Penn in the News

The Supreme Court’s decision to reconsider a challenge to affirmative action at the University of Texas at Austin has universities around the country fearing that they will be forced to abandon what remains of race-based admission preferences and resort to more difficult and expensive methods if they want to achieve student diversity.

At many colleges, victories have been slow to accumulate for campus activists who have pressured their institutions to ban certain investments from their endowments. There are hundreds of active campaigns that seek divestment from fossil-fuel companies, yet a much smaller number of colleges have actually pledged to follow through on those demands. But student activists say they scored an important victory last week, when Columbia University decided to divest from for-profit prison companies.

International applications to U.S. graduate schools rose 2% this year, driven by double-digit growth from Indian candidates and interest in science and engineering programs but tempered by declining demand from Chinese prospects. This marks the 10th straight year of gains in applications from foreign candidates, according to a preliminary tally by the Council of Graduate Schools, based on reports from 377 schools that educate the bulk of international graduate students. U.S.

Tobias Barrington Wolff of the Law School discusses the opinions in the Supreme Court’s rulings on same-sex marriage and lethal injections.

The state’s highest court on Tuesday upheld a lower court ruling allowing New York University to move forward with its expansion plan, most likely ending a long battle with neighbors, elected officials, preservationists and faculty members. The contentious plan would add about 1.9 million square feet of space across four buildings, including classrooms, dormitories and offices, to the largely low-slung neighborhood of Greenwich Village. About 900,000 square feet of that would be underground, according to the university.

Adam Finkel of the Law School is quoted about standards from the Occupational Safety & Health Administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Campus hearings, even when they’re regarding an activity as serious as sexual assault, are not courtrooms. It's a distinction that the U.S. Department of Education has embraced, requiring colleges to conduct their own investigations into claims of sexual assault, and to adjudicate those cases under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Colleges use “preponderance of evidence” instead of “beyond reasonable doubt” as the standard of proof. If a student is found in violation of campus rules, he or she is “responsible” for the misconduct, not “guilty” of a crime.

A study about financial behavior co-authored by Nicholas Souleles of the Wharton School is cited.

Kermit Roosevelt of the Law School offers his opinion on a possible shift in the Supreme Court’s political leanings.

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take a second look at the use of race in admissions decisions by the University of Texas at Austin, reviving a potent challenge to affirmative action in higher education. The move, which supporters of race-conscious admissions programs called baffling and ominous, signaled that the court may limit or even end such affirmative action. The advocates speculated that the court’s most conservative members had cast the four votes needed to grant review of the case in the hope that Justice Anthony M.