Free workshops and advice about financial aid for college will be offered at 29 high schools across the Los Angeles region this Saturday.

The Cash for College program will provide experts to help students and their families complete the federal and state applications for college financial aid between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. that day. Attendees are urged to bring along their family’s financial and tax documents, including 2009 tax returns and the most current W-2 forms.

The nearest locations for what are called Super Saturday workshops and for subsequent ones through March 2 can be found by zip code on this website.

Undocumented students will have a chance to explore alternative sources of grants even though government aid is barred to them. And all students who participate and complete the required forms and aid applications will be eligible to win in a random drawing for more than 100 scholarships, worth $1,000 each, officials said.

Cash for College is a program aiming to boost college attendance. Among its sponsors are the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the city of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Los Angeles Community College District and the United Way.

-- Larry Gordon

Officials at the University of California Irvine acknowledged Wednesday that serving chicken and waffles at a campus cafeteria in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day was not in "good taste," but said the chef is not being disciplined.

The incident first reported in the OC Weekly occurred Jan. 17 when a chef at Pippin Commons and several other staff members determined the menu without any oversight from the university, said UCI spokeswoman Cathy Lawhon.

The menu and a sign reading "MLK Holiday Special: Chicken and Waffles" were thrown together at the last minute and not in the "best taste," she said.

The meal passed uneventfully except for one member of the Black Student Union, who lodged a formal complaint, she said.

Thomas Parham, vice chancellor of student affairs, tried to schedule a meeting with the chef and student, but the student declined, Lawhon said. Parham was unavailable for comment.

Lawhon described the possible meeting as an opportunity for a “teachable moment.”

“The sign was probably more of a touch point than the food itself,” Lawhon said.

California State University on Tuesday moved to increase tuition this fall for hundreds of students seeking doctoral degrees in education.

A finance committee of the Cal State Board of Trustees approved a tuition increase of 10%, or $954, which would raise total annual fees to $10,500 for the university’s Doctor of Education degree.

The full board is expected to approve the increase Wednesday at its regular meeting in Long Beach.

About 700 students are enrolled in the doctoral programs at 11 campuses, including East Bay, Fresno, Fullerton, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Northridge, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco and Stanislaus.

In November, the board approved a 5% fee hike for the current winter/spring term and another 10% increase for the 2011-2012 academic year, raising annual undergraduate tuition to $4,884.

-- Carla Rivera

A former part-time anti-terrorism instructor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and other schools was arrested Tuesday in Maryland on mail fraud charges for allegedly lying about his academic credentials and military experience.

William G. Hillar, who claimed to have been a retired colonel in the U.S. Army's Special Forces with a Ph.D. and many overseas adventures, "was living a lie and basing his entire career on experience he did not have and credentials that he did not earn," Baltimore-based U.S. Atty. Rod J. Rosenstein said in a statement.  In fact, Hillar, who served in the Coast Guard reserves, was never trained in counter-terrorism and does not have a doctorate from the University of Oregon as he claimed, Rosenstein said.

The investigation into Hillar’s background and activities began last fall after students at the Monterey Institute and special forces veterans began to raise questions about Hillar’s part-time workshops on human trafficking and terrorism and what seemed to be his tendency to borrow material from real experts. Hillar also had taught at other schools and served as a professional speaker to law enforcement and human rights groups, often claiming that the 2008 action movie "Taken," starring Liam Neeson, was based on his life and his daughter's alleged kidnapping and murder.

A Chinese businessman who recently struck a deal with a Riverside recreational vehicle company to build and export RVs to China has also agreed to donate $10 million to UC Riverside, the largest single-donor gift ever to the campus.

The donation by entrepreneur Winston Chung, which is expected to be finalized Monday with a memorandum of understanding, would be used to support research into clean battery power, solar energy and sustainable transportation at UCR's Bourns College of Engineering, school officials said. 

“His investment in this university will result in generations of students and faculty sharing their knowledge with local and global communities, and in new materials and new energy sources for an energy-hungry world,” UC Riverside Chancellor Timothy P. White said in a statement.

Read more about Chung's gift to UC Riverside on The Times' Money & Company blog.

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-- Rebecca Trounson

University of California regents on Thursday urged all nine undergraduate UC campuses to adopt an admissions review system that looks at an applicant’s grades, test scores and life experience as a whole rather than ranking various application parts separately. UC Berkeley and UCLA already use the method, called holistic review, in making admissions decisions and the regents want it extended across the university system. Although some critics say it is too subjective, UC administrators say the method is more thorough and fair than the university's more traditional way of choosing applicants.

As they wrapped up their meeting in San Diego, the regents also awarded controversial, 10% pay raises to three financial managers in the UC president’s office whose salaries after the increases will range from $216,370 to $247,500. Officials defended the one-time raises as a way to save money in the long run; chief risk officer Grace Crickette; Dan Sampson, assistant vice president for financial services and controls; and Sandra Kim, executive director of capital markets finance, had contracts that called for annual bonuses even while UC was eliminating such bonus plans. Their contracts were renegoiated for the one-time raise with no bonuses or future raises planned, according to Peter J. Taylor, UC’s executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Unions criticized the decisions, calling such raises for executives unseemly at a time when low-wage UC employees face increased costs for pension and retirement health plans and a state budget crisis threatens large scale layoffs across the university.

-- Larry Gordon

Mills College, the Oakland campus with a women-only undergraduate program, has hired an attorney and business executive to be its next president, officials announced Thursday. Alecia A. DeCoudreaux, who is vice president and deputy general counsel at Eli Lilly and Co. and has been active in women’s education issues nationally, will become Mills’ leader July 1.

DeCoudreaux succeeds Janet L. Holmgren, who has been president of Mills since 1991, one year after a student revolt helped reverse a decision that would have made the college a fully coeducational school. Mills now enrolls about 950 women undergraduates and about 600 men and women in its graduate programs. In an interview Thursday, DeCoudreaux said she would not have taken the new position if there was any chance its trustees might again try to make Mills' undergraduate program coeducational. 

DeCoudreaux, 56, is a graduate of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, one of 50 women’s colleges in the country, and she chairs Wellesley’s Board of Trustees. She will step down as chairwoman before starting her new job at Mills but plans to continue serving on the Wellesley board. She earned a law degree at Indiana University.

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-- Larry Gordon

Photo: Alecia A. DeCoudreaux. Credit: Business Wire

UC Santa Cruz was open for classes Tuesday, but students and faculty were on alert after the discovery last month of graffiti that warned of violence to be carried out on Jan. 18.

University officials increased security, bringing in extra law enforcement from local communities and other UC campuses to help patrol and ease jitters at a campus shaken by the discovery in December of the threatening scrawls.

They were found in the restroom of a social sciences building and warned of unspecified violence on Jan. 18. Graffiti is not unusual on a college campus, but the fact that these mentioned a specific date prompted officials to inform students, faculty and staff.

University police provided training sessions on how to prepare and respond to violence and asked everyone to report suspicious activities.

“It may be something as benign as someone having a particularly stressful day, but we decided it made sense to err on the side of caution and to ask people for vigilance and to let us know if they observe anything that is of concern,” said campus spokesman Jim Burns.

As of midday, no incidents had been reported, Burns said.

Most students and others on campus were conducting business as usual, but some professors canceled or relocated their classes as a precaution, the spokesman said.

The heightened security on the Santa Cruz campus comes in the wake of the deadly shooting rampage in Tucson, where the accused is a 22-year-old former community college student.

“Those events do serve as a reminder that safety is everyone’s business,” Burns said.

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-- Carla Rivera

A campus e-mail sent this week by the chancellor of UC Berkeley has drawn criticism for linking a  Tucson shooting rampage with Arizona's tough immigration law and the failure of the DREAM Act.

In the Monday e-mail, Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau condemned a “climate in which demonization of others goes unchallenged and hateful speech is tolerated.”

He continued, postulating on factors that motivated alleged gunman Jared Lee Loughner: “I believe that it is not a coincidence that this calamity has occurred in a state which has legislated discrimination against undocumented persons.”

Birgeneau was referring to the new Arizona law that empowers local police to demand proof of citizenship or legal residency when they suspect a person is in the country illegally. His comments immediately drew rhetorical fire.

“The supposition that political expression created a climate that led Loughner to his choice is an idea that seems to have sprung from whole cloth out of the minds of people who likely were upset beforehand about ‘rhetoric’ and ‘hateful’ speech, including, apparently, Chancellor Birgeneau,” commentator Adam Kissel wrote on the website of the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

And Diane Schrader, on the NewsReal Blog of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, accused Birgeneau of delivering “a nasty political rant even while condemning -- you guessed it -- nasty political rants!”

Birgeneau also commented on the political climate he said had contributed to the recent failure in Congress of the DREAM Act, which would have established a path to citizenship for children of some illegal immigrants. “This same mean-spirited xenophobia played a major role in the defeat of the DREAM Act by legislators in Washington, leaving many exceptionally talented and deserving young people, including our own undocumented students, painfully in limbo with regard to their futures in this country.”

The chancellor, a physicist, has championed the DREAM Act. He could not be reached Thursday for reaction to the criticisms.

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-- Howard Blume

Contrary to reports circulating on the Internet, incoming L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy did not lie about teaching courses at Loyola Marymount University, a top college official told the Los Angeles Times.

Deasy was a part-time faculty member in the doctorate program when he also served full time as the superintendent of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, said Shane Martin, dean of the School of Education at Loyola. 

“John was a very successful professor,” Martin said.

The allegation apparently originated with a call to confirm Deasy’s employment, and the caller was told incorrectly there was no record of him having worked there. From there, the allegation went viral.

Martin did not dispute what the caller was told. The school has been changing its recordkeeping system, and complete employment records were not available to everyone who might have performed such a check, he said.

Loyola has one of the region’s leading education and teacher training programs.