Penn in the News

The 2015-16 academic year has seen numerous shootings, some deadly, of students, and a national debate over guns on campus. On Wednesday, with the academic year winding down, an engineering professor was shot and killed in the engineering building at the University of California at Los Angeles. Reports of a morning shooting at UCLA left many on campus terrified, and students running for cover. In the end, a professor was dead in what is being described by local news sources as a murder-suicide.

Urs Giger of the School of Veterinary Medicine comments on dog origin and domestication.

In recent weeks, the first outlines of a culture shift in college football have begun to appear. Most obviously, Baylor University fired Head Coach Art Briles last week after an independent investigation found the university had mishandled accusations of sexual assault against his players. For a university to fire a coach like Mr. Briles, who had almost single-handedly made Baylor a college football superpower – was “ a milestone,” wrote ESPN columnist Ivan Maisel. “Someone in the gridiron-industrial complex stood up and said some standards are more important than winning.”

Dorothy Roberts of the Law School and the School of Arts & Sciences comments on a study about the genetic makeup of African-Americans in comparison to other groups and says, “We can’t think…that knowing more about each group’s genetic makeup is going to necessarily lead to reducing the differences in health between these groups.”

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education comments on the performance funding models and historically black colleges and universities.

Graduate student unions on a number of private campuses have for years sought recognition from their universities and federal officials, to little avail. But organizing efforts at Cornell University are moving forward, in the form of an agreement on how to proceed until and if a legal barrier to collective bargaining is reversed.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center talks about politics and the current presidential campaign.

Northeastern University alumni facing the daunting challenge of paying off student loans were offered a chance at debt relief from the school on Wednesday—for the small price of some more money. “Summer’s on us! Make a gift of any size to Northeastern by June 30, and you will be eligible to win $1,000 worth of student loan repayments,” the school wrote in an email to alumni. Asking alumni who have their own debt to pay to enter a debt lottery struck some as unseemly.

Jean-Christophe Cloutier of the School of Arts & Sciences is mentioned for finding manuscripts related to Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison’s “Harlem Is Nowhere” project.

Lawyers representing a University of Virginia student at the center of a debunked gang-rape allegation have acknowledged in court papers that the student has ties to a fake persona she once named as the ringleader of the alleged attack. Filed in federal court Tuesday, the papers are part of an ongoing lawsuit a U-Va. associate dean filed against Rolling Stone magazine, arguing that the magazine published a defamatory account of how the Charlottesville school handles sexual assaults.