At UNC Chapel Hill, student leaders are bringing back an old tradition: the homecoming parade.

Homecoming is this weekend in Chapel Hill, and Carolina takes on Duke in football at 3:30 p.m. The parade will start at 11 a.m. at the Columbia Street/Cameron Avenue intersection.

As Student Body President Jasmin Jones writes today in the Chapel Hill News, student leaders want the event to be a town/gown initiative.

The last homecoming parade is believed to have been in 1993, according to this Daily Tar Heel report.

Remember back last week when UNC Chapel Hill hosted its first Thursday night football game?

Well, some folks got twisted a bit out of joint over it. (Click here and read the story and the comments...)

And to be sure, the UNC-CH faculty has long played a role in the university's decision not to schedule a disruptive Thursday night game on campus.

But UNC-CH made it happen this year. And if it bothered you, you're not alone. You need look no further than Blacksburg, where your Tar Heels will tonight be squaring off against the Virginia Tech Hokies. There, too, classes are being let out early due to the game, though it's being done on less of a formal basis.

And there, too, some faculty say a Thursday football game, broadcast nationally on ESPN, essentially proves that athletics trumps academics.

The Washington Post has this topic covered in some detail in today's paper, and the story ends with this quote from a Virginia Tech prof, proving that not every academic sees the issue the same way.

A football team "does great things for the university, much more so than somebody discovering something in their PhD dissertation, which five people read. That's true, and we're going to have to live with it."

In a scathing letter published today in UNC Chapel Hill's Daily Tar Heel student newspaper, an emeritus faculty member bludgeons the university for last week's football game, which necessitated an early end to the workday for thousands of employees.

Charles Murphy wrote that the move illustrates that the university is ruled not by academics but by athletics, and writes that the operating rooms at the hospitals were shut down to accommodate game traffic.

He wrote in part: "Even UNC Hospitals operating rooms closed at 3 p.m. last Thursday. God help those who have the audacity to become acutely ill or injured during the Sacred Hours."

Well, that's not precisely accurate.

This according to Karen McCall, a spokeswoman for UNC Health Care:

The hospitals and ambulatory care center have 35 operating rooms.

That's 31 at the main hospital and the women's and children's facilities, and four more at the ambulatory care center.

At the hospitals, two are always held open for emergencies.

Hospital officials did not shut the rest down at 3 p.m. last Thursday, the time at which university employees were ordered home to clear the way for football fans, McCall said.

Rather, the hospitals went to a reduced operating room schedule in much the same way it would on holidays or at other times when there are fewer scheduled surgeries.

Thus, there were 18 operating rooms in use at 3 p.m. that day, then scaled back to 9 at 7:30 p.m., McCall said. The operating rooms at the ambulatory care center were shut down at 3 p.m., as were the clinics there, she said.

The next morning, everything resumed at a normal schedule.

"We reduced the number of operating rooms running in response to the fact that people would have a hard time getting in and out," McCall said. "We never closed. The emergency room is always open."

Writing on his blog, UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp espouses the virtues of fraternity and sorority life at Carolina.

Though he wasn't in a fraternity while a student at Carolina, Thorp writes that he owes much to the Greek system. His father was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, and that's where he met Thorp's mother.

The Greek system has taken some knocks lately, particularly related to the strange death of DKE President Courtland Smith, who was shot dead earlier this year by Archdale police after driving and acting erratically on the interstate. Police thought he had a gun.

Here's what Thorp writes about Smith:

We may never fully understand why Courtland died. We do know that there’s no indication that Courtland had been using anything other than alcohol the night he died. That was consistent with what our Student Affairs folks told us about Courtland – that he was a good kid who was working with them to improve Greek life and make his fraternity a safer place.

House Speaker Joe Hackney will participate in a panel discussion Monday as part of a UNC Chapel Hill class.

Hackney will be joined by UNC-CH trustee Roger Perry. The duo will speak to about 60 students enrolled in the Role of the University in American Life class, which tackles the making of laws, policies and rules that govern a university.

The class meets at 11 a.m. Monday in room 039 of the old Graham Memorial Building, now home to the Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence.

Hackney received his bachelor's degree from UNC-CH in 1967 and his law degree in 1970.

UNC Chapel Hill has won a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish a regional research center to study sexually transmitted infections.

The Southeastern STI Cooperative Research Center will be based at UNC-CH and headed by Fred Sparling, a medical school professor.

The five-year grant will fund work by faculty at UNC-CH, Emory, Virginia Commonwealth and Duke universities as well as the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, of Bethesda, Md.

The center will look for vaccines for the bacteria which cause gonorrhea and chancroid, each of which increase transmission of HIV.

Click here for more information.

Wake Radiology has suspended its relationship with the UNC Chapel Hill medical school study whose computer server was recently hacked, exposing personal data including social security numbers of more than 100,000 patients.

The practice will only participate again if all data is anonymous and unidentified, a spokeswoman said today.

In July, UNC-CH med school officials discovered that a hacker had infiltrated a computer server housing the personal data of about 160,000 patients, including 114,000 social security numbers.

The data was sent the university over time by the dozens of radiology practices who contribute to the Carolina Mammography Registry, a 14-year-old med school study that collects and analyzes mammogram information.

It should have been secure and stripped of identifying information but was not, university officials say.

Joe Ferrell just can't help himself.

He can't let you sit in the audience at some stuffy university event while he drones on and on about some wonderful person's wonderful background.

 "I've sat through too many of these things and been bored to death; Ferrell said recently. "It's like reading the obituaries."

That's why, as the secretary of the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill, Ferrell tries to lighten the mood at commencement, when honorary degrees are bestowed upon notable folks with long resumes, and at University Day, when distinguished alumni awards are given to, um, notable folks with long resumes.

He does so by prefacing the rote biographies of these overachievers with short, pithy, well-thought-out comments that warm up the crowd.

Take his recent University Day introduction of Janie McLawhorn Fouke, a distinguished alumni award winner who has served on an array of advisory boards and professional organizations and is among the world's leaders in biomedical engineering.

"Don't ask Janie Fouke about a glass ceiling for women in engineering," Ferrell intoned in introducing her. "She's standing on the shards."

Some thoughts from UNC Chapel Hill's University Day celebration:

Holden Thorp can do no wrong, apparently.

Erskine Bowles, who as the UNC system's president is Thorp's boss, told a packed house at Memorial Hall Monday that he was, shall we say, quite pleased with himself for naming Thorp to the UNC-CH chancellorship last year.

"Holden Thorp is doing a phenomenal job," Bowles told the crowd. "He is, without a doubt, the single best decision I've made in my life."

Both Thorp and Gov. Beverly Perdue - who gave Monday's featured speech - pointed out to Bowles that perhaps he'd like to temper his enthusiasm just a smidge so as not to enrage his wife, Crandall Close Bowles.

Today is University Day at UNC Chapel Hill, and Chancellor Holden Thorp has put a twist on the traditional State of the University address that campus leaders here customarily give as part of the day's celebration.

This year, Thorp gave a virtual address. You can click on the 9-minute youtube video below or click here to read the transcript.

The chancellor doesn't break any news in this year's address. Mostly, it's a summary of all that went on in the past year. It emphasizes the budget crisis that sapped $67 million from university coffers, and the Bain report, created by a consultant to help the university streamline its administrative and financial operations.

And it also trumpets some highlights from the past year, like the national championship in basketball, the success of Anoop Desai on American Idol, and the fact that the university produced two Rhodes Scholars.

Not bad.

On the budget issue: Thorp mentions that the economic crisis has led more students to request financial aid in order to get to or stay in college. The university has managed to patch aid packages together for all who needed them; the Carolina Covenant program, which offers full aid funding for students who demonstrate great financial need, has swelled and now accounts for 11 percent of the first-year class.

At 11 this morning, Gov. Beverly Perdue will give the keynote University Day address at Memorial Hall.