Penn in the News

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education co-writes an article about the role of historically black colleges and universities in the social justice movement.

Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School is cited for his research on student debt.

NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering in Brooklyn is getting a $100 million contribution and will change its name Monday in recognition of the large gift. Chandrika Tandon, a musician and New York University trustee, and her husband, Ranjan Tandon, have agreed to make the donation. The school will be renamed the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, NYU is planning to announce Monday. “Engineering is not just making machines move,” Ms. Tandon said in an interview. “Technology permeates every discipline, and that’s the future of solving the world’s problems.”

Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro of the School of Arts & Sciences is cited for leading a study that revealed how Twitter behavior can predict users’ income level.

Sigal Barsade of the Wharton School suggests that “anger is not all bad.”

Al Filreis of the School of Arts & Sciences is quoted about Kenneth Goldsmith’s poetry techniques.

Albert Maguire of the Perelman School of Medicine talks about testing a gene therapy product to help restore vision.

Microaggressions: everyday offenses or digs, sometimes subtle and unintentional, directed at a person based on his or her race. It’s a divisive term which some say has helped enable the “coddling” of college students nationwide. Other still say it’s given a name to the kinds of insidious discrimination that students of color and others have faced in the college classroom for generations. Like it or not, microaggression is now part of the mainstream college climate vocabulary, as a recent, public case at Mount Holyoke College and others like it illustrate.

In August 2014, I was fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The firing made me a free-speech darling — or the world’s most violent person since Stalin, depending on your perspective. It also sparked a debate about academic freedom, faculty governance, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the role of social media in university life. That debate rages with no resolution in sight.

Dartmouth College has removed the new director of its Native American Program after tribal officials and alumni accused her of misrepresenting herself as an American Indian. The Ivy League school hired Susan Taffe Reed last month to serve as a liaison between the college and Native Americans, saying her role as president of the Eastern Delaware Nations would be instrumental in helping guide Indian students. But her appointment quickly became mired in controversy as some Native Americans said Dartmouth didn’t sufficiently vet Ms.