Penn in the News

During a brief recess in an honors course at Eastern Michigan University last fall, a teaching assistant approached the class’s three female professors. “I think you need to see this,” she said, tapping the icon of a furry yak on her iPhone. The app opened, and the assistant began scrolling through the feed.

Katharyn Hanson of the Museum comments on antiquities in Iraq and Syria damaged by extremist group ISIS.

Diego Aguilar Avila enrolled in Cal State Northridge last fall, and the freshman says he's lucky to have gotten in when he did. The Northridge campus recently announced plans to tighten its admission criteria beginning in fall 2016. That could have created a hurdle for Avila, who admits to receiving low grades in some of his classes at Bravo Medical Magnet High School in East Los Angeles.

A strike threat hovers over labor talks at New York University this week, more than a year after the school, in a watershed decision, recognized its graduate-student employees as part of a union. Graduate students say the school’s commitment to collective bargaining is ringing hollow, as negotiations that began in 2014 still haven’t led to a contract. To some of them, they are unionized in name only.

Sweet Briar College’s sudden decision to close may cause other struggling private colleges to do the same by creating a new paradigm for when a college should call it quits. That’s the fear of Richard Ekman, the head of the Council of Independent Colleges, which represents many small private colleges across the country. He worries Sweet Briar's decision will influence other trustees. "My hope is that it will not,” Ekman said.

Tensions between University of Idaho administrators, a fraternity and the chapter’s alumni have ended with the university’s dean of students suddenly announcing his resignation after less than three months on the job. Just prior to the announcement, sanctions brought against the fraternity over hazing allegations were dropped.

Throwing another wrench into the belief that higher education is the great equalizer, a new paper suggests that African-American graduates from elite institutions do only as well in getting jobs as white candidates from less-selective institutions.

Unveiled in 2009, Drexel's Sacramento, Calif., campus was supposed to be the first of five new locations in growing U.S. cities that would help the university expand its reach. And it was supposed to be the first step in a larger plan to open a 5,000-student undergraduate campus on a large swath of land in nearby Placer County. That's what the late Drexel president Constantine "Taki" Papadakis envisioned.

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education is cited for her thoughts on the potential negative impact of free community colleges on four-year minority-serving institutions.

Jennifer Morrissette and Peter Nowell of the Perelman School of Medicine discuss cancer treatment.