Penn in the News

A report published last year in the Journal of Applied Psychology confirms what many might say is obvious: "Incivility, … defined as insensitive behavior that displays a lack of regard for others, is rampant and on the rise." This will not be news for academics. Consider the regular calls for an end to faculty incivility — the rudeness, abusive language, bullying, and general meanness that seem to characterize many of our interactions. We aren’t the only profession with jerks, certainly. But the academy does seem to offer a refuge for the obnoxious.

Katherina Rosqueta of the School of Social Policy & Practice’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy comments on the strategy and impact of using popular fictional stories in nonprofit advertisement.

Matt Blaze of the School of Engineering and Applied Science is part of a piece about encryption.

The notion of a campus “safe space,” which has seen much ink and ridicule, is nothing new, says Louie Dean Valencia-García. The teaching fellow at Fordham University in New York has studied student protest movements from those in Franco’s fascist Spain to “Occupy Wall Street.” The term “safe spaces” was first used by gay men facing ridicule and violence in the 1960s, as well as by young feminists being derided in classrooms. “It was a response to hate, and trying to find a place that was safer than those they were experiencing on campuses,” Mr. Valencia-García says.

It was 2004, and Sara Goldrick-Rab, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, had just landed a job at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She hadn’t planned on becoming a professor. But faculty members and fellow students kept sending her an ad for the position. It seemed like a long shot — she hadn’t finished a single chapter of her dissertation — but she got an interview. "I arrived here at 10 p.m. in the middle of a snowstorm," she says, "and the chair of the department was there to greet me and take me out to dinner.

Student activists at the University of Arizona issued a list of demands on Tuesday that included urging the university to provide free tampons and menstrual pads on campus. The demand was immediately mocked by some conservative commentators (“campus crybullies demand free tampons,” the Breitbart headline reads), but the request is not unusual.

Jason Karlawish of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on researching showing that “what’s good for the heart is also good for the brain.”

Peter Calautti finds a lot to like about Donald J. Trump. He likes that the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is speaking to the concerns of people in working-class neighborhoods like the one where he grew up. He likes that Mr. Trump isn’t afraid to talk about illegal immigration. He likes that the Republican Party, which he says has abandoned conservative principles in favor of large-scale military intervention and tax cuts for the rich, is being punished by Mr. Trump’s ascendancy.

Daniel Rader of the Perelman School of Medicine is featured for leading a study about “good” cholesterol levels.

Rejecting a set of amendments that faculty members argued would have preserved tenure as they know it, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents approved Thursday new tenure policies to fill a hole left by recent changes in state law. “I do not believe the academy is precisely like a business,” Regina Millner, board president, said at the meeting. “But we cannot have quality, serve our students, have quality faculty if we do not have a sound financial system. This is a different century, this is a different time ….