Penn in the News

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague letter that urged institutions to better investigate and adjudicate cases of campus sexual assault. The letter clarified how the department interprets Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and for the past five years it has been the guiding document for colleges hoping to avoid a federal civil rights investigation into how they handle complaints of sexual violence.

Annette Fierro, Karen M’Closkey and Randall Mason of the School of Design comment on designer Bruce Mau’s geodesign approach to helping resolve social problems.

In the world of money management, bigger is often considered better. College and university endowments greater than $1 billion, for example, have long outperformed their smaller rivals. That may be changing.

Dean John Jackson of the School of Social Policy & Practice shares his commentary on how a master of social work degree is becoming the 21^st century’s law degree.

David Asch of the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School is quoted about studying shift lengths of internal medicine residents.

Richard Berk and Geoffrey Barnes of the School of Arts & Sciences and Susan Sorenson of the School of Social Policy & Practice are featured for their arraignment/machine-learning research.

Philip H. Knight, the co-founder and chairman of Nike Inc., said on Monday that he had pledged to give Stanford University $400 million to recruit graduate students around the globe to address society’s most intractable problems, including poverty and climate change. The gift to the new Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, which is modeled on the Rhodes scholarships, matches one of the largest individual donations ever to a university, the $400 million that John A. Paulson, the hedge fund tycoon, gave to Harvard last year to improve its engineering school.

Georgetown University, a Catholic institution long known for scholarship on the Arab world, is intensifying its study of Jewish civilization with aid from a series of significant donations. The latest, to be announced Wednesday, is a $10 million gift for research on the Holocaust. A 13-year-old Jewish studies program in the Jesuit university’s prestigious School of Foreign Service will be formally renamed the Center for Jewish Civilization next week. The shift in nomenclature is not a small matter in academia: It signifies money, depth and commitment.

Faculty members opposed to Texas's new campus concealed carry law have argued that it will chill academic freedom and free speech. A set of recommendations from the University of Houston’s Faculty Senate on how to teach under campus carry is the new exhibit A in the case against the law for those concerned about its effects on academic freedom. Its advocates, meanwhile, say faculty fears are overblown. The debate is being renewed the same week Georgia's House of Representatives passed similar legislation.

Sarah Tishkoff of the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Arts & Sciences is highlighted for her research on evolutionary genetics.