MARKETING TRENDS: Like Coca-Cola and Nike, the University of Florida seeks to build a brand name that consumers will covet, notes the Miami Herald. University of Florida leaders realize the school is well-known — but worry that its reputation for football overshadows its strengths in scholarship and research. UF President Bernie Machen is under pressure from his board of trustees to change that image and build the school's stature nationwide. To do that, Florida's major research university is turning to the branding and marketing strategies of the corporate world. Machen's goal is to boost the school — now ranked No. 16 among public universities in the annual U.S. News & World Report list — into the top 10. …

BUILDING BRIDGES: Scholars from around the world are gathering at UC Santa Barbara this summer to study the religious diversity of the United States and how people with different belief systems coexist. UCSB's Department of Religious Studies developed the program, the "Study of the U.S. Institute on Religious Pluralism." Participants hail from Argentina, Armenia, Bulgaria, the People's Republic of China, The Congo, Egypt, India, Italy, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Tunisia, Turkey and Uruguay. …

TRADING BOOKS FOR BREWS: The University of Texas at Austin is clearing its undergraduate library of nearly all its books to make way for computers and a coffee shop. The idea is to give students a center where they can work on multimedia and Internet projects. About 1,000 reference books will remain in the building. Fred Heath, vice provost for libraries at UT, Austin, said, "The challenge is to re-engineer our space to be able to move into this suddenly, formidably huge digital universe."…

TITLE IX: The representation of female student athletes is not proportional to the representation of female students at most institutions, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Of the 494,000 athletes who competed in college sports in 2003-04, 41 percent were female. Meanwhile, women represented about 55 percent of full-time undergraduates at American colleges. …

RESEARCH FUNDING: The UC Senate Assembly recently adopted a resolution on research funding sources, concluding an almost two-year long dialogue on the issue of restrictions on research awards. The resolution clarifies that no unit within the university may deny, based solely upon the source of funding, a faculty member's right to accept a research award. Only the Board of Regents has the authority to establish policies on the acceptance of research funding. UC Senate leaders have asked President Dynes to distribute the resolution to campus chancellors and forward it to the regents. …

MORNING-AFTER PILL: The Wisconsin Assembly has voted to ban the "morning after" pill on public college campuses, marking it as the first state in the land to do so. A bill passed in June would ban health centers in the University of Wisconsin System from prescribing, advertising or dispensing drugs taken after sex to prevent pregnancy. Supporters say that state universities should not be in the business of making such pills available because they encourage an immoral lifestyle. Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle has said he will veto the bill if the State Senate passes it. …

STUDENT NAMES: The Pentagon is creating a database with the names of every college student, according to Inside Higher Ed. It would include for each student a name, date of birth, gender, address, Social Security number, e-mail address, ethnicity, telephone number, grade point average, education level, and any relevant information about expressions of interest in enlisting in the military. The purpose of the database is to help in military recruiting efforts. The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a lengthy complaint about the proposal. …

WATER CENTER: UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science will launch a Water Technology Research Center to develop technologies that transform brackish water or seawater into fresh water. Researchers will seek to lower the cost of desalination by integrating it with innovative energy generation. …

NIH FUNDING: UC San Francisco was the fourth largest recipient of National Institutes of Health research dollars in 2004, receiving a total of $438.8 million in research grants, awards and contracts, according to recent rankings released by NIH. …

LEGAL EAGLES: Universities' legal staffs have increased significantly over the past two decades, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. Since the early 1980s, the National Association of College and University Attorneys, to which many college lawyers belong, has witnessed its membership increase by nearly 60 percent, to 3,257 lawyers serving about 640 member institutions. Reasons given for the growth include an increasingly litigious society and the fact that higher education is subject to more federal and state regulations than ever before.

— By Clifton B. Parker