STEM CELL CAPITAL? Sacramento is vying to serve as the headquarters for California's $3 billion stem cell research effort, the Sacramento Bee recently reported. Sacramento will face tough competition from San Diego and the Bay Area, which already have established life sciences industries. Tom Zeidner, a senior project manager with Sacramento's economic development department, told the Bee the city is prepared to offer free rent for space at One Capitol Mall, an office building in Old Sacramento. The building's owner, AKT Development, which is controlled by developer Angelo Tsakopoulos, is offering the 15,000 square feet of office space at no charge. The building currently houses the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, among other tenants. …

UCLA HAS TRANSFORMED its Chicana/o studies programs into a full-fledged academic department, making it the second campus in the UC system to have such a department. UC Santa Barbara established the first one in 1969. The new UCLA department will be home to faculty with various academic backgrounds, including socio-linguistics, anthropology, urban planning, history, education, Los Angeles history, literature, art, political economy, and gender and sexuality. Chicano studies has been an area of study at UCLA since the 1973-74 school year, but making it a department will boost its profile on campus, the university said. Such departmental status was one of the goals of a student hunger strike in 1993. ...

GRADUATION RATES for students who enrolled at a four-year college or university in the 1996-97 academic year are included in a report released by the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics. Of students who enrolled at four-year colleges and universities in 1996, 54.4 percent graduated within six years. Among those students, women were more likely than men to complete their degrees. ...

ENDOWMENTS AT UNIVERSITIES NATIONWIDE rebounded in 2004, ending a three-year losing streak for many of them. Higher education endowments earned an average return of 15.1 percent in 2004, the highest since 1998. The uptick follows investment losses in 2001 and 2002 and a modest 3-percent return in 2003, according to an annual survey of 741 colleges, sponsored by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. ...

UC MERCED has drawn applications from about 9,000 students interested in the new campus's undergraduate and graduate programs in fall 2005, according to preliminary numbers released Jan. 19. For the opening year, projections have called for UC Merced to enroll 1,000 students. Initial results show strong interest from San Joaquin Valley students and many more applicants than expected from other parts of California. ...

UCTV this month celebrates its fifth anniversary of being on the air. To mark the occasion, UCTV is introducing its latest programming feature "The Teacher's P.E.T." (Professional Education for Teachers), as well as announcing several new cable channel launches, bringing UCTV's total household reach to almost 15 million nationwide. See www.uctv.tv/teachers. …

MATH AND SCIENCE-LOVING STUDENTS have a chance to spend four weeks in residence at a UC campus this summer -- including UC Davis -- learning about astronomy, marine mammal biology, robotics, computer graphics, environmental science and ecology, earthquake engineering, bioinformatics, tissue and tumor biology, physics and technology, and more. The California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, or COSMOS, is aimed at prospective scientists, engineers and mathematicians. Besides Davis, COSMOS programs are offered at UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz and, for the first time, at UC San Diego. Information is available at www.ucop.edu/cosmos. …

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON professor Gretchen Kalonji was recently appointed to the newly created director of international strategy development position in the Office of the President. Kalonji, longtime partner of recently appointed UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice Denton, accepted the $192,000-per-year position created to bring the pair to UC. It is not uncommon for universities to offer recruitment packages for spouses and their partners, said UC spokesperson Michael Reese. "If you want to recruit top talent, you must accommodate the spouse who is leaving behind a position," Reese said. The university also agreed to pay up to $50,000 to Kalonji for transitional costs -- in addition to a $68,750 moving allowance for the new chancellor. The hiring rankled some UC workers. "I'm not opposed to money and energy helping families and spouses to make a transition ... but I think it's immoral for the university to create a position for a partner, even if they are qualified," Margy Wilkinson, chief steward for the Coalition of University Employees, told Berkeley's Daily Californian. ...

THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE issued an editorial on recent remarks by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers that genetic differences may explain why men outnumber women in fields like science. "Summers' musings seem especially misplaced in relation to the University of California," wrote the Chronicle, "where women scientists have risen to highest echelons of the academic community. The chancellor at UC Riverside is France Córdova, a distinguished astrophysicist. Last August, Marye Anne Fox, an organic chemist, became chancellor at UC San Diego." The newspaper noted that Chancellor Denice Denton at UC Santa Cruz holds four degrees in electrical engineering from MIT and that the previous chancellor there was Marcie Greenwood, a biologist who was recently promoted to provost of the entire UC system. And there's Virginia Hinshaw, UC Davis' provost and executive vice chancellor, who holds a doctorate in microbiology.