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Graduate students will receive larger stipends starting next year. Instead of a $20,000 nine-month stipend, plus a $3,700 stipend in each of three summers, all humanities and social sciences students will receive 12-month stipends of $25,000. The new system will allow students to focus on their research in the summer instead of getting jobs. Students in the sciences, who already receive 12-month stipends, will see an increase of about 3.5 percent.

The Yale Women's Center threatened a lawsuit in January after members of the Zeta Psi fraternity pledge class posted online a photo of themselves standing in front of the center with a sign that read "We love Yale sluts." The fraternity apologized for the incident, but students from the center say they are still considering a sexual harassment suit and are urging stricter undergraduate regulations regarding "fraternity-sponsored or -enabled sexual harassment, assault, and rape."

Applications to the Yale College Class of 2012 totaled 22,553, a new record, the admissions office said in January. Other Ivy schools also reported record numbers of applications. Yale's were up 16.7 percent after an 8.4 percent decline last year.

Dongguk University says it will sue over Yale's erroneous authentication of a false credential offered by one of the Korean university's former professors. In 2005, Shin Jeong-ah presented a letter on Yale letterhead to Dongguk claiming she had a PhD in art history from Yale. When the letter was faxed to Yale for verification, Yale officials responded that it was genuine. But last summer, a major scandal arose in Korea when it was revealed that Shin had forged the letter. Yale at first said that the fax verifying the degree had been forged, but later acknowledged it had made a mistake. Yale president Richard Levin apologized, and the university says it has tightened its procedure for verifying academic credentials. 

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