Officials at California State University engineered the death on Thursday of a proposed state law that would have increased scrutiny of the university's information-technology purchases.

At the university system's request, the information-technology bill was rewritten to tie its fate to another, separate law on faculty ethics -- and on Thursday, that bill's author shelved the ethics bill, again at the university system's request.

That decision effectively killed for this year the information-technology bill, which had been widely expected to be enacted and signed by Gov. Gray Davis.

Cal State sought the marriage of the bills and then asked that the ethics bill be put on hold because the university opposes the information-technology measure, said Colleen Bentley-Adler, the university system's director of public affairs. A spokesman for the sponsor of the ethics bill, State Sen. John Burton, also said that Mr. Burton had halted action on the bill at Cal State's request.

The information-technology bill, AB 491, initially applied only to Cal State, but last Thursday the Senate Appropriations Committee amended the bill to include oversight of purchases by the University of California system as a concession to Cal State.

The bill was approved 25 to 9 by the California Senate on Wednesday. It would have required an auditor appointed by the state director of finance to oversee new information-technology acquisitions by the university systems that exceeded $3-million each, including parts of a controversial Cal State project known as the Common Management System.

An information-technology purchase by Cal State or the University of California system that exceeded $20-million would have been reviewed by the governor and examined as part of the annual budget process.

The bill was strongly supported by the California Faculty Association, and was the result of state legislators' growing concerns about the Common Management System, a nine-year, systemwide computer overhaul. The California Bureau of State Audits accused Cal State of understating costs and failing to establish a business plan for the project.

Assemblyman Manny Diaz and Sen. Richard Alarcon asked Charles B. Reed, chancellor of Cal State, to halt spending on the project, and $16-million was put on hold this year, Ms. Bentley-Adler said. Still, she said, the project is expected to be completed on schedule, by June 2007.

That ethics bill, SB 971, which the Senate approved 34 to 1 on Tuesday, would have required faculty members who also work outside the university system to disclose this to their academic deans every year. Currently, they need only disclose such work if their supervisors ask for the information, a procedure detailed in a contract between the Cal State administration and the California Faculty Association. The bill was sought by Cal State administrators, said David G. Hawkins, legislative director of the Faculty Association.

Both the information-technology bill and the ethics bill stipulated that neither would go in effect unless the other bill did as well.

The California State Assembly had been expected to approve the information-technology measure this week, and the governor was scheduled to sign it into law by October 12.

The University of California system strongly criticized the information-technology bill on Monday in a letter to members of the California Legislature. Stephen A. Arditti, assistant vice president and director of state governmental relations for the university system, wrote the bill would cause delays in information-technology improvements and would "impose significant additional costs" to the university system.

Since the Legislature is in the first year of a two-year cycle, both bills could be reconsidered in January.