American Notes EDUCATION

Richard Berendzen won't be getting his $1 million severance package from American University after all. But everything considered, he can hardly gripe. Berendzen resigned as president of the Washington institution last April after making repeated obscene telephone calls from his office to a woman in Virginia. Last week, following a campus-wide uproar over their largesse, the trustees struck a more modest deal: Berendzen will be retained as a tenured senior physics professor at a salary "appropriate to his faculty rank," somewhere around $70,000 a year, and will begin teaching in the spring of 1992.

The original $1 million offer had prompted three weeks of campus protests. Many students and faculty members denounced the deal as a cop-out for the university and a windfall for Berendzen. Last week's compromise got a better reception. Said Diane Jackson of the Undergraduate Student Confederation: "This is a compassionate solution that will allow Dr. Berendzen and the A.U. community the time they need to heal." Still, many faculty members are hoping that by the spring of 1992, Berendzen will choose to go elsewhere.