The University of Pennsylvania Board of Trustees announced the nomination of M. Elizabeth Magill to serve as the ninth president of the University. In addition to being an “extraordinarily accomplished academic leader,” said Trustees Chair Scott Bok, she also “truly understands and values the critical role of faculty in teaching and research, which is so important to Penn.” Magill is presently the executive vice president and provost of the University of Virginia; she will assume the Penn presidency on July 1.
A $5 million commitment from James S. and Gail Petty Riepe will endow a new PIK Professorship in recognition of Penn President Amy Gutmann’s distinguished tenure as Penn’s longest-serving president. “Amy Gutmann has created a tremendous legacy at Penn, and the Penn Integrates Knowledge program stands as one of her signature initiatives,” Jim Riepe explained. Integrating knowledge across disciplines was a founding principle of the Penn Compact.
Penn and the Graduate School of Education will contribute more than $4 million to West Philadelphia’s Henry C. Lea School over the next five years, supporting the K-8 school’s key initiatives. “This agreement is a historic milestone in the longstanding collaboration between Penn, our Graduate School of Education, and Lea,” says Penn President Amy Gutmann. “This collaboration with the School District and the PFT adds another important component to Penn’s expansive commitment to Philadelphia’s schools.”
The University announced an $18 million gift from Scott and Elena Shleifer in support of students who are the first in their generation to attend college or come from modest-income households. Nearly 20 percent of undergraduate students benefit from the Penn First Plus program, created in 2018 by Penn President Amy Gutmann and leaders across the University.
In anticipation of the return to campus for the spring semester, Penn Today outlined guidelines for gateway testing, the COVID-19 booster requirement, PennOpen Pass, new mask requirements, and what to know about testing for the remainder of the semester.
Two Penn scientists working rapidly to keep up with the evolving SARS-CoV-2, Frederic Bushman and Susan Weiss of the Center for Research on Coronavirus and Other Emerging Pathogens, describe key findings about the omicron variant. They explain its plethora of mutations, its dominance as a strain, and leading theories of how it emerged.
Penn-led research, in collaboration with Princeton and Washington University in St. Louis, found that by age 26, six in 10 Black men whose parents have a high school diploma or less had been arrested, while four in 10 had experienced probation, and four in 10 had been incarcerated. Among Latinx men and Black women, one in four was arrested by age 26. “The magnitude of the criminal legal system in the lives of these young people, and by consequence, their families and communities, is just staggering,” says Penn sociologist Courtney Boen.
Kathryn Hellerstein, a professor of Germanic languages and literature in the School of Arts & Sciences, has been exploring the archives of Irene Eber, donated to Penn Libraries in 2019 as the Irene Eber Gift of the Yedidya Geminder Memorial Collection of Sino-Judaica. The archives, which explore the Jewish-China connection, are being explored as part of Hellerstein’s first-year seminar, “Jews and China: Views from Two Perspectives.”
A “megastudy” from the Wharton School’s Katy Milkman and Angela Duckworth partnered with 24 Hour Fitness to create a 28-day workout rewards program intended to test inexpensive, scalable, science-based interventions for improving exercise habits. Among other findings, a key discovery was that 45 percent of interventions—which ranged from text reminders to weekly emails—significantly increased weekly gym visits by 9 to 27 percent.
Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Dolores Albarracín, alongside co-authors Man-pui Sally Chan and Kathleen Hall Jamieson of Penn, and Julia Albarracín of Western Illinois University, explore how conspiracy theories have taken hold in recent years in the new book, “Creating Conspiracy Beliefs.” “It’s an integration of all the factors that psychologists and other social scientists have been pointing to when it comes to figuring out why people believe in conspiracies,” says Albarracín.
Penn Today discussed the college football season with fifth-year senior Brian O’Neill, along with his plans for the future. “We definitely wish we could have won the championship, but sometimes things don’t go your way,” O’Neill said. “But I would say the positives are we had a lot of underclassmen really step up. Guys like [junior] Chris Rankins, [junior] Jaden Key, and Micah Morris really stepped up and made big plays. Going forward, with the game exposure they had, I think that experience is going to pay dividends.”
In a Wall Street Journal analysis of gratitude practice, Martin E.P. Seligman, director of Penn’s Positive Psychology Center, remarked on the significance of shifting focus to positive outcomes in our lives. “Humans are built to attend to the things that go badly in our lives,” Seligman says. “A lot of the exercises in positive psychology are ways of teaching people to savor and pay attention to what goes well.”
Connected by Penn FLASH, a platform founded in 2019 initially to connect first-generation, highly aided students with Penn alumni, Rachel Swym and Leanne Huebner developed a mentor relationship that has endured. This summer, Swym completed an internship with Minds Matter, an educational nonprofit co-founded by Huebner. The FLASH program has since expanded to any student seeking to build a supportive network, administered by the Greenfield Intercultural Center, among others.
In a Q&A with Penn Today, Cait Lamberton of the Wharton School explained some possible reasons that Wordle, a popular web-based word game, has accomplished such universal adoration, citing cultural historian Johan Huizinga’s ideas about play. “People play [Wordle] because they choose to,” said Lamberton. “Nothing yells, ‘Come back tomorrow!’ or ‘If you play again, we’ll give you a reward!’ Wordle is very ‘pure’ play in that sense.”
In Axios, John L. Jackson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, likened a recent surge in book bans to U.S. political divisions. “It’s almost immaterial what the books are and what’s in them,” Jackson said. “It’s all about the readers. It’s all about the folks who are organizing our contemporary political discourse.”
