Fred Wood says Crookston has an innovative campus with technology-rich learning. He comes to Minnesota after 26 years at the University of California-Davis, where he earned degrees in chemistry before becoming an administrator.

Roger Rusack, a longtime University of Minnesota physics professor, has been a part of the search for the elusive Higgs boson particle for two decades. He helped design, develop and tweak a critical particle detector within the massive, 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. His contribution, the electromagnetic calorimeter, measures the energies of photons.

University of Minnesota physics professor Jim Kakalios was a consultant on the new Spider-Man movie. In a fun video, he talks about how he taught filmakers about the science behind wall-crawling and how he came up with the "Decay Rate Algorithm" featured in the film.

The university wants to increase its undergrad enrollment by about 1,000 students -- for a total of 33,000 students. The new students would mostly be in science, engineering, technology and math.

The school says it will file an appeal with the Minnesota Supreme Court over the Jimmy Williams lawsuit. An attorney for the school says the judgment "has the potential to harm the University now and in the future." The Court of Appeals upheld an earlier decision saying the school must pay Williams $1 million after promising him a coaching job. Williams reportedly accepted the offer, put his house up for sale and quit his job at Oklahoma State. The U of M athletic director later refused to hire him.

The demonstration shut down traffic for about an hour Thursday afternoon. Minneapolis police arrested the activists for 'creating a public nuisance.' The protesters marched to the bridge to celebrate the two-month anniversary of the anti-Wall Street movement.

Like many students, Lucas Kramer is almost done with high school and ready to enter college as a University of Minnesota freshman. Unlike his peers, he cannot drive to campus, ride on some amusement park rides, or got to R-rated movies.

The school plans to cut about 300 students to help stabilize its transfer program. However, officials at the state's two-year colleges criticize the plan.