Penn in the News

Drexel University has begun to scale back a series of expansion efforts, a sign that the university’s ambitious plans may not have played out as hoped. The university mostly recently decided to shut down a campus in Sacramento, 3,000 miles from its main campus in Philadelphia. After just a year, Drexel also scaled back a partnership with Philadelphia-area community colleges.

A racist song that caused a national uproar when it was caught on video was a fixture within a fraternity chapter at the University of Oklahoma and not an anomaly, the university reported Friday, and members first learned it at a gathering of the national fraternity four years ago.

Ian Lustick of the School of Arts & Sciences writes about politics in Israel.

It’s getting hard to keep up with the number of shocking incidents attributed to fraternities. As headlines pile up — racist and sexist speech, sexual impropriety, destruction of property, hazing, illegal drugs, and even the death of a student — there is a growing sense that Greek organizations are out of control.

Katherine Nathanson of the Perelman School of Medicine is quoted about BRCA testing.

For years, students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been asking school leaders to change the name of Saunders Hall, named after a former trustee who was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Last month, some stood outside the building with nooses around their necks and signs such as “THIS is what SAUNDERS would do to ME.”

Should a doctor of philosophy be considered a .doctor? The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has yet to make web addresses ending in .doctor available, but the debate about who should be able to register for them has already begun. ICANN recently decided that .doctor should only be available to licensed medical practitioners, meaning the millions of Ph.D. holders in the U.S.

President Amy Gutmann, Presidential Bioethics Commission chair, writes about three key areas of ethical concern in neuroscience research and application.

Stanford University is probing a “troubling” increase in academic dishonesty among students, made easier by their use of technology, Provost John Etchemendy said in a letter to faculty. As many as 20 percent of students in a large introductory course may have cheated, Etchemendy said, adding that the school’s Office of Community Standards received an “unusually high number” of such reports at the end of the winter term.

Five seniors, Jodi Feinberg, Matthew Lisle, Shadrack Frimpong, Adrian Lievano, and Katlyn Grasso, are highlighted as the inaugural winners of the President’s Engagement Priz