Penn in the News

Philip Sirinides and Abigail Gray of the Graduate School of Education comment on researching the impact of the Reading Recovery program on elementary students.

Student Deren Temel of the Graduate School of Education writes about African higher education.

Two events at Brown University last week have unsettled Jewish students. First, a lecture having nothing to do with Israel was called off after students petitioned the lecturer to refuse to participate in any event co-sponsored by Hillel, as the lecture was to have been. Then anti-Semitic and homophobic graffiti appeared in a residence hall that includes a Jewish fraternity and a coed fraternity that is home to gay and lesbian students. The events haven't been linked, but both have frustrated many Jewish students, and both resulted in emails to the campus by President Christina Paxson.

Jonathan Moreno of the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Arts & Sciences is quoted about a bullfight experiment conducted by José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado.

Birth control was not the first thing on Tracey L. Poston’s mind when she arrived at the University of Notre Dame as director of research compliance. But when she needed to replace her IUD the next year, she was shocked to discover that contraception was not included in her insurance. The cost had been covered by her previous employer, a Jesuit university, yet Notre Dame said it ran contrary to Roman Catholic doctrine. Ms. Poston, who’s not Catholic herself, felt that Notre Dame should not be intruding on her personal life.

Olivia Mitchell of the Wharton School talks about older workers who are met with incentive to retire sooner rather than later.

You’re the only one, the Americans told Amnah Alkhan. We’ve never really talked with other girls who wear head scarves. Just you. Arizona State University, where Amnah is a senior, has no shortage of observant Muslim women who cover their hair with the scarf known as a hijab. There are 775 students, like Amnah, from Saudi Arabia; most of the women, though not all, wear the hijab. Some are fully veiled. Amnah is funny and frank and speaks with a directness that puts people at ease.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center talks about the length of the presidential campaign cycle.

Recent moves by adjunct professors to unionize at Duke University, the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota are heightening a debate over how much such steps will cost schools and whether the moves could radically shrink the jobs available to the low-level professors. A recent study found that U.S. universities’ costs could increase to a total of $24 billion from $4.3 billion for courses currently taught by adjuncts, if union targets for higher pay are met, according to a paper co-authored by Georgetown University business school professor Jason Brennan.

Mark Neuman of the Perelman School of Medicine says, “The growth we observe over time in opioid prescribing after surgery occurs against the backdrop of a major public health crisis of prescription opioid abuse.”