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All great institutions — and Penn is surely a great institution — run into trouble from time to time. When they do, the best strategy is to fall back on their mission and guiding principles to get them through it. Penn’s problem isn’t that its now-deposed president didn’t — how’s this for irony? — have the right answer to a tough question. It’s that Penn’s actions for 30 years have mostly been about advancing Penn and creating an unequal world in which Penn thrives. Nothing Liz Magill said or didn’t say was going to change that.

According to University of Pikeville President Burton Webb, the recently-released study on whether there should be a four-year state-run university in Eastern Kentucky is the beginning of a welcomed conversation. But it’s not the conclusion. On Nov. 17, the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education voted to release the findings of the study, which was performed as a result of a Senate resolution sponsored by Senate President Robert Stivers (R-Manchester).
 

Tania Tetlow, the newish president of Fordham University, was in New Orleans, isolating with a case of Covid over winter break, when she learned that Claudine Gay had been forced to resign as Harvard’s president. She did not know all the facts of the case, but it was still a sobering moment.  The ability to navigate through turbulence is one of the many assets that brought Ms. Tetlow to Fordham. Added to her wide-ranging résumé — putting murderers and drug lords in jail as a federal prosecutor in New Orleans, challenging longstanding gender barriers while untangling the finances of a foundering institution, singing the national anthem at Yankee Stadium — Ms. Tetlow’s somewhat unusual profile seems uniquely suited to Fordham.

Azita Emami, dean of the Yale School of Nursing; Megan L. Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health; and Jessica Illuzzi, deputy dean for Education of the Yale School of Medicine, write:  The “Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act,” legislation now being considered by Congress, would offer new federal grants to help people afford short-term job training that leads to a credential recognized by employers. Congress should be commended for trying to help Americans develop skills that will lead to productive, rewarding careers. But the House of Representatives, looking to offset the cost of these new grants, has proposed taking away aid from other students, including those studying to be doctors, nurses, physician assistants and public health practitioners — fields already facing an acute workforce shortage that, under this plan, seems sure to get worse.
It doesn’t make sense to help one set of students by denying essential aid to others — especially health workers in short supply. 

As humanities programs face continued cuts and public skepticism of their value, a small Pennsylvania liberal arts college is setting itself apart by investing and creating more opportunities for its humanities majors. ycoming College, in Williamsport, PA, recently opened an on-campus research center, established an annual undergraduate humanities research conference and launched a related journal to publish research students present at the conference. Academic leaders have also gotten students involved in a digital project focused on the institution’s history.