Louis Aucoin, a School of Law adjunct associate professor, is the United Nations acting director of judicial affairs in East Timor, which voted last year for independence from Indonesia after a lengthy and often violent struggle. In a March 29 Washington Post story on East Timor's evolving nationhood, Aucoin says, "We have a courthouse, but there's not a lot inside. We are starting the court from scratch. Most of our judges and lawyers have no practical experience with the law whatsoever."

"Professionalization of college sports corrupts institutions by lowering standards," says BU Chancellor John Silber, in an op-ed essay in the March 28 Boston Herald. "In the midst of March Madness, we should consider the fact that among the more than 300 schools in Division I basketball, a third had graduation rates of less than 30 percent." Silber notes further, "At one perennial basketball power, the University of Cincinnati, the graduation rate is barely over 25 percent."

"There's an element in high fashion that's straight from the trailer park," says Shari Thurer, Sargent College adjunct associate professor of rehabilitation counseling. Thurer discusses in a March 23 Boston Globe story the possible fashion statements of Julia Roberts' trampy ensembles in the movie Erin Brockovich. "Nowadays, street culture influences high culture," she says. "In fashion, it could be a ripped sweatshirt or a baseball cap."

"All photography is paper with power. It is the result of adding the perennially mysterious power of an image to a sheet of paper," says John Stomberg, director of the BU Art Gallery, in the March 16 Memphis (Tenn.) Commercial-Appeal. Stomberg is curator of the traveling exhibition Power and Paper: Margaret Bourke-White, Modernity and the Documentary Mode, which displays rarely seen photographs taken by Bourke-White while on commission for International Paper Company in the 1930s. The exhibition originated at BU two years ago.

Voicing his expectations on the eve of the BIO 2000 conference in Boston last week, Ashley Stevens, director of BU's Office of Technology Transfer, says in the March 26 Boston Herald, "Clearly we are approaching a watershed in the sequencing of the human genome that is going to radically change the rate of drug discovery and the ability to target specific diseases."

"In the News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.