STUDENT SPIRITUALITY: Forty-eight percent of freshmen say it's "very important" or "essential" for their college to encourage their personal expression of spirituality, reports the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA. This month HERI released "The Spiritual Life of College Students," a study of more than 100,000 American students, weighted to represent all first-time, full-time freshmen at four-year schools. See http://spirituality.ucla.edu/news/2005-04-13.html for more information. ...

PUBLISHERS WARY: Publishers are objecting to a UC electronic reserve system that allows libraries to scan portions of books and journals and make them available free online to students. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that lawyers for the Association of American Publishers have sent letters to the university that object to the use of electronic reserves at UC San Diego. The publishers say that the use of electronic reserves violates the fair-use doctrine of copyright law and hurts their sales. UC officials counter that the electronic reserves at San Diego are well within the bounds of fair use. ...

'DIGITAL KIDS': A UC Berkeley professor is spearheading a research team recently awarded $3.3 million to study "digital kids." Peter Lyman, a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems is one of three principal investigators for the project funded by the MacArthur Foundation. "It will be exciting to investigate kids' innovative knowledge cultures and how they learn using digital media," Lyman said, "in order to think about the consequences for public education." The three-year study will document how youth ages 10-20 are using new digital media to create and exchange knowledge and assess how these phenomena affect learning. ...

LOG OFF AND READ: Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association and dean of library services at CSU Fresno, wants to make sure students and professors do not become so enthralled with Google, which plans to scan millions of books and add them to its popular search engine, that they stop reading books the old-fashioned way. "We all know that, in Googleworld, speed is of the essence, but it is not to most scholarly research in the real world," Gorman wrote in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times. "Massive databases of digitized whole books, especially scholarly books, are expensive exercises in futility based on the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of communication (electronic) will supplant and obliterate all previous forms." ...

FACULTY SALARIES: Average faculty salaries increased by 2.8 percent in 2004-05 — weighted across all types of institutions and all faculty ranks — according to survey data released last week by the American Association of University Professors. That's better than last year's increases of 2.1 percent, a 30-year low. But inflation was low last year, and rose to 3.3 percent this year. That means average increases lagged behind inflation for the first time in eight years. The survey — released every spring — is available at http://www.aaup.org. ...

ENERGY SUIT SETTLED: UC, acting on behalf of scores of investors, announced a $468 million settlement last week with Texas energy merchant Dynegy Inc., according to The Sacramento Bee. The settlement represents the latest agreement between UC and various corporations, executives, accountants and investment bankers that the university has sued since the era of corporate scandals began in late 2001. UC lost $112 million investing in Dynegy, whose stock went south after the revelation in spring 2002 of a questionable scheme to inflate the company's cash flow via a natural gas deal called Project Alpha. ...

SAVING NEWSPAPERS: UC Riverside is one of four universities sharing $1.9 million in grants to digitize newspapers from the beginning of the 20th century so the publications can be preserved and searched online. The two-year grants were announced last week by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the National Digital Newspaper Project, a new program that will eventually preserve old newspapers from all over the country in digital form. With the money, each institution will digitize 100,000 or more pages from the most historically significant newspapers published in its state between 1900 and 1910. The digital copies will then be available free on the Library of Congress's Web site. ...

NANO PROJECT: The Fresno Bee notes that UC Merced will partner with UC Berkeley, Caltech and Stanford University in establishing the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems. Made possible by a $12 million National Science Foundation grant and led by UC Merced engineering professor Valerie Leppert, the project will involve constructing the next wave of machines made of microscopic tubes, disks, wires and other components. ...

SAT CHANGES: When the college entrance exam expanded from two sections to three this year, the mark required for perfection rose from 1600 to 2400. Some 300,000 students took the first sitting of the new test March 12 and have begun receiving scores on each of the three sections — writing, critical reading and math. The College Board, which administers the SAT, reported that 107 scored a perfect 800 on each section.