Penn in the News

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center talks about the “I approve this message,” disclaimer in political campaign ads.

By now just about everyone has gotten the message that the adjunctification of higher education is unsustainable. Yet there's no apparent sense of urgency by administrators to address the problem, as academe continues to "react" -- rather than thoughtfully "respond" -- to the changing makeup of the faculty and the factors driving it, argues a new book from Adrianna Kezar, founder of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success at the University of Southern California.

You get used to the vehemence. In academe, anything that’s published about our own special place gets somebody going. Even so, the vituperation among the professoriate generated by the journalist Nathan Heller’s May 2016 New Yorker article, "The Big Uneasy," took me aback. A case study of student discontent at Oberlin College, the essay is by no means the first to raise academic hackles about students. Before Heller, the Northwestern University professor and feminist Laura Kipnis stirred an outcry in these pages with her charges of "sexual paranoia" among women students on campus.

Everything today is being unbundled: television, hotels, even the European Union. Some education reformers would like the university to be next. Ryan Craig, author of College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education, argues that disaggregation of the university’s services is a positive and inevitable process that will make the university more efficient and accessible. Craig is not alone in seeking to parcel out a number of the university’s duties.

Richard Gelles of the School Social Policy & Practice comments on child welfare and his upcoming book, Out of Harm’s Way: Creating an Effective Child Welfare System.

Kevin Volpp of the Wharton School and the Perelman School of Medicine is mentioned for co-authoring a paper titled “Habit formation in children: Evidence from incentives for healthy eating.”

Charles Branas of the Perelman School of Medicine is cited for leading a research team to calculate the value in savings from adding slight improvements to vacant houses and clearing abandoned lots.

On the second day of class this year, the University of Florida fired its deputy Title IX coordinator amid complaints that he had too much power over resolving sex-assault cases. Then, this month, Baylor University’s Title IX coordinator resigned, charging the institution with refusing to give her enough authority. The claims — that one Title IX officer had too much power, while another didn’t have what she needed — highlight the pitfalls and pressures for those in a high-profile job at the center of one of higher-education’s most vexing issues: campus sexual assault.

On Thursday Donald J. Trump broke his near-silence on the higher-education policies he’d pursue if elected president, laying out a variety of ideas at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. If the speech itself was a surprise, more surprising still was the issue Mr. Trump discussed in the greatest detail: income-based repayment plans for student-loan borrowers. Those plans have broad bipartisan support and have been embraced by the Republican nominee's Democratic foils.

Gabriel Picazo applied to only one University of California campus — and not the one his family and friends expected. The 20-year-old from Long Beach chose UC Merced — the youngest, smallest and least renowned of the UC system’s nine undergraduate campuses. It is far from bustling urban centers, located in a flat expanse of grazing land that it shares with cows. But Merced had what the aspiring engineer wanted: a focus on sustainability, with cutting-edge research and ambitious conservation goals.