A long-running struggle over control of the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees that has drawn national interest could reach some resolution next week. At stake is a system that allows alumni to elect almost half the membership of the board of trustees.

For the second time in a little more than two years, Harvard University has named a new person to oversee its mammoth endowment fund.

James H. Simons keeps putting his money where his mind is.

The billionaire former mathematics professor and his wife, Marilyn Hawrys Simons, have given $60 million to Stony Brook University.

The No Child Left Behind act is a bonanza for private tutoring firms, including Sylvan Learning.

Under the act’s provisions, students enrolled in schools judged to be failing are entitled to free tutoring, paid for by taxpayers. The costs total $2.5 billion annually, according to U.S. News and World Report.

Tutoring companies contract with individual states and school districts. Sylvan provides such tutoring at about half of its 1,200 U.S. locations, according to Tabatha Sweeney-Gehrt, Sylvan’s director of new business development. At some centers, she says, business has doubled because of the service.

Despite losing to Microsoft in its bid for a piece of Facebook, Google isn’t giving up on social networks.

The behemoth of search is partnering with other tech companies and social networks to develop a competing approach called OpenSocial. The open-source technology will enable developers to write applications that can be used on many sites, including partners in the project, such as LinkedInand Friendster.

In 1961, A&P supermarket heir Marie Robertson and her husband, Charles, gave $35 million in stock to Princeton University for its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Today, the gift is worth more than $880 million.

But the university and the descendants of the couple have spent millions in legal costs in a years-long fight over how the money should be used.

New York City’s ambitious charter school initiative gets a new director this month in Michael Thomas Duffy, fresh from a successful run in Roxbury, Mass.

The city has about 60 charter schools, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said he wants 100 by the time he leaves office in 2009. So Duffy has a big goal to meet.

Erwin Chemerinsky was out. Now he’s back in.

The high-profile legal scholar and Duke University professor has been “re-hired” to become the founding dean of the Donald Bren School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, officials announced.

Chemerinsky’s original hiring at U.C. Irvine caused a national stir among conservatives and several prominent Californians who complained about his liberal views. Chemerinsky, for one, was instrumental in helping tear down a prominent California ballot initiative, Proposition 209, which would have repealed affirmative action programs in the state.

Until recently, Norman Hsu was a trustee of good standing at New York’s New School.

University president Bob Kerrey defended Hsu against the early criticism. But first it was revealed that Hsu had an outstanding arrest warrant for a 1991 fraud charge and then Hsu skipped a court date in California.

“I thought that I knew him,” Kerrey told the New York Times. “But obviously I didn’t.”