Penn in the News

Katie Margo of the Perelman School of Medicine is featured for training medical professionals in how to talk to transgender patients.

On average, 75 out of every 100 full-time faculty members at four-year colleges are white. Five are black, and even fewer are Hispanic. But that’s not the whole story. Among the higher ranks and at certain types of institutions — say, small, private master’s universities — the faculty is even less diverse. Using the drop-down menus below, you can find the racial and ethnic breakdowns of all types of professors and institutions. Click the bars to see which colleges employ the most faculty members in each group.

The death on Saturday of Antonin Scalia, the sharp-tongued justice who shaped constitutional debates for nearly 30 years, could end up shifting the Supreme Court’s ideological balance. But his absence is unlikely to affect the highly anticipated ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the pending legal challenge to race-conscious college-admissions policies. In short, the math still seems to favor the court’s conservative wing.

They have national, even international reputations for groundbreaking research and scholarship. They write lauded books, win coveted prizes, draw graduate-student disciples. Their institutions and their disciplines tap them as leaders. They’re full professors, the elite class of the professoriate. But the path that scholars must follow to join their ranks is hardly clear-cut, which can make it more difficult for some people — particularly women and minorities — to get there.

The engineering field is booming these days. Society regards it as an essential part of innovation, and colleges promote a degree in it as an entry into a fruitful, sustaining career. The humanities, by contrast, are in peril, with fewer students each year. We want to bridge this divide and help create a system where the two areas are not separate but are essential to each other. One of us began his studies in art and is now dean of an engineering school, and the other is an expert in Russian literature who originally planned to study physics.

When I served in the Obama administration, some of my colleagues, who had recently been academics, wondered, with something like despair, how they could ever return to academic life. "After this," they wondered, "what could possibly be the point of going back to write academic articles?" When I asked them to elaborate, one of them sent me this quotation from Theodore Roosevelt: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

When Simon P. Newman was interviewing for the presidency of Mount St. Mary’s University, he promised to bring the small Catholic institution in rural Maryland national exposure. Now he and the board are probably just wishing that would all go away.

Penn is one of 426 schools that will neither require nor recommend students take the SAT essay portion of the new test.

Dot Porter of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library comments on Penn’s role as co-leader on a project that will digitalize the largest regional collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts in the country.

Male students appear to consistently and significantly overrate the abilities of other male students, whereas female students showed no such bias, according to a new study in the journal PLoS ONE.