Penn in the News

With foreigners enrolling in U.S. schools at record numbers, students such as Noah Hernandez, a freshman at the University of California, San Diego, are getting a global view of the world without leaving their home state. The school has thousands of Chinese students, including Mr. Hernandez’s roommate, who pay three times the in-state tuition. “If I were running a school, it would make sense” to accept them, said the biology major, as a clutch of Mandarin-speaking students walked by.

Matt Blaze of the School of Engineering and Applied Science is quoted about encryption.

Lauren Sallan of the School of Arts & Sciences is highlighted for leading research that shows ancient mass extinction led to dominance of tiny fish.

His cellphone started humming at 11:20 p.m. on Thursday. An urgent voice jolted Jonathan Holloway from his slumber. Students protesting against racism on campus were streaming toward the home of the university’s president, the caller said. Dr. Holloway is the first black dean of Yale College, a scholar of African-American history, and an administrator who prides himself on his close ties to his students. But the late-night march took him by surprise. Within minutes, he was dialing Yale’s president: “You might want to get dressed.”

Postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Wilson of the School of Arts & Sciences writes about promoting difficult dialogues on college campuses.

Georgetown University will rename two buildings named for school presidents who organized the sale of Jesuit-owned slaves to help pay off campus debt in the 1830s, the university’s president announced. Mulledy Hall, a new student dormitory named for the president who authorized the sale of about 272 slaves to a Louisiana plantation owner in 1838, will be called Freedom Hall until a permanent name is chosen.

When Payton Head ran as a gay, black man for student president at the University of Missouri — a school now known for one student's hunger strike and other protests against the administration's handling of racial bias and hostility on campus — he promised to "ignite Mizzou." "We've definitely done that," Head, a 21-year-old senior from Chicago who is studying political science and international studies, told The Associated Press.

In recent years the University of North Carolina system — long considered one of the best in the country — has sustained massive budget cuts by the state legislature as well as efforts to force some academics to change their priorities. Now there is a new challenge: the appointment of Margaret Spellings, education secretary under President George W. Bush, as system president. The move — by a Republican-dominated governing board — is being attacked by students and faculty as a political move that will damage the state.

The Wall Street Journal couldn't have been much more excited about what Mitch Daniels said Wednesday about the protests at Yale University and the University of Missouri. "We’ve been wondering all week what happened to the grown-ups on American university campuses, and it appears we have a sighting. Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, spoke up Wednesday about the children’s revolt at Yale and Missouri," said the Journal in an editorial. While many conservatives joined in praising Daniels, his comments angered many black students at Purdue and some critics elsewhere.

The veracity of one of this year’s most talked about documentaries, “The Hunting Ground,” has been attacked by 19 Harvard Law School professors, who say the film’s portrayal of rape on college campus is distorted, specifically when it comes to their school’s handling of one particular case. Directed by Kirby Dick and produced by Amy Ziering, whose previous team efforts include the Oscar-nominated “The Invisible War” (2012), about sexual assault in the military, “The Hunting Ground” interviews victims of sexual assault at colleges around the country.