Penn in the News

With hometown companies like Amazon and Microsoft, this bustling region on the Puget Sound easily ranks in the top tier of technology hubs in the United States. But the area lags its peers in one glaring way: It is home to a single major research university, the University of Washington, while nearly every other big technology scene in the country has at least two. For years, that weakness has stoked local unease about whether the gap between the supply of people with computer-related degrees and the surge in demand for those skills could impede the region’s economy.

University chaplain Charles Howard, chaplain Kameelah Rashad and Rabbi Josh Bolton are highlighted for plans to complete Philadelphia’s TriRock Triathlon as a relay team.

Anthea Butler of the School of Arts & Sciences writes about the media narrative around the Charleston church shooting.

The University of Arizona, the last holdout in a state investing heavily in distance education for undergraduates, will this fall join the state’s other public universities in offering online bachelor’s degrees, as UA Online opens its virtual doors. UA's in-state competitors -- Arizona State and Northern Arizona University -- have already established themselves in that market.

Reporting a campus sexual assault can be difficult, even traumatic, for any student. But for minority students who have been assaulted, speaking up can be an especially daunting prospect. Many of those students may simply not know how to go about reporting an assault. Many more may not feel that the conversations about sexual assault that have cascaded across campuses over the last year even apply to them, experts say. Increasingly, advocates for sexual-assault victims wonder: Are colleges doing enough to bring those minority students into the fold?

David Sarwer of the Perelman School of Medicine is quoted on plastic surgery trends.

Commentary on Greece’s financial problems from Mauro Guillen of the Wharton School is cited.

Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School critiques the shift toward “occupationally-focused majors and degrees.”

It was there and then it wasn’t: a controversial issue of a Northwestern University bioethics journal about sex and disability featuring one scholar’s account of receiving oral sex from a nurse as part of his rehabilitative process. Did Northwestern demand the removal of the journal essay from the university’s website and threaten to review all forthcoming issues prior to publication? That’s what faculty members claims happened last year. Northwestern, meanwhile, acknowledges that the archive issue of the journal was taken down, but isn’t saying why, or why it was later restored.

Richard Ingersoll of the Graduate School of Education and the School of Arts & Sciences is cited his collaborative report “Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force.”