Penn in the News

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.

Kemuel Benyehudah of the Graduate School of Education writes about his experience as a non-traditional student.

Lynn Schuchter of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on how common it is for women to be diagnosed with melanoma during pregnancies.

Samuel Preston of the School of Arts & Sciences comments on the increased life expectancy rates of black Americans.

Angela Duckworth of the School of Arts & Sciences describes the “Hard Thing Rule” in her new book.

For online lenders, the business model of targeting Ivy League student borrowers is starting to backfire. The problem isn’t that graduates of these and other prestigious universities are deadbeats. Rather, these customers, who the lenders covet for their superlow default rates, are proving savvier and more anti-debt than anticipated.

A dozen teenagers in nametags sit waiting, some nervous, knees bouncing beneath their desks. At 9:30 a.m. that Friday in April, Father Robert Scholla takes a seat among them. After introducing himself as a faculty fellow, he picks up the assigned text and asks for their thoughts about it. One young woman, hand raised halfway, speaks right up. Then another chimes in: "I would add to that…." The competition, polite but intense, is on. Nearly 50 high-school seniors have come to Santa Clara University seeking a prize.

President Obama said Saturday that the country is "a better place today" than when he graduated from college more than 30 years ago, citing his historic election as "one indicator of how attitudes have changed." But gaps persist, he told Howard University's Class of 2016, citing racism and inequality in particular. In his commencement speech at one of the nation's leading historically black schools, Mr. Obama said there were no black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and few black judges when he received a bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1983.

Every postdoctoral fellow has probably heard a “permadoc” joke or two, making light of the increasingly long stints recent Ph.D.s spend in such positions. But has the postdoc become the default for graduates -- even for those for whom it doesn’t necessarily make sense? Has it become a holding pattern rather than a bridge to more permanent work? A new study in Science by two business professors suggests that’s the case and calls for increased attention to career planning among students, mentors, graduate schools and those funding postdocs.

Members of single-gender social clubs at Harvard University will be banned from holding leadership positions in official campus organizations or on sports teams beginning in the fall of 2017, the university announced Friday. Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, the first woman to hold the position, wrote a letter to the university describing the changes: