Penn in the News

In the middle of a major capital campaign that could reach $900 million, Drexel University recently gave its entrepreneurial president, John A. Fry, a second five-year contract, running to August 2020. The board of trustees unanimously approved the pact Sept. 30, said trustees chairman Richard Greenawalt. Fry received a boost in pay for good performance, Greenawalt said, but declined to provide the amount. Drexel, like most private colleges, does not release pay until it becomes public on tax forms. In 2013-14, Fry received $1.5 million in total compensation.

The nation’s medical schools chalked up another record-setting year of applications and enrollment, while making strides to attract a more-diverse applicant pool, according to figures released on Thursday by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Michael Perlis of the Perelman School of Medicine is quoted about CBT-I, cognitive behavioral therapy specifically for insomnia.

Some students at American University got so fed up with the racist comments they were reading on social media that they decided to spread them. They launched an online campaign, #TheRealAU, to blast out the racism they see, in hopes it will make it more difficult to ignore. They have been posting and sharing screenshots of slurs. They plastered them on the school’s front gates. And they are demanding that the administration do something. “It has been getting worse,” said Daniel Marks, a senior from Atlanta.

Karla Cabrera, a 29-year-old lawyer in Mexico City, was excited when she came across “Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought,” an online course about the Chinese revolutionary leader. She has a passion for Chinese history, and she hoped the class would shed light on the brutal political battles that took place under Mao’s rule. But when Ms. Cabrera began watching the lectures on edX, a popular online education platform owned and administered by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was disappointed. Each class opened with a patriotic video montage.

Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School talks about how the cost of college and its sticker price.

When Jon H. Oberg was a researcher at the Department of Education 13 years ago, he discovered a loophole that let student loan companies reap hundreds of millions of dollars in excessive payments from the government. His catch ultimately led to a whistle-blower lawsuit accusing several lenders of defrauding taxpayers. Some settled early on. Others had their cases dismissed as recent as January, giving the impression that the years of court battles were over. Not quite.

Educators at Pennsylvania State University are getting some help writing textbooks these days. From robots. Don’t laugh. The venture saved students in faculty member Bart Pursel’s Information, People and Technology class $16,000. Pursel used the new technology, BBookX, to build a textbook, and he distributed it to students for free, the university said in a press release. “Penn State develops new technology to create robot-written textbooks,” so touts the news release. “The system is helping to usher in a new genre of media: the bionic book.”

Federal education officials have launched an investigation into how the University of Mary Washington handled threats made against feminist students on the messaging app Yik Yak. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is probing whether the university administration subjected students to a hostile environment by failing to properly respond to sexual harassment on social media, according to a letter provided Wednesday by an attorney for the students.

James Alwine and Erle Robertson of the Perelman School of Medicine discuss their research that identified an association between microbial signatures and triple negative breast cancer.