Penn in the News

Shaun Harper of the Graduate School of Education is quoted about studying racial disparities and graduation rates.

Undergraduate Kim Bernardin of the School of Arts & Sciences publishes an article based on her senior thesis in urban studies.

In May 2010, Faisal Shahzad hoped to kill dozens of pedestrians when he parked his Nissan Pathfinder near Times Square, loaded with improvised bombs. Four months earlier, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight carrying 289 passengers by igniting explosives sewn into his underwear. Last year, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez opened fire on two military facilities in Tennessee, killing five soldiers.

Stanley Plotkin of the Perelman School of Medicine makes comparisons between the rubella outbreak and the Zika virus.

Bachelor's degrees should be completed in three years. MOOCs should replace general education. Coding boot camps are the game changer. College should be free. Internships are more important than instruction. Eliminate administrative bloat and higher education will be prosperous. Pick your quick fix for higher education, but it won't be endorsed in Lesson Plan (Princeton University Press), a new book by William G. Bowen and Michael S. McPherson.

You know who they are: Young American students who go overseas, often during the summer months, to participate in community service projects in poor countries where they hope to make a human difference — and, in some cases, beef up their résumés while they are at it. But there are real ethical problems with this model, as explained in the following post by Lisa V. Adams, associate dean for global health and director of the Center for Health Equity at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

The Indiana Court of Appeals ruled last week that private college police departments are subject to the state’s open records laws, but a bill passed earlier this month by Indiana’s General Assembly could undercut the ruling. The legislation would require that police departments at private colleges and universities, which have argued they are exempt from public access laws, release records related to arrests for criminal offenses.

A crowd of students chanted, “‘No’ means NO! ‘No’ means NO!” outside a dorm at Howard University where a woman said she was raped by another student. When she made the allegations on social media, upset by what she said was a lack of concern from university officials, students quickly turned it into a broader protest about safety for women on campus. Their social media campaign — #takebackthenightHU — was trending on Twitter in Washington, as protesters gathered outside the dorm, sitting in the grass and filling part of Georgia Avenue.

Sara Jaffe of the School of Arts & Sciences comments on how marriage promotion can backfire.

The University of California at Berkeley said Friday it will extend job offers to 69 subcontracted employees after the university system’s largest union last month urged speakers scheduled to appear at Berkeley to boycott the campus. AFSCME Local 3299, which represents more than 22,000 employees on the University of California’s 10 campuses, called in early February for a “Speaker’s Boycott” until Berkeley agreed to directly hire custodians and parking attendants who were contracted to work on campus through three different companies: PerformanceFirst, ABM and Laz Parking.