Penn in the News

Jonathan Supovitz of the Graduate School of Education comments on the importance of classroom size.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard argument last month in the latest constitutional challenge to race-based preferences in university admissions. The court's decision in Fisher v. University of Texas may determine affirmative action's future. It may also reveal the extent of the conservative justices' avowed commitments to judicial restraint. To understand why Fisher has this significance, recall the court's holding in June that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. In that case, Obergefell v. Hodges, the four most conservative justices dissented.

Teaching an online course that 49,000 students have signed up for presents an unprecedented challenge when it comes to an important aspect of instruction: knowing your audience. I could see from my course "dashboard" in Coursera that the students hailed from 190 countries, with 6 percent from India, 31 percent from the United States, and so on, but these numbers only took me so far. I wondered which places had lots of students earning a passing grade? Which places had students who were really engaged with the course? Since I’m a cartographer, it made sense to make some maps.

In the 14 months since her story shocked the world, Jackie has been at the heart of a national debate about sexual assaults on college campuses, has become embroiled in a media scandal, and is the central figure in a series of defamation lawsuits. Yet there’s one important fact missing about Jackie, the young woman who concocted a harrowing story about a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity: her full name. News organizations have declined to reveal Jackie’s full identity since her now-discredited story appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in November 2014.

Mitchell Berman of the Law School and the School of Arts & Sciences pens an op-ed about consistency in the Supreme Court’s decisions regarding constitutional challenges to race-based preferences in university admissions.

Carmen Guerra of the Perelman School of Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center talks about the importance of colon cancer screening.

Paul Robinson of the Law School writes about the debate surrounding the use of “yes mean yes” as a sexual-consent policy on college campuses.

By now you’ve probably seen the video of a student screaming at Nicholas Christakis — the master of Silliman College at Yale — over his refusal to apologize for an email written by his wife, Erika Christakis, which some found insensitive for its suggestion that students "look away" if someone wore a Halloween costume that offended them.

“Where did I learn about sexual consent?” Jonathan Kalin was standing before an auditorium of Trinity College freshmen, pressing play on a clip from the movie “Superbad.” The 2007 film, you may recall, tells the story of two schlubby high school friends on a quest to lose their virginity before college. In this particular scene, the main characters, played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, are standing in the middle of a soccer scrimmage dissecting whether or not Mr. Hill’s romantic interest wants to hook up with him.

Wendell Pritchett of the Law School talked about this book on Robert Weaver, the first Housing and Urban Development Department secretary and the first African-American cabinet secretary.