Penn in the News

In the fall of 2006, students living in Ohio State University’s dormitories received letters espousing racist ideas, including the belief that African-Americans are intellectually inferior to white people. Around the same time, about 100 miles away, students at the university’s Agricultural Technical Institute in Wooster created a Facebook group that promoted racist views about Oprah Winfrey. The two incidents made Ohio State officials realize they needed a proactive means to prevent occurrences of offensive speech, said Todd Suddeth, director of the university’s multicultural center.

Nate Heneghan was optimistic about his fledgling academic career when he joined USC's teaching ranks last fall as a lecturer in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. But after just one semester in the job, disillusionment had set in. His paychecks weren't arriving on time. The university eliminated his vision insurance benefits. To make ends meet, he took on a crushing teaching load. That meant putting his research on the back burner — along with any hope of landing a tenure-track faculty position that would bring a measure of job security and higher pay.

Four students and alumni from the University of California-Berkeley have sued Google in federal court, alleging that the company — which runs the university’s email accounts — illegally intercepted and scanned emails for advertising purposes without students’ knowledge or consent. Google’s Gmail service is a core feature of Google Apps for Education, which is provided for free to thousands of K-12 schools and universities and is used by more than 30 million students and teachers nationwide, according to the complaint.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center talks about how presidential debates are used and misused.

When Henry Fountain enrolled at Temple University last year, he was working two jobs: 40 hours per week with his local government during summer break and 23 hours per week as a busboy at a restaurant during the school year. It was an arrangement he had balanced for years while in high school, but a few weeks into his freshman year at Temple, Fountain quit the restaurant job. And the university gave him $4,000 for doing so.

Israeli anthropologist Dan Rabinowitz is a leader in his field, heading a prestigious school of environmental studies at Tel Aviv University, authoring dozens of publications and holding visiting teaching positions over the years at leading North American universities. But the British-educated Rabinowitz fears that his younger counterparts may not enjoy the same professional opportunities for a very personal reason: They are Israeli.

Joseph Serletti and Mandy Sauler of Penn Medicine are featured in a video about nipple reconstruction and medical tattooing for post-mastectomy patients.

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading scholar of the first half of the 20th century, defined the urgency of black social responsibility in his famous essay “The Talented Tenth” — 10 being the percentage of the African-American demographic needed to lead the race into an integrated, equal America.

Students are planning to rally Monday afternoon to protest an alleged attack on three black students at University at Albany State University of New York by a group of white people. Three women called campus police shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday and said they had been attacked by a group of 10 to 12 white men and women on a bus who shouted racial slurs. The initial call came from a dorm, and campus and city police are jointly investigating what happened and where, said Steve Smith, a spokesperson for the Albany Police Department.

The bulletin atop a University of Maryland news release was provocative: “Concussion-related measures improved in high school football players who drank new chocolate milk, U-Md. study shows.” But an update posted below that finding in late December added a backpedaling caveat rarely seen from a major research university: “This press release refers to study results that are preliminary and have not been subjected to the peer review scientific process.”