It wouldn’t be D.C. without a scandal in Congress, a White House official going to jail, and a headline with the words “Marion Barry” and “cocaine.”

USC’s financial aid director is stepping down after allegations that she violated the school’s conflict of interest policies when she bought stock in Student Loan Xpress. The news of Catherine Thomas’ departure after 17 years on the job comes less than two weeks after Columbia fired its finaid director David Charlow for his ties to the same company.

It seems like things keep getting worse for eager lenders and corrupt university officials involved in the student loan kickback scandals popping up around the country. Sensing this trend, Alabama Contract Sales (a lending company founded by a state representative) ‘fessed up yesterday to federal prosecutors that it had given $83,000 to Roy Johnson, the former chancellor of Alabama’s two-year college system. It only gets juicier with a report in the Birmingham News today that $7,500 of the kickbacks went to an unsuccessful campaign for the Hunstville, Ala. mayoralty. Two birds with one stone! This news will hopefully add some fuel to the trend of lenders coming forward for playing a little I’ll-scratch-yours-if-you-scratch-mine. 

The latest news in the struggle for “academic freedom” comes from the University of California-San Diego where two teaching assistants were let go after raising a fuss about changes to the curriculum for a year-long sequence required for freshmen at UCSD’s Thurgood Marshall College. In a nutshell, administrators changed the way “Dimensions of Culture” was taught in response to complaints of a left-leaning bias. The T.A.s claimed the changes watered down the program at the expense of teaching students how to examine material critically. Get the whole scoop from Inside Higher Ed here.

Growing up in Philly, I was always appalled by how many wealthy residents of the region’s affluent areas could simply ignore the devastating problems of the city’s poorer neighborhoods. I am even more disturbed by the attitudes of many of my peers at college – the supposed leaders of tomorrow – who turn a blind eye to the challenges New Haven faces and disparage the city’s residents as “townies” to be avoided at bars, not fellow citizens with whom they share a community. But nowhere have I been so disgusted by the disregard for what goes on in people’s backyard than here in Washington, D.C. where I moved in last week.

The dispute between evangelical leaders on global warming reached new heights this week when the Evangelical Climate Initiative called for Congress to take action “to solve global warming.”

With the eleventh straight day of record-high gas prices yesterday and no relief in sight before millions of cars flood the roads for Memorial Day Weekend traveling, the House voted to approve stiff penalties for those found guilty of gasoline price gouging. The bill’s supporters claim it’s a measure for “consumers being ripped off at the pump” by oil companies, but I’m hesitant to go along with the either-you’re-with-working-class-Americans-or-you’re-with Big-Oil rhetoric.

With student lenders facing massive proposed cuts in subsidies from Congress, Sallie Mae is playing a particularly nasty game of racial politics to maintain its privileged standing.

The birthplace of hip hop is being threatened by creeping gentrification. The owners of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the Bronx apartment building where DJ Kool Herc first spun the 1s and 2s in 1973, plan to opt out of the Mitchell-Lama program which gives landlords tax breaks and subsidized mortgages in exchange for renting to low- and moderate-income tenants. In doing so, the owners will be able to charge higher rents and possibly reap more profit on the open market, but this might change the character of the building where a culture that has spread around the world was born.