.

N.C. Central University is dipping deeper into its endowment than is customary to help its cash-strapped students cope with the rising cost of college.

The university will spend about 8.5 percent of its $19 million endowment next year, a  jump from the standard 5.5 percent it usually takes each year. Doing so will yield an extra $142,000 that the university will use for scholarships.

(image courtesy citytown.com)

At a university where more than 90 percent of students receive financial aid, the extra money is expected to benefit 142 students who will receive grants of $1,000 each.

A committee of the university's trustee board approved the unusual move Tuesday, and the full board will likely give its blessing Wednesday.

NCCU and most universities generally take 5 or 5.5 percent of its endowment each year, based on a three-year rolling average, for scholarships and other uses. But mounting budget cuts and rising college costs prompted the move, officials said Tuesday during meetings of the university's board of trustees.

Read Wednesday's News & Observer for more.

The Blackstone Group's charitable foundation announced this morning that it is committing $3.6 million to create an entrepreneur network in the Triangle.

Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO and co-founder of private equity firm, formally announce the five-year initiative at an event in Durham's American Tobacco Campus.

The company hopes the network will become a model for other regions.

The money will be used to create an entrepreneurial support network similar to ones that already exist in Silicon Valley and the Boston area.

Partners in the project include Duke University, N.C. Central, N.C. State and UNC Chapel Hill.

At the University of Iowa, a professor who studies same-sex relationships is in some trouble after firing off a hasty message containing the naughty four-letter F word in response to a mass email from a Republican group on her campus.

Ellen Lewin, a professor of anthropology and gender, women's & sexuality studies, hit the all-caps button and wrote "F#$% YOU, REPUBLICANS" in response to a campus GOP group's announcement of "Conservative Coming Out" week.

Problem: The professor's vulgar response came from her official University of Iowa. Her missive and the predictable responses to it all found a home on the Iowa Republican, a GOP news website, according to this story in the local newspaper, the Press-Citizen.

Lewin later apologized, sort of. She acknowledged her inappropriate language but took the college Republicans group to task for the term "conservative coming out" day, which she said essentially hijacked terminology used by the gay and lesbian movement.

I didn't know Chris Hondros until yesterday, when I wrote about his death.

I came away impressed.

Hondros, 41, was a war photographer who won some of his industry's top honors for his incredible work covering the world's diciest battles.

A graduate of N.C. State, Hondros was drawn to war, to its stories, its relevance and its victims.

He studied English literature at NCSU. One of his early bosses, Johnny Horne of the Fayetteville Observer, told me that area of study grounded Hondros and gave him a unique world view. It helped him related to people, no matter their race, nationality, background.

Hondros died Wednesday, caught up in the bloodshed in Libya.

Here's today's story.

And here's a link to a tribute posted on an NCSU website.

If you're keeping score, it's now Julia Gaffield 2, all other Haiti historians 0.

A year ago, the Duke graduate student made international news in scholarly circles upon discovering the first known copy of Haiti's Declaration of Independence. She did so while combing through the British National Archives.It was a big deal, particularly on the heels of the earthquake that did such damage and brought so much attention to the Caribbean nation.

Well. Now Gaffield's just showing off. Last month, she did it again, plucking another printed copy of the document from the same archives.

(Duke University photo)

This one's different. It is one page and as large as a poster, unlike the first, which was an eight-page pamphlet. And it likely served a different purpose.

As Duke News writer Camille Jackson notes here, it was common when Haiti declared its independence from France in 1804 to post poster-sized proclamations in public areas. The eight-page pamphlet version of the declaration Gaffield discovered last year, in contrast, was probably produced for a more formal audience such as the British government.

Gaffield's still doing work in Europe right now but answered some questions via email. I asked her if she's now feeling like an expert in the unearthing of these sorts of documents.

"An expert? No," she wrote. "I think the fun part about studying history is that you constantly find new things and new sources surprise you and make you rethink assumptions that you had made."

Gaffield's first discovery brought with it a great deal of media attention for Gaffield, a doctoral student in history.

"It was incredible to see the power of history in contemporary society," she wrote. "This discovery provided an opportunity for diverse people to learn about and connect with a really exciting moment in the history of the Americas. I really enjoyed and benefited from the opportunity to speak to public audiences about my research and it was cool to see how people engaged with this history."

Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning ruled Tuesday that the university withheld documents that should have been provided to the News & Observer in response to an open-records lawsuit filed by a consortium of media groups led by the News & Observer and Charlotte Observer against the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

In a memorandum regarding his decision, Manning wrote, "FERPA does not provide a student with an invisible cloak so that the student can remain hidden from public view while enrolled at UNC."

N.C. State University has picked a speaker from Duke for its spring commencement. Duke Energy that is. James E. Rogers, chairman of the board, president and CEO of the power company will deliver the commencement address.

Rogers has more than 20 years of experience as a CEO in the electric utility industry. He was named president and CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest electric power companies in the United States, following the merger of Duke Energy and Cinergy in April 2006.

He has served more than 50 cumulative years on the boards of Fortune 500 companies, and in leadership roles for a host of organizations and energy councils and was named to Newsweek’s “Global Elite” list of “The 50 Most Powerful People in the World” in 2009. He will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree. 

During the ceremony, Chancellor Randy Woodson will also confer an honorary degree on Robert Weiss, the artistic director and chief executive officer of Carolina Ballet. 

Commencement is set for Saturday, May 14, at the RBC Center in Raleigh. The ceremony starts at 9 a.m.

A UNC-Chapel Hill freshman who claimed he was attacked by a man who burned his wrist and called him an anti-gay slur has been charged with filing a false report.

Quinn Richardson Matney, 19, of Asheville,  was charged by citation Friday and is scheduled to appear in court May 16 in Hillsborough, according to a campus police report.

Matney reported he had been attacked outside Craige Residence Hall about 3:30 a.m. April 4 by a man who pressed a piece of hot metal into his wrist.

He reported the alleged incident to campus police the next day, but it was not publicized to the campus community until Chancellor Holden Thorp announced April 11 that the university was investigating it as a possible hate crime.

UNC-CH determined the report was false the next day, but the alleged incident and university's response concerned the campus gay students groups and others, which held a meeting last Thursday.

Matney later admitted the wound was self-inflicted, his father told the Daily Tar Heel.

After a tornado-prompted day off, Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh will reopen for classes Tuesday.

“Although there was severe damage, we worked very hard to get the campus back to a place where it is safe for our students, faculty and staff,” said Saint Augustine’s College President Dianne Boardley Suber in a news release. “We understand the importance of upholding the integrity of our academic program and carrying out our obligation to complete the semester. Although the work will continue on campus — to include working with Progress Energy to restore power to all of the campus — we felt the need to get our students back in the classroom.”

It was a rough weekend on campus, and the college's counseling center will continue working with students, Suber said.

“The effect of the damage will be felt on campus for years to come. We look forward to establishing an organized method to provide our partners and friends an opportunity to assist in the rebuilding of Saint Augustine’s College’s campus,” Suber said.