The Thursday night football game UNC hosted last month went well enough that the university expects to do it again.

The Oct. 22 game against Florida State was the first Thursday night game ever held on the UNC campus. For years,  officials had opposed the idea due to fears of congestion and other campus disruption.

But this year's game was held over Fall break, and athletics director Dick Baddour and others were pleased with how things went.

For the story, check out our higher education blog.

Duke broke ground today on a big new cancer center, one half of a $700 million construction project designed at least in part to enhance the health care system's global brand.

The cancer center, slated to open in 2012, follows a similar project at UNC Chapel Hill, which just opened its own cancer hospital.

The Duke facility will put cancer research and clinical services under one roof and will come as cancer rates continue to rise. The N.C. health department has predicted a 16 percent hike in cancer cases from 2006 to 2011, with a 21 percent hike in the Triangle over that same time period.

Jarring stuff, and sobering enough to prompt Gov. Beverly Perdue, who attended the Friday ceremony, to say "I don't ask if I'll be diagnosed, but when, because it's so prevalent among us."

For more, read Saturday's News & Observer.

The number of high school seniors applying to Duke University through the Early Decision process rose 32 percent from last year.
 
Those who apply via this process commit to enrolling at Duke if accepted. That decision comes in December.

“Last year, we received 1,535 Early Decision applicants, which had been our second highest total,” Christoph Guttentag, Duke's undergraduate admissions dean, said in a Tuesday news release.  “This year, we’ve recorded 2,040.”
 
Guttentag attributed the increase to a number of factors. For one, a rise in applications last year - 17 percent over the previous year - that got people's attention. Also, Duke and other universities have in recent years placed a greater emphasis on student aid, leading more students to apply.

At Duke University, layoffs are still a possibility as the university works its way through budget problems.

So said Kyle Cavanaugh, the university's head of human resources, in a recent information session for employees interested in a retirement incentive program.

But Duke has made progress so far. In October, Duke offered the first incentive program to 198 salaried employees.  Then, an incentive plan for hourly employees attracted nearly 300 participants.

Duke is trying to shave $125 million from its annual operating budget.

Duke will hold more information sessions for employees this month.

For more info, read this.

Well, this should help the old resume.

David Babson, an N.C. State student, just got published in a scholarly physics journal. Wait, isn't that what his professors are supposed to do?

Here's what happened: Two years ago, Babson was working through a problem in his electromagnetism textbook and just couldn't figure out how to get the answer the book was telling him was correct.

That's because the book was wrong. The problem concerning a basics physics principle was flawed.

Here's Babson's story.

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."

There was a week earlier this year when all James Oblinger wanted to do was celebrate success. For the N.C. State Chancellor, there were three groundbreakings that week marking the start of significant new construction project on campus, each of which would eventually yield something good for NCSU.

Yet those ceremonial events all took place as the heat around Oblinger grew. He now calls it "the swirl," a frenzy of media activity surrounding the actions he and others took in hiring former First Lady Mary Easley for a job that didn't exist before she was placed in it.

It was during that week that Oblinger realized he had to step down.

"I never got a question about how great it was for the university," he said of the groundbreakings that week. "The only questions were about the situation. That meant I was overshadowing a lot of great work. I had never planned on anything other than retiring as chancellor at N.C. State University."

Since resigning June 9, Oblinger has stayed largely out of the public eye. But he's now in the running for a new job - the presidency of New Mexico State University - and he knows he'll be facing some tough questions there. 

He already has, in fact, and the folks doing the interviews seem pleased with what they've heard. He'll be down there in November for campus interviews, and the university expects to make a decision Nov. 19.

"We're aware of the situation that happened at N.C. State," Del Archuleta, who is chairing the New Mexico State search, told me this morning. "But he's extremely experienced, very professional. He appeared a very sincere man and very qualified. It looks to us like an unfortunate set of circumstances. He told us mistakes were made and things were learned from it."

In an interview Wednesday, Oblinger spoke at length about how he's spent the last four months since resigning the chancellorship. He has been on leave, and thus has had time to both reflect on his actions and to re-tool and prepare for his next venture, as an NCSU faculty member.

But when the New Mexico State job came up, it sounded to him like a good fit. 

Here's today's story from that interview.

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."

A strange story out of Boston, where six people at Harvard University Medical School were poisoned, apparently by drinking tainted coffee.

Six researchers and students from the pathology department drank from a single-serve coffee machine and quickly became ill. Some became dizzy and at least one passed out, according to this story in the Boston Herald.

Investigators say the culprit may be sodium azide, a preservative common to research laboratories.

Duke University has set an ambitious goal: Become climate neutral by 2024.

Plenty of universities are going in this direction, making public declarations of their intent to cease harmful carbon emission activity. But most have set a 2050 goal. Duke's is far more aggressive.

Read more here.