If you've ever wondered what college students do when they're bored, click through to this series of videos that Ed Comeau, a former fire investigator and the founder of the newsletter Campus Firewatch, compiled from YouTube.

Mr. Comeau sat down for a Q&A with our colleague Eric Hoover to talk about campus fire safety and why so many young men still think it's cool to play with matches.

We wrote earlier this week about Brooke Magnanti, the scientist at the University of Bristol who acknowledged that she was the mysterious sex blogger Belle de Jour, whose memoirs became the television show Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

Ms. Magnanti said that she began working for an escort service six years ago after running out of money while working on her thesis in forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield. Today New Scientist features a Q&A with her that includes this exchange:

Q. Should British Ph.D. students be paid a proper wage, as they are in other countries?

A. I'm in two minds about this:...

As we go into the weekend before Thanksgiving, you might take a few moments to give thanks that you're not having to deal with the problems currently vexing some of your fellow universities:

1. Jeff Schemmel resigned this week from his post as athletic director at San Diego State University after he admitted misusing state funds for a tryst in Alabama.

2. The University of Nebraska at Lincoln agreed to pay $40,000 to an unnamed woman who says she was fired from her job directing a youth program there after an associate dean learned that she was a witch.

3. The Mississippi White Knights of the

Just 15 months after being chosen as the mascot of the University of Georgia Bulldogs, Uga VII died Thursday morning of heart-related causes.

The death came just a week after Georgia's vet school had given the 4-year-old dog a clean bill of health, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

"We are all in a state of shock," Frank W. (Sonny) Seiler, owner of the line of bulldog mascots for more than half a century, said in a statement. "We had no warning whatsoever."

The dog's predecessor, Uga VI,

The football team at Bethel College entered last Saturday's final game of the season with a 2-7 record, a coach who was resigning after 13 years with the team, and steep odds against beating rival Sterling College (6-3 at the time).

Late in the third quarter, with Bethel

In the flesh-eating film comedy Zombieland, the main character, Columbus, becomes one of the last humans on earth by scrupulously following a set of rules for survival.

Here's one he apparently forgot to mention: Go to community college.

A new cartoon short that is making the rounds of middle-school students via social networking asserts that anyone who amasses student-loan debts (i.e. anyone who attends anything other than a community college) is doomed to wander the earth as a zombie. 

The cartoon was created by two Chicago-area institutions -- Elgin Community College and Harper College -- in collaboration with the e-mail provider Abeedle.com. 

It depicts two high-school seniors,...

The University of Chicago Law School is displaying a collection of letters recovered from a time capsule that was sealed in a cornerstone in 1958, reports the Chicago Tribune.

The capsule was supposed to have been unsealed on May 28, 2008 — the 50th anniversary of the school's opening — and would have been forgotten altogether but for a discovery by an alumni-magazine reporter. The loss would have been a tremendous one; the capsule contained letters from Supreme Court justices and the physicist Edward Teller, among others.

A Chronicle article that we dug up from our archives...

In a longstanding tradition that celebrates Ohio State University's annual football game against rival Michigan, scores of students will plunge into the frigid waters of Mirror Lake tonight.

Many of them will also urinate in the water, a researcher tells The Columbus Dispatch.

Steve Goldsmith, a postdoctoral research associate, says that tests before, during, and after last year's jump revealed not only a 3-degree rise in the temperature of the lake water, but a spike in ammonia as well.

"It went from a background of 5.2 parts per million to a peak of about 42 parts per million," he says. "So it was an eightfold increase."

The SAT has been known to cause headaches and nightmares. Now, it has inspired a rap song.

Behold the joyful sound of “Relax,” a four-minute music video made by administrators, teachers, and students at Williamsburg Charter High School, in Brooklyn. The school serves many low-income, first-generation students, and the tune is meant to alleviate the stress that so often accompanies the nation’s most...

This satirical recruitment advertisement for Harvard University, spotted on the Ivygate blog, got us thinking about the feel-good promotional videos that colleges run during football bowl games and the March Madness basketball tournament.

If your college or university were being candid about itself, what would it say in one of those ads? Shoot your own video that gets at some...