Penn in the News

Kermit Roosevelt of the Law School comments on the city of Clarkson, Ga. making marijuana possession a low-level offense.

Kathleen Brown of the Law School is highlighted for helping a prisoner serving a life sentence win commutation. The Penn Inmate Project, a collaboration with the Department of Corrections is mentioned.

Caught between opposing federal and state directives, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors held a special meeting Tuesday afternoon to get legal advice and try to resolve a standoff on the issue of transgender rights that puts hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. On Tuesday evening, they had no resolution to offer, only expressions of concern about the importance of federal funding on university operations and the difficulty of juggling two competing mandates.

They boarded the bus in the early morning hours. They were three black students, surrounded by white passengers. As they headed onto the State University of New York at Albany's main campus, the fight broke out. When they got off the bus, the three students called the police. They said that the other passengers attacked them, punching them in the head and yelling racial slurs. In the months since, the incident gained national attention. In early February, the students and their allies organized a rally. Hillary Clinton weighed in on Twitter.

Mark Pauly of the Wharton School pens an op-ed reviewing the reasons behind rising drug prices and whether consumer action can influence pricing.

When Jennifer R. Warren was denied tenure last year by Rutgers University at New Brunswick, she believed she had ample grounds to protest the decision. Ms. Warren, an assistant professor of communications who is black, said her school had discouraged her from writing a book and had pushed her to change her teaching style, causing her student evaluations to drop. Her annual reviews, she said, had offered no indication that she wasn’t on the right track. Student activists saw a force underlying those issues: institutional racism.

Perhaps the most nerve-racking duty of a senior class president at Scripps College in Claremont is securing a speaker for commencement. And Jennie Xu thought she had nailed it by booking Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of State. Here was a pioneering woman who fled political persecution as a child and became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and America's chief diplomat. Like Xu and her classmates, Albright also attended an all-women college. "She was our top choice," Xu said. "I was really, really ecstatic."

Sara Cherry of the Perelman School of Medicine is quoted about the lack of knowledge and research on the Zika virus.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center is quoted about the effects of both factual political advertisements and uncorroborated attacks.

When posters popped up last month on several California campuses, accusing specific students of having "allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists," the students who were named expected campus officials to come quickly to their defense. Instead, administrators on some of the campuses grudgingly recognized the posters as protected speech, stoking anger among students who say they are being targeted for their activism. The posters appeared at four campuses of the University of California — Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz — and at San Diego State University.