Penn in the News

As student protests over racial injustice are exploding at campuses across the nation, the Supreme Court is preparing to hear a major case that could put an end to racial preferences in college admissions. The tense atmosphere on campuses may alter the legal dynamic when the case is argued on Dec. 9. “It’s quite possible,” said Michael C.

Doctoral candidate Timothy Libert of the Annenberg School for Communication is cited for researching websites that leak user data to third parties.

As an ongoing observer of the bipartisan War on College, I read a recent column on cost containment in higher education by The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein with great interest. Pearlstein is a smart guy, and he stresses four “tough things” that universities must do to contain costs. Some of the recommendations he makes based on what he “observed during four years as a professor at George Mason University” are worth considering.

Katherina Rosqueta of the School for Social Policy & Practice’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy offers advice about researching the effectiveness of charities.

In an op-ed this month on rising racial tensions on campus, Education Secretary Arne Duncan noted that in his seven years in office, the department's Office for Civil Rights has received more than 1,000 complaints about racial harassment in higher education. He said this statistic was an indication that the current concerns about race on campus are "no small issue." Duncan didn't note how small a proportion of those complaints have resulted in findings of discrimination. Most of the complaints, in fact, never result in a complete investigation by OCR, let alone a finding.

Report: “Sharp Declines in Underemployment for College Graduates”

Organization: Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce

PIK Professor Jonathan Moreno of the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Arts & Sciences writes about boundaries of genetic engineering.

Ellen Berman of the Perelman School of Medicine is interviewed about how to handle finances and families.

Officials were slow to handle racial incidents at the University of Missouri, and that contributed to protests, a student hunger strike, a threatened boycott by the football team and ultimately, the resignations of two administrators. At the University of Oklahoma, damage over a racist chant that was caught on video was kept to a minimum when the school president acted quickly to expel the students and condemn the episode.

In the coming weeks, students will participate in a ritual as familiar as it is reviled: evaluating their instructors. One of the latest and most visible critiques of these assessments came this year from Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. He cast doubt on their validity and reliability, proposing that instead, professors complete an inventory of the research-based teaching practices they use. That would be more likely to promote learning than garden-variety evaluations do, Mr.