Campus & Community

A political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has been studying Russian politics for more than a quarter century is in the midst of wrapping up two books.

The Wharton Communication Program director discusses teaching students how to be better oral and written communicators, and preparing them for the communication challenges they will face as managers. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld once joked about a study that found that speaking in front of a crowd is considered the No. 1 fear of the average person.

University founder Benjamin Franklin seems to have the perfect quote that fits any occasion. And because this is Penn, we’ve searched for one of his quotes about writing that fits this particular occasion.

 

LOOKING FOR EXCELANO: Majoring in English and Africana studies, Kassidi Jones is a senior from Hartford, Conn. Since the second semester of her freshman year, she has been a member of the Excelano Project, Penn’s premier spoken word poetry group.

Dear Benny:I’m always in awe at how much talent Penn has when it comes to its faculty members. I know some, who hold appointments in more than one school, have special titles such as Penn Integrates Knowledge (or PIK) professors. How did that program come about, and how do professors earn the title?—Amy Askalot

 The surface of a riverbed is typically lined by relatively large rocks, which protect the layers of finer sand and gravel beneath from erosion. Geologists have long thought that fluid mechanics control this pattern; the idea being that the flow of the river washes away the finer particles from the bed’s surface, leaving the larger particles behind.

The City of Philadelphia was created in 1682 as part of William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” where people of different religious faiths could worship freely and live in peace.

It was in New Haven, Conn., in the 1990s when Rogers Smith first heard about the Teachers Institute, a program that enrolls K-12 public school teachers in semester-long seminars led by university faculty. A professor at Yale at the time, Smith, quite frankly, was skeptical.