Penn in the News

How does a university with a reputation for historically being inhospitable to black students overcome that part of its heritage? That was the focus of a panel of faculty and staff members from the University of Mississippi here Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors. Speakers from across student services and academic programs at Ole Miss described a kind of “recursive progress,” in which the university takes steps forward as well as backward on the road to inclusion -- but ultimately moves ahead.

The federal government provides more than $150 billion in grants, loans and work-study funding for college students, yet the number of high school students filing out financial aid applications to access that money is waning. A trove of data released this week by the Department of Education shows fewer high school seniors are turning in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) than last year. As of June 3, submissions among high school seniors nationwide were down 4 percent compared with the same period a year ago.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute continues to face criticism after lawyers representing the university alleged that a student who was sexually assaulted during a study abroad program in Puerto Rico is partly responsible for her rape. The argument was made in response to a lawsuit filed by the victim against the university. Experts on rape and advocates for those who have been attacked say that it is unethical and shameful to focus on the decisions of rape victims rather on the actions of rapists.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Mindy Weston scrawled a message on a whiteboard in a library here at Brigham Young University: "Sex without marriage = bad." That’s the entirety of what young Mormons are taught about sex, she said. At 18, that was all she knew. Then, just weeks before she was supposed to start her first semester as a BYU undergraduate, she was drugged and raped. "I didn’t tell anybody for years," said Ms. Weston, who is now a 41-year-old graduate student in mass communications at the university. "I knew that I would be judged. I knew that I would be blamed.

University of Louisville President James Ramsey will step down and the school’s governing board will be reorganized under a leadership shake-up that Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) announced Friday. Ramsey, the university’s 17th president, took office in 2002. Bevin said at a news conference in Frankfort that he is appointing an interim board of trustees to oversee a public university that has weathered a period of extended turmoil, with controversies involving sports, financial issues, the board and the president. The date of Ramsey’s exit and the terms remain to be determined.

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.

Aaron Wunsch of the School of Design comments on the Mutual Burial Ground of Kensington.