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> Last spring the Saudi Arabian government signed a $72,400 contract with a consortium of five Midwestern universities calling for U.S. professors to act as consultants to the new University of Riyadh. The consortium --made up of Indiana University, Michigan State University and the Universities of Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin--then submitted a list of 30 faculty members as candidates for the trip to Riyadh. The Saudis selected ten; among those eliminated were the only Jews nominated, two professors at Wisconsin.

That exclusion could have been coincidental. But in May, while the U.S. team was in Riyadh, Ralph Smuckler, dean of international studies at Michigan State and a member of the consortium's board, wrote to officials at Riyadh University, asking permission to visit. Smuckler, who is Jewish, did not get answers to his letters to the Saudis, and there was no response to his visa application through the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington. At that point Michigan State withdrew from the Riyadh project.

Last week the consortium met in Chicago and voted unanimously to abandon the entire Riyadh project unless "an understanding can be reached" with the Saudis, preventing any ethnic, religious, racial or sex discrimination. Says David Johnson, dean of international studies at Wisconsin: "We are not really dependent on an infusion of Arabian funds. Even if we were, this organization is not going to prostitute itself for oil money."

>It took a while, but school officials in Richmond, Va., finally got fed up with teacher absenteeism last week. In studying records for the 1973-74 school year, they found that an average of 40 of the city's 2,000 teachers called in sick each day in the middle of the week; 47 on Fridays and Mondays, and 55 on Mondays after paydays. "There are abuses of the sick-leave policy," charged school board member William Edwards. His proposed solution: Starting next fall two school nurses would make house calls on teachers who are "habitually absent" to see if they are sick or merely playing hooky.

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