Penn in the News

Dirk Krueger of the School of Arts & Sciences is cited for a co-authoring a research paper examining wealth inequality.

For more than a year, criticism of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools has been growing over the poor student outcomes at its member colleges and allegations of misconduct against some of those institutions. Now the U.S. Department of Education has recommended that the accrediting agency lose its authority as a gatekeeper of federal financial aid. In a 29-page report released on Wednesday, department analysts laid out 21 areas where they say the accreditor, known as Acics, has failed to follow federal rules.

The architecture and design of Perry World House, set to open in September, are highlighted.

Three in 10 female undergraduates surveyed at Georgetown University said this year they had been sexually penetrated or sexually touched without their consent since they arrived at the school, a finding similar to what more than two dozen other prominent research universities have learned recently from their own students. The women told Georgetown that the attacks occurred through physical force or while they were incapacitated and unable to provide consent.

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.