A story in Inside Higher Ed on reading lists for incoming first-year students includes a comment from Jonathan R. Wynn, 2017 PEP Fellow, who is one of two co-chairs of the book selection committee at UMass Amherst. The selection is “The Other Wes Moore,” a nonfiction book that tells the story of two black boys growing up in Baltimore. “We want to tackle issues of community and also engage students at the point of…making choices and defining who they are,” Wynn says.

Peter M. Haas, 2015 PEP Fellow, co-authors a column in the Gazette where he argues that President Donald J. Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Accord on climate change shows that the president does not see the bigger picture, “which is the global transition to a non-fossil fuel-based economy.” 

A new study by 2015 PEP Fellow Nilanjana Dasgupta and her Ph.D. student Tara C. Dennehy covered in The Atlantic, Inside Higher Ed, ScienMag, and IMechE.org found that early in college, young women in engineering majors felt more confident about their ability, a greater sense of belonging in engineering, more motivated and less anxious if they had a female, but not male, peer mentor. At the end of the first college year, a remarkable 100 percent of women students mentored by advanced female peers were still in engineering majors, Dasgupta says. “That number is spectacular because the first year of college is typically the time of greatest attrition from STEM majors, but none of the women with female mentors dropped out,” she adds. This compares with an 18 percent dropout rate for women students with male mentors and 11 percent for women with no mentors, the control group.

Samuel Redman, Assistant Professor of History, writes in The Conversation about how the Piltdown Man hoax in 1912 showed how scientific information and inquiry can be hampered and distorted when researchers are denied access to findings and historical objects. He says the faster and freer flow of information in today’s world would make such a hoax much more difficult to pull off. He also says free flow of information is key to promoting scientific discovery and preventing false or misleading findings.