Penn in the News

Ezekiel Emanuel of the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School pens an op-ed about a recent study that finds patients receive better care when senior physicians are absent from the hospitals.

The University tradition of throwing toast at sporting events and singing “Drink a Highball” is highlighted in coverage of Penn Football win and share of this year’s Ivy League title with Dartmouth and Harvard.

Princeton University late Thursday ended a sit-in in the president's office by agreeing to consider changing the prominent use of Woodrow Wilson's name -- in ways that honor the man who was president of the United States and of Princeton. The action was one of many in higher education in which colleges are trying to respond to a growing student protest movement that in the last 48 hours has seen new sit-ins and rallies -- and also new incidents of backlash and threats. Here is some of what happened in the last 48 hours:

Protests by University of Missouri black students that forced the school's administration to address racism and other problems mirror efforts decades ago that led many majority white schools to create African-American studies and other programs. But those programs and some ethnic studies departments across the country are struggling with funding, low-staffing and dwindling student enrollment, according to some experts.

Two-thirds of college freshmen who applied for federal student loans or grants last year indicated that they were applying to only one institution, according to new data released by the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday. Sixty-eight percent of freshmen filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid during the 2014-15 academic year instructed the Education Department to send their information to only one college, the department said. That’s down from 80 percent in the 2008-09 school year.

Jonah Berger of the Wharton School writes about the evolution of the word “cool.”

One month before R. Bowen Loftin resigned as chancellor of the University of Missouri at Columbia, accused of not fighting racism on the flagship campus, he announced mandatory "diversity training" for faculty, staff, and students. Some hailed the move as overdue, but others were not impressed.

The Education Department got hit from all sides at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, with lawmakers, advocates, and investigators alike accusing the agency of everything from lax oversight to poor customer service. Their target was the department’s Office of Federal Student Aid, or FSA, the semiautonomous division charged with awarding billions of dollars in student grants and loans, and overseeing the thousands of contractors and colleges that deliver and manage that money.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center says “Every program that conservatives haven't liked for the past 40 years has been identified as a socialistic program and no one has been standing up to defend socialism.”

Just before midnight on Thursday, November 12, nearly 200 students gathered outside the house of Peter Salovey, Yale University's president. Passing around a megaphone, they read him their demands. Among other things, they wanted mental-health professionals placed in each of the university’s four cultural centers, which serve black, Asian-American, Hispanic, and American Indian students. And in Yale’s Mental Health and Counseling Center, they wanted more counselors of color.