Penn in the News

I do not blame William and Mary for my brother’s suicide in April 2010. This decision was his and his alone and I will never know whether the way William and Mary treated him in the weeks leading up to his tragic decision would have made a difference in the outcome.

McMaster University is giving full-time faculty members a sizable raise this summer, with one qualification: they’re all women. The Canadian university is turning talk about its gender pay gap into action, tacking $3,515 (about $2,900 U.S.) onto the salaries of its female professors across ranks.

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education writes about how different the experiences are for African-Americans and whites when encountering the police.

Michael Useem, Howard Kunreuther and Erwann Michel-Kerjan of the Wharton School write about lessons to be learned from the earthquake in Nepal.

Irwin Horwitz starts each semester of his strategic management class at Texas A&M University-Galveston with a basic lesson. He asks his students to imagine that they’re setting up a Kool-Aid stand with a certain number of resources which cost a certain amount of money. Then he asks: How much Kool-Aid would you have to sell to break even? Most seniors majoring in management can perform this exercise with no problem.

The rioting, looting, arson, and vandalism that happened here this week might have horrified people across the country, watching it unfold on 24-hour news channels and Facebook feeds. But no one in this city should have been surprised. Much of Baltimore has long been a tinderbox of crushing poverty, pervasive violence, racism, and stark socioeconomic divides. It was only a matter of time.

CASI Spring Visiting Fellow Prashant Jha is interviewed about the Nepal earthquake.

Dean Ted Ruger of the Law School recalls his experiences with a former classmate and now U.S. senator, Ted Cruz.

To test a potential cure for hepatitis B, Benitec Biopharma Ltd. could have infected as many as 50 chimpanzees with the liver disease, then given them the drug and watched what happened. Instead, the Australian company turned to a U.K. startup for “livers on a chip” contaminated with the virus.

The University of Southern California's new online M.B.A. program is the latest entry in a renaissance for such degree offerings, a development program directors say has been made possible by advances in technology that connect students and professors online. The USC Marshall School of Business will launch its program this fall, marking the first time the university has offered the degree at a distance.