Penn in the News

Ezekiel Emanuel of the Perelman School of Medicine and Wharton School and Justin Bekelman, also of Medicine, discuss end-of-life care in America and other countries.

When the University of Oregon dropped its $3.4-million, multiyear contract with a national branding agency this month, it raised a lot of questions. William H. Faust knows this, because his clients, as well as some prospective clients, continue to ask them. "Everybody’s paying attention to it, because it’s high visibility and a big school and a big budget," says Mr. Faust, managing partner of Ologie, a company that works with colleges to develop branding campaigns. His clients want to know what, if anything, Oregon’s ending its contract means for marketing in higher education. Mr.

Kamen Simeonov of the Perelman School of Medicine is cited for co-authoring a paper that found lower lung cancer incidence among people living at high elevations.

Mark Alan Hughes of the School of Design and faculty director of the Fels Policy Research Initiative is quoted.

When Mi Gente, a group that represents Latino students at Duke University, announced that it would boycott a spring recruiting weekend for Latinos because its members were tired of simply being "poster children for brochures," black and Asian-American student groups took to social media to pledge their support. Meanwhile, they were busy with their own demands. All three wanted safe spaces where students could feel comfortable talking about their problems and an accelerated timeline for hiring minority professors.

Donations to capital campaigns for new facilities and commitments to cover more aid for athletes helped major-college athletic departments raise more than $1 billion in 2015, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Council for Aid to Education. It was the fourth time in the past five years that gifts for athletics had crossed the billion-dollar mark. But there are signs that donors may be reaching their limits, as overall athletics donations to the reporting institutions dipped slightly in 2015 from the year before.

Several new ratings reports from Moody’s Investor Service that landed in my e-mail inbox this week give plenty of clues about where higher education is headed in the United States. Moody’s examines the finances of more than 500 colleges and universities that issue debt through the public markets. While some might place little trust in the analyses of Moody’s or the other major bond-rating agencies after they were so wrong about the 2008 housing crisis, in higher education the ratings still provide a good indicator of the strengths and weaknesses of colleges and universities.

The National Science Foundation this week issued a statement calling on the colleges and universities that receive its grants to do a better job of preventing and dealing with harassment in science -- and the agency has warned that it would terminate funding to institutions that do not take required steps to prevent and deal with harassment. The statement says that the NSF "holds responsible" colleges and universities that receive its funds.

Jonathan Moreno of the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Arts & Sciences writes about the symbolic power behind an empty podium to represent the absence of Donald Trump at the Iowa Republican debate.

Ezekiel Emanuel of the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School is cited for speaking out against efforts to extend longevity.