Penn in the News

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education is quoted.

I gave my first university lecture in philosophy at the University of Ghana, Legon, when I was a freshly credentialed 21-year-old. My audience was a couple of hundred students gathered in a vast hall, with ceiling fans to move the hot and humid air.

Research on entrepreneurial projects funded through Kickstarter, co-authored by Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School, is featured.

“The joke about Harvard is that it’s a hedge fund with a university attached to it,” Mark Schneider tells me. It’s a quip that, for obvious reasons, has become pretty popular in recent years. In 2014, the university’s legendary endowment, overseen by a team of in-house experts and spread across a mind-bending array of investments that range from stocks and bonds to California wine vineyards, hit $36.4 billion.

Campus Reform carefully tracks how well it creates headaches in academe. On a dry-erase board in its offices here, the online publication tallies numbers related to its mission of exposing liberal "bias and abuse" at American colleges. In mid-August, the board showed that so far this year it had published more than 530 articles, seven of which had been featured by the Drudge Report, an online conservative news hub that drives big audiences.

The University of Georgia, seeking to improve the classroom experience of its undergraduates, has begun a faculty hiring spree to reduce enrollments in hundreds of courses. The university will hire 56 full-time, teaching-focused lecturers and professors over this academic year. It is one of several recent efforts at the research-focused institution to improve its educational environment. Others include the creation of a series of freshman seminars and the requirement that incoming students participate in a hands-on learning experience.

Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School is quoted about his book Will College Pay Off?

Jonathan Moreno of the School or Arts & Sciences and the Perelman School of Medicine blogs about the topics that will be covered in his bioethics course and about not being stifled by providing a warning to students that some topics might be upsetting.

Susan Domchek of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on how results from a breast cancer study might be skewed by the sampling process.

PennApps is featured, and management and technology undergraduate Pranav Vishnu Ramabhadran is quoted.