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.

James Vivenzio says he thought pledging a fraternity at Pennsylvania State University would mean brotherhood and honor. Instead, the 21-year-old from Great Falls, Va., says, he was force-fed buckets of liquor mixed with urine, vomit, and hot sauce; made to guzzle hard alcohol until he vomited; burned on the chest with a cigarette; and once was beaten by a member of Kappa Delta Rho after he failed to participate in a ritual.

Joseph Turow of the Annenberg School for Communication talks about the loss of privacy in the digital age.

Like many university leaders, Chancellor Rebecca Blank of the University of Wisconsin at Madison has had her ups and downs with the faculty. She butted heads with some professors in her support for a now-dead plan to make the university system into a more autonomous public authority, for example, but earned faculty praise when she defended professors against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s suggestion that faculty members might be shirking their teaching responsibilities.

Nathaniel DeNicola of the Perelman School of Medicine says, “Trackers help solve a simple problem, which is that a woman’s cycle can be unpredictable and difficult to recount from memory.”

Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School talks about why attending college to prepare for a specific job is not the best idea.

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.

Doctoral candidate Steven Jasinski of the School of Arts & Sciences is featured for naming a newly discovered dinosaur.

Can college students text and tweet their way to a better grade? In “Mobile Phones in the Classroom: Examining the Effects of Texting, Twitter and Message Content on Student Learning,” Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff, assistant professor in the department of integrative studies at Miami University (Ohio) at Middletown, explores if texting, tweeting and note taking can be combined. The article appears in the most recent edition of Communication Education, a journal of the National Communication Association.