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Several stumbles by American colleges in setting up programs with foreign partners have called attention to problems inherent in making such arrangements. State University of New York Empire State College has allowed a university in Albania to deliver diplomas in its name. In North Dakota, state auditors issued a scathing review of dual-degree programs at Dickinson State University, reporting that they had admitted hundreds of unqualified students, mainly from China, and awarded them degrees even when they failed to meet graduation requirements. Then there is Houston Community College, which has been in the midst of its own desert storm. Students at the Community College of Qatar, in the tiny Persian Gulf emirate, protested after learning that they would not earn degrees from the Texas college, as they had expected to. Those degrees would allow them to transfer to four-year universities. Houston officials maintain that they were working with Qatar's first community college only in an advisory role, but that students could earn Houston diplomas by submitting their transcripts for review. These incidents have renewed concerns about whether, in embarking on ambitious international ventures, American colleges are putting themselves at risk, legally, financially, and reputationally. In their quest for global prestige and, often, dollars, are they rushing abroad without doing their homework? After all, experts note, even internationally savvy institutions, like George Mason University and Michigan State University, have occasionally misstepped in their efforts overseas.

This article reports on the findings of the state panel on the Virginia Tech massacre. A state panel that investigated last spring's massacre at Virginia Tech has issued a harshly worded report that says the university erred in the way it handled a mentally disabled student who became a killer and in how it dealt with the immediate aftermath of the shootings. The report was one of several developments involving the shootings in the last several weeks, including the release of an internal review by the university. The panel found that the Virginia Tech police made a mistake in "prematurely concluding" that the first two murders on April 16, which occurred in a campus dormitory room, resulted from a domestic dispute and that the killer had probably left the campus. The report said the university waited much too long--about two hours--to issue a campuswide alert about those murders. While it found fault with the response to the attack, and made many recommendations for improvements, the panel did not call for the firing of any officials.

Educators, mental-health officials, and law-enforcement officers often do not share information about troubled students because they are confused by what they can disclose under complex and overlapping privacy laws, according to a report on the Virginia Tech shootings. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and two other Bush cabinet secretaries worked on the report. The "Report to the President on Issues Raised by the Virginia Tech Tragedy" called on the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services to issue guidelines clarifying how colleges, police departments, and social-service agencies can share information legally under current federal laws governing student records. The federal agencies should study whether the laws should be changed to balance students' privacy with safety concerns, the report said. A chief finding of the presidential report is that restrictions on information sharing pose a significant hurdle to identifying potential threats on campus. The report said it is the differing interpretations of federal law that must be clarified. The laws have exemptions for health and safety, but the report found that campus, law-enforcement, and mental-health officials have "differing interpretations and confusion about legal restrictions." Among other recommendations, the report said state and federal agencies should do a better job at ensuring data is entered into the federal database used to approve gun purchases. Just 23 states, including Virginia, currently provide any information about people disqualified from possessing firearms for mental-health reasons. The report says the federal government should encourage states to provide additional information but did not propose any specific changes in federal gun laws.