Penn in the News

Christopher Yoo of the Law School is quoted about President Obama’s strategies to shift the debate about internet rules.

The nation’s colleges and universities just finished a school year of extraordinary debate on questions about racial inequality, with activists demanding steps to make campuses more inclusive for minority students. Protesters toppled the University of Missouri’s president after a series of racially charged incidents at the state flagship in Columbia and forced Princeton University to reckon with the segregationist legacy of one of its famed leaders, Woodrow Wilson, the nation’s 28th president.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center is quoted about people checking on opposing viewpoint and not relying solely on opinionated news.

The craze over the smash-hit Broadway musical Hamilton has reached epic proportions, and Wesleyan University is getting in on the act. On Wednesday the institution announced a new scholarship — the Wesleyan University Hamilton Prize for Creativity — that will fully fund one new student’s four-year education, starting this fall. The award honors the two Wesleyan graduates, Lin-Manuel Miranda ('02) and Thomas Kail ('99), who created and directed the musical, respectively, which chronicles the life of Alexander Hamilton via hip-hop music and a mostly black and Latino cast.

A recent University of Virginia law school graduate is challenging a federal directive that transformed the way colleges evaluate allegations of sexual assault on campus. In a lawsuit filed Thursday, the plaintiff, who was accused of and found responsible for sexual misconduct, argues that a 2011 letter from the U.S. Department of Education was a mandate improperly imposed on universities.

Goubin Yang of the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Arts & Sciences is interviewed about his latest book, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China.

There were no rapes reported in 2014 at California State University at Long Beach, a public university with about 36,000 students. That could seem like a positive sign. But school officials aren’t boasting about it. They know sexual violence victims are often reluctant to step forward, and they want to hear more often from survivors. “We always operate under the assumption that zero does not really mean zero,” said Cal State Long Beach spokesman Mike Uhlenkamp. “We realize that under-reporting will happen. It is a fact based on the national data.

The mass shooting early Sunday at an Orlando nightclub that left 49 people and the gunman dead has heightened fears of anti-gay discrimination and persecution, especially among the college-aged. While officials were still investigating the shooter’s motives on Tuesday, the effects of the massacre were acute among college students — and not just because several of the victims were enrolled in local institutions. Young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are often particularly vulnerable and seeking a supportive community, said Shane L.

Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School is cited for his book Stocks for the Long Run.

An oft-repeated story about Henry Rosovsky, the longtime second-in-command at Harvard University, tells of how he once greeted a student protest group who came to his office. "You are here for four years," he said. "I am here for life, and the institution is here forever." Now, he asked, what is it that you want to talk to me about? That story is not just funny. It also makes a few sharp points. It highlights the inherent institutional conservatism of academe, for one thing.