News Archives

“Beyond the Century of the Child: Cultural History and Developmental Psychology”

In 1900, Ellen Key wrote the international bestseller “The Century of the Child.” In it, she proposed that the world’s children should be the central work of society during the 20th century. Although she never thought that her idea would become a reality, in fact it had much more resonance than she could have imagined.

Jeffcoat a first for SDM

An award-winning dental researcher from the University of Alabama (UA) will become the first female dean of Penn’s School of Dental Medicine this summer. President Judith Rodin has announced that Marjorie K. Jeffcoat has been selected as the next dean of the Dental School, succeeding Raymond M. Fonseca. A graduate of MIT and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Jeffcoat is currently assistant dean of research and professor and chair of periodontics at UA’s School of Dentistry.

Pink-collar ghetto lives on

It’s been almost 40 years since the passage of equal rights and equal pay legislation, but women are still getting paid only three-fourths of what men get paid. This is just one of the many statistics featured in “A Change of Pace: Accelerating Women’s Progress,” a new report published by Penn’s Alice Paul Center for Research on Women and Gender in collaboration with Womens Way and Solutions for Progress, Inc.

Carol Bowers

Reporter driven up a wall

Who hasn’t dreamt of clinging to overhangs a la Peter Parker and his alter ego Spider-Man? Well, now at Penn, mere mortals can have such thrills. I recently got a chance to flex my superhero muscles at the climbing wall of Penn’s spanking-new Pottruck Fitness Center. So, okay, you may not reach skyline heights, but with a 38-foot wall and a climbing rope, you can come pretty close.

Judge Rendell: To lead, get inside their heads

Judge Marjorie Rendell (CW’69) was on campus Feb. 4 to talk about leadership to a standing-room only crowd of College students who packed 3615 Locust Walk. She was the second speaker this semester in the ongoing series “Lessons in Leadership,” designed by the Fox Leadership Program to bring outstanding College alumni back to campus to discuss life, their career and what they’ve learned about leadership.

News briefs

Bite out of crime Crime in University City took a dive in 2002, plummeting 19 percent, according to an announcement by the University City District. The figures obtained from the Philadelphia Police Department reflect a four-year downward trend in the area bounded by 50th Street, Spring Garden Street, the Schuylkill River and Woodland Avenue. Crime categories that experienced the most dramatic drop include homicide, down 50 percent; residential burglary, down 62 percent; and auto theft, down 7 percent.

Staff Q&A: John Shea

When John Shea (Gr’84) came to Penn to pursue a doctorate in English, he fully intended to pursue a career in academe, researching and teaching English literature. He ended up with a career in academe, and one involving English literature to boot. But the literature in question has turned out to be magazine and newspaper articles for Penn publications—first for The Pennsylvania Gazette, then for this newspaper’s predecessor, The Compass, and now for Penn Medicine and other periodicals produced by the Health System’s Office of Public Affairs.

Two decades, one work

BodyVox, the modern dance ensemble formed by Pilobolus and Momix alumni Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton, has been around long enough for the founders to step back and look at how far they’ve come over the years. “Reverie,” which gets its first Philadelphia performance at a Penn Presents/Dance Celebration concert Feb. 25, is a distillation of two decades’ worth of BodyVox compositions. The eclectic, athletic works are set to music ranging from Puccini to Miles Davis to the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus, and include visually stunning costumes. —S.S.

So it is written...

“Who Wrote (Down) the Qur’an?” is the question that five Islamic scholars will attempt to answer at a conference Friday, Feb. 21, from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Penn Humanities Forum, 3619 Locust Walk. Panelists from Canada, France and the United States will consider the physical process of collecting, writing and canonizing the earliest versions of the Qur’an, considered by Muslims to be the revealed word of God. Free, preregistration required: humanities@sas.upenn.edu or 215-898-8220.