New vice provost | Harry Elam, drama professor, will replace John Bravman ’79 M.S. ’81 Ph.D. ’85 as vice provost for undergraduate education, Stanford announced on Wednesday. Currently a senior associate vice provost in the VPUE office, Elam, 54, was the pick of a search committee formed after Bravman said in April he would leave Stanford to become president of Bucknell University. The committee held a sparsely attended town hall meeting in May to get input on Bravman’s replacement; more popular was a student meeting that same month on the Study on Undergraduate Education at Stanford, which Elam co-chairs and which could make sweeping changes to the undergraduate experience he will oversee when his new job starts July 1.

Oil spill | Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey and a former Stanford professor, profiled in The New York Times: “Though she has stayed behind the scenes for most of the federal response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill,” McNutt “has emerged in the past week as a bold, forthright translator of the web of numbers and scientific estimates surrounding the spill.”

Overheard | “The appearance of cracking down, I think, might best be accomplished by making BP pay a large dollar sum.” — Michael Wara, law professor, on NPR.

Prop. 8 | A federal judge heard closing arguments in San Francisco today in a suit to overturn Prop. 8.

Birth control | Stanford sociologists are trying to figure out why women use birth control inconsistently. To do so, they’ve turned to interviews with Bay Area community college students.

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