Wake County school administrators hope to get a grant to encourage community participation in an early childhood literacy initiative.

During Thursday's Wake County school board economically disadvantaged student performance task force meeting, administrators said they've applied for a grant from The Campaign For Grade-Level Reading.

The Campaign focuses on closing reading achievement gaps between low-income and middle-income students. A major focus of the group is for students to have reading proficiency by the end of third grade.

As a joke, there's nothing funny about it.

But as a teaching tool, Duke Professor Lorand Matory has long found value in a terribly off-color, anti-Semitic joke he was once told by a German friend.

And so Matory, a cultural anthropologist and chair of Duke's African and African American Studies department, thought nothing of recounting the joke, which he prefaced properly and condemned after the fact, during a recent live interview on the university's website.

The interview was part of Duke's Office Hours feature, an online talk show that features faculty members and invites live viewer e-mail comments and questions. The interviews are then archived for viewing on Duke's website.

This week, two people who watched the video took umbrage with the joke Matory and complained to his dean, George McClendon.

McClendon didn't share the concerns expressed by the two critics, but passed them along to Matory with one warning: In the Internet era, your words, no matter how genuine or innocent, could be used against you.

So five days after the 59-minute conversation was recorded, it was removed at Matory's request.

Before he was at Harvard, Henry Louis Gates had a brief tenure on the faculty at Duke University.

It was, apparently, a bumpy experience for Gates, the noted scholar thrust into the spotlight last week after being arrested at his home in Cambridge.

Gates' arrest has sparked a great deal or racial turmoil in Cambridge; Gates is black, the arresting officer is white, and nobody seems to be able to agree on precisely what happened.

Gates came to Durham two decades ago to join an English department run at the time by Stanley Fish.

Writing in the New York Times, Fish recalls how when Gates arrived in town, he bought a huge house and was immediately and repeatedly mistaken for the hired help. 

It was apparently not a good experience for Gates, who was at Duke for so short a time that he didn't even develop an allegiance to the basketball team.

As Fish notes, Gates actually rooted for UNLV when Duke squared off against them in the national title game.

Gates left for Harvard in 1991.

Man, times are tough financially. Even Harvard is hurting for bucks!

The world's richest university, with an endowment not long ago valued at nearly $37 billion, is dealing with the same financial struggles as you and I, according to the Boston Globe. 

Of course, everything being relative, Harvard won't be going out of business anytime soon, but its whopper of an endowment is rumored to have lost around $11 billion due to the nation's financial swoon.  

That's a lot for any institution to handle, no matter how austere, robust or successful.

As a result, the university is talking budget cuts. Sound familiar, North Carolina?