Penn in the News

The 2015 commencement speaker, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, is mentioned.

Timothy Libert of the Annenberg School for Communication is highlighted for studying health data privacy.

In the end, Pooja Chandrashekar had to narrow down her choices. The wunderkind senior at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology got into 14 schools — including all eight Ivies — and was deciding between Stanford and Harvard. And on Friday she made her decision: Chandrashekar is bound for Cambridge, Mass. “After much deliberation, I’ve finally committed to Harvard,” Chandrashekar said.

On William Shakespeare’s birthday this year, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) issued a report, “The Unkindest Cut: Shakespeare in Exile in 2015,” which warned that “less than 8 percent of the nation’s top universities require English majors to take even a single course that focuses on Shakespeare.” Warnings about the decline of a traditional literary canon are familiar from conservative academic organizations such as

Scott Barry Kaufman of the School of Arts & Sciences writes about levels of sensitivity.

Swarthmore College will not drop fossil fuel stocks from its $1.9 billion endowment, the school’s board of managers announced on Saturday. The board engaged in “extensive preparation, analysis, and robust discussion and debate” leading up to the decision, Gil Kemp, its chairman, said in a statement. Mr.

In 2004, Jeannette Jones landed a tenure-track job at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln — a joint appointment in the Institute for Ethnic Studies and the history department. She had her career all planned out: Teach. Write. Publish. Get tenure. Repeat until she became a full professor. But with tenure comes an increased service burden, and Jones’s dual appointment has left her with two departments to serve.

Within hours of the unexpected announcement last month that Sweet Briar College would close forever this summer, people began fighting the board’s decision. By this week, those efforts had led to three lawsuits simultaneously challenging the closure, one being appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court.

St. Joseph’s University has suspended play for its women’s varsity softball team for the rest of the season following an internal investigation into hazing allegations. The team has three games remaining in the season. It’s unclear whether the team would have made post-season play.

He described the night as a consensual, Ecstasy-fueled threesome. She described it as a sexual assault. Reed College agreed with the female student’s version of the events, in which she said she was coerced into having the encounter, and kicked the male student off campus.