Penn in the News

By calling on private-university police forces to expand the range of records they make available to the public, Ohio and Texas are joining a group of states in which lawmakers and the courts have brought reporting requirements at private institutions in line with standards at public ones. The new standards — which arrived in Ohio through a Supreme Court ruling and in Texas through a bill passed by state lawmakers — show broader nationwide conversations about police authority and transparency are trickling down to college campuses.

David Goldberg of the Perelman School of Medicine is quoted about participating in a collaborative study that revealed that organ donation rates vary throughout the United States.

Kent Smetters of the Wharton School talks about the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

Doctoral candidate Timothy Libert of the Annenberg School for Communication is interviewed about what happens with health information that people search online.

Mathias Basner of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on a study that revealed how reducing daily noise levels would reduce the number of people with hypertension and coronary heart disease.

Some students taking the SAT college-entrance exam Saturday had extra time to complete a section of the test because of a misprint in an instruction guide, at least briefly calling into question the validity of scores for nearly half a million test-takers. Shortly before noon EDT on Saturday, the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT on behalf of the College Board, notified the test maker that there was a printing error in the test booklets distributed to students in the U.S., according to a statement posted on the College Board website Sunday evening.

Now that Texas legislators have passed a law allowing concealed weapons to be carried at colleges throughout the state, campus leaders, professors, students, and safety officials will turn to debating what areas of their campuses can be declared gun-free, and how much of each campus can be a designated a gun-free zone. Administrators will have over a year to devise new policies to comply with the legislation, which the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has said he will sign. Private colleges and universities will have the option of opting out of the requirement.

Rosemary Polomano of the School of Nursing talks about women who are not informed of the risks or ways to reduce risks of pain after a mastectomy.

Robert Town of the Wharton School is quoted about health-care costs in Pennsylvania.

Jonathan Moreno of the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Arts & Sciences writes about the impact of national security on the birth of bioethics.