Penn in the News

When James (Jerry) Murphy retired as a professor of English and rhetoric at the University of California at Davis, his plan, he says, was "not to work very hard." That may be what some people expect of emeritus faculty members, but Mr. Murphy’s idea of retirement was a bit busier than that. Since he retired, in 1991, he has written, edited, or revised six books, been guest editor of a journal, lectured at colleges large and small, and occasionally served on dissertation committees.

Stephen Burbank of the Law School says, “If this continues, I would hope that some prominent judges would set Mr. Trump straight on what’s appropriate and what’s not in our democracy.”

Barbie Zelizer of the Annenberg School for Communication writes that news media coverage of Donald Trump is akin to 1950s coverage of Joseph McCarthy. 

Earlier this year, Alexandra Marella was in her ballet class at Skidmore College when she had a panic attack. Marella has a history of severe anxiety, she said, and she knew this attack was one of the worst she had ever experienced. Sobbing and short of breath, Marella rushed to the college’s counseling center. “When I asked the receptionist to see someone for help, she asked if I was suicidal,” Marella said. “I answered that I was not, and she said that she was unable to provide me with immediate care because I was not suicidal.

Two college officials look at a vexing problem: the declining percentage of low-income students going straight from high school to college. Vern Granger, a first-generation college student, now the associate vice president of enrollment services at Ohio State University, and Courtney McAnuff, vice president of enrollment management at Rutgers University, write about what they think should be done to change that.

Jonah Berger of the Wharton School is cited for a collaborative study about the habits of people who share content online.

Driven by negative attitudes toward women and misperceptions about rape and consent, more than half of athletes surveyed for a new study say they have pressured women -- through physical and verbal threats -- into having sex with them. And it’s not just big-time basketball and football players who are guilty of sexual coercion, which is defined as “any unwanted oral, vaginal or anal penetration as a result of verbal or physical pressure, including rape.” The athletes included in the study were mostly those who play recreational, not intercollegiate, sports.

New Jersey's third-largest public university broke public bidding laws when it purchased a custom conference table shipped from China that ultimately cost nearly a quarter-million dollars, the state comptroller said in a report Wednesday. Officials at Kean University in Union County authorized a Chinese manufacturer to build and ship the 22-person, state-of-the-art table before obtaining approval from the school's board of trustees, according to the comptroller's 19-month investigation. Comptroller Philip James Degnan did not refer the matter to the Attorney General's Office.

Reagan Wetherill and Teresa Franklin of the Perelman School of Medicine are featured for a study that revealed specific weeks of a woman’s menstrual cycle may be better than others for quitting smoking.

For 15 years, until 2013, the Arizona Board of Regents collected fees from university students in the state on behalf of the Arizona Students' Association, funds that supported the group's work. But that year, the board -- aggravated by the association's active lobbying for a ballot initiative that would have boosted education funding -- first suspended collection of the student fees, and then (in response to criticism that it had acted politically) said it would collect fees only from students who opted to pay them.