Last month in the student newspaper, Protess accused the university of waging a "war" against him. And this week, the university told students that Protess won't be teaching his investigative reporting course for the upcoming spring quarter as expected. Students planning to take the course signed a petition asking university officials to reconsider and threatening to drop the class.

At the center of the dispute are memos written by students during their investigation of the McKinney prosecution --documents Protess turned over to McKinney's lawyers at Northwestern Law School's Center on Wrongful Convictions so they could try to win his freedom. Led by Protess to believe that only limited information had been shared, university officials said, they spent almost a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses fighting prosecutors' bid for all the student records.