Three-thousand Penn undergraduates moved into College Houses during an extended eight-day period with various safety protocols in place. “Move-in has always been a well-honed process, which allows us to adjust as external factors necessitate,” said Pat Killilee, director of residential services.
President Joe Biden, inaugurated on Jan. 20, has long had ties with Penn, speaking on campus about arms control as a senator, receiving an honorary degree in 2013, and more recently serving as a Penn professor. “Every time Joe Biden … visited campus, he brought forth endless expertise on a wide variety of topics—from international affairs and domestic politics to immigration policy and cancer research, and so much more,” remarked Penn President Amy Gutmann. “In addition, his unmatched personal connections with global leaders made our mission to bring the world to Penn and Penn to the world even stronger.”
Penn President Amy Gutmann welcomed students back as the semester began on Wednesday, Jan. 20, and many undergraduates settled in after their move back to campus. “The magic of a university is that every year we renew ourselves,” Gutmann said. “Every year brings a fresh influx of excitement, of energy, of enthusiasm, and unbounded potential with a new incoming class. We’re thrilled to have you here with us.”
Penn Cares, Penn’s COVID-19-response program for safeguarding the community, kickstarted in December. The strategy includes a saliva-based testing strategy that will see 40,000 screening tests conducted—by appointment only—each week, split among eight testing sites. The program is a key component of Penn’s spring semester repopulation of campus. Penn Cares also involves symptom monitoring through PennOpen Pass, a campus compact, ventilation checks, extra cleaning, and contact tracing.
Christopher Woods was named the Williams Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, effective April 1. Woods comes from the University of Chicago, where he is the John A. Wilson Professor of Sumerology and director of the Oriental Institute. That institute’s museum contains more than 350,000 artifacts. “An experienced and collaborative leader and award-winning scholar who believes deeply in the power of museums to connect past to present, Chris Woods is an ideal choice to lead the Penn Museum,” remarked Penn President Amy Gutmann.
Margo Natalie Crawford of the Center for Africana Studies spoke with Cornel West for this year’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture in Social Justice, with introductions from Annenberg School for Communication Dean John Jackson, Provost Wendell Pritchett, and Penn President Amy Gutmann. West described Dr. King as someone “whose gifts to the world are an unbelievable caravan of love in the face of 400 years of chronic hatred.
Penn Dental Medicine and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences launched the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry. The Center, co-directed by Michel Koo of Penn Dental and Kathleen Stebe of Penn Engineering, bridges the two schools' research and technologies to accelerate developments that address unmet oral health needs.
The NCAA recognized Nia Akins, a 2020 Penn graduate and athlete on the Quakers’ women’s cross country and track & field teams, as one of 10 recipients of the prestigious Today’s Top 10 Award. Said Akins of the achievement: “It is always nice to be acknowledged for my hard work, but to receive this NCAA Today’s Top 10 Award and represent this class of amazing student-athletes speaks more to the potential of this group at large and what an environment full of opportunities can do for you if you choose to take them.”
Following a historic election and its aftermath, Penn Today asked experts at the University to weigh in on the state of democracy in the United States, according to their areas of study. Says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, “A free press is alive and well; I don’t think it’s ever been stronger. Read its exposés on QAnon. The challenge facing the country is that we have channels of communication that have been abused in order to traffic in conspiracy theories, which often are harmless but can be menacing.”
In Newsweek, Rogers Smith of the School of Arts & Sciences describes the history of the filibuster, which he says began as an “accident” in the early 19th century during a rewrite of Senate rules. "Filibusters were rare, however, until the late 19th century, when the Republicans were most often the dominant party, and Democrats especially found they could block laws they didn't like by using filibusters to prevent anything else getting done until their opponents gave up," Smith said.
Nicole Holliday, an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics, and Diana Mutz, a professor of political science and communication, discussed the array of language used during and following the Jan. 6 events at the United States Capitol. Often debated is whether to call it a “mob,” a “riot,” “attempting a coup,” etc. What the researchers agree on is that discussing complicated and divisive issues in sound bites on social media is a problem.
In the latest episode of Penn Today’s “Understand This …” podcast series, Mauro Guillén, a professor of international management in the Wharton School, and Tomoko Takami, director of the Japanese Language Program in the School of Arts & Sciences, discuss the increasing importance of cross-cultural communication in business and beyond. “Each language, each culture you understand, I think makes you more effective and sensitive to cultural evaluations, even if it’s a different culture,” says Guillén. Learning a language is, he adds, a “humbling experience … that’s really important.”
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020, biologists in the School of Arts & Sciences Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs were already in the forests of Costa Rica for a research trip. They extended their stay to isolate from the virus, and had ample time to reflect on their research, which they published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In their writing, they discuss outsized impacts of climate change on tropical countries like Costa Rica and, critically, the effects on insect biodiversity. “What we have seen and lived since the mid-1970s, unambiguously, in our Costa Rican tropical wild world is that the biomass and species richness of insect individuals and species, and their interactions with everything, are decomposing,” they write.
In The New York Times, Martin Seligman of the School of Arts & Sciences encouraged people to use their imagination in envisioning the future. The result might be a boost to wellness in turbulent times. “The important thing about imagination is that it gives you optimism,” Seligman says. “Imagining the future—we call this skill prospection—and prospection is subserved by a set of brain circuits that juxtapose time and space and get you imagining things well and beyond the here and now.” He adds: “The essence of resilience about the future is: How good a prospector are you?”