Quick Takes

Overwhelming majorities of Americans believe that science has had a positive impact on society and that science has made life easier for most people, but Americans don't think as highly of American science as do scientists. Those are the among the results from a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Only 17 percent of Americans believe that their country's scientific achievements rate as the best in the world, compared with nearly half (49 percent) of scientists who hold that view.

A fund raiser at the State University of New York at Binghamton says that senior athletic officials there used her as a sexual "plaything," trying to appeal to donors, the Associated Press reported. The suit says that she was told to dress provocatively, and to use her sexuality as a "business tactic." At dinners with some donors, the suit charges, donors would suggest that they wanted to sleep with her -- and the university ignored her complaints about the problems. A spokeswoman for the university said it "has zero tolerance" for harassment or discrimination and was "dismayed" by the allegations. "We are reviewing the legal complaint now, and we will respond appropriately in court," she said.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has concluded that Suffolk University didn't break the law, but also didn't follow its own rules when it authorized contracts with a trustee's lobbying firm, The Boston Globe reported. The newspaper reported last year on questions raised by the university awarding a contract to the trustee's firm at the same time the board was approving generous contract provisions for the president. While Coakley said that she found no legal violations, she stressed that she looked only at that issue, not whether the arrangements were in the best interests of Suffolk.

The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Wisconsin at Madison have expanded their deals with Google Books over digitization of their library collections. The agreements concern Google's project to digitize library collections -- a program controversial in some quarters and praised elsewhere. Under the revised agreements, people nationally will be able to preview collections at the two universities and to buy online access to the books. The deals are similar to the first of the sort Google signed, with the University of Michigan.

This week’s hearing about the Bowl Championship Series on Capitol Hill may have been much ado about nothing. After its officials argued before Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Republican from Utah, that the method by which the college football national champion is determined violates federal antitrust law, the Mountain West Conference has agreed to sign a contract extension to keep the system in place for another five years. Conference officials argued that the BCS unfairly limits the access of teams from lower-profile conferences to the national title game and pushed replacing the current system with an eight-team playoff. ESPN reports that the Mountain West Conference was the last of the 11 conferences in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association to sign a deal that gives ESPN the right to televise BCS games until 2014. Michael K. Young, president of the University of Utah and chair of the Mountain West Conference Board of Directors, conceded in a statement that the conference had “no choice at this time but to sign the agreement” because its “good faith initiatives to generate reform have thus far not been accepted.” He maintained, however, that the conference would continue to push for BCS reform and the creation of what he called “an equitable system.”

First James Franco was criticized by some students at the University of California at Los Angeles for not having enough gravitas to be named as commencement speaker. Then the actor was criticized by many others for withdrawing as speaker at the last minute. Now The Harvard Lampoon is presenting the speech (or prep for the speech) that he might have given at UCLA (at least in the minds of Franco and the humor magazine).