THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSIT Y OF PENNSYLVANIA
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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2014
Double Legends
Some Ph.D., medical and graduate students heard Legend speak at their College graduation in 2009
Legally helping college athletes overcome ‘a blurred line’ A Penn Law student group’s symposium will address issues in college sports law BY COSEtTE GASTELU Staff Writer
the College graduation ceremony in 2009. Seventeen students who received bachelor’s degrees from the College in 2009 will hear him speak for a second time when they graduate from Ph.D., graduate and
The 50-yard line on a football field might be clearly demarcated, but getting into the pros from college comes with a bit of legal “blurred lines.” Speakers at the Penn Law Entertainment and Sports Law Society’s inaugural symposium on Friday, entitled “A Blurred Line,” will discuss the gray area surrounding athletes’ transitions from amateur to professional sports. The event - which will take place at the Law School from 9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. - is bringing some of the biggest names in sports law to Penn. Jim Delaney, commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, will give the keynote address. Other speakers include Yahoo Sports’ Legal Analyst Rand Getlin, General Counsel for the NCAA Scott Bearby and CEO of Relativity Sports Group Happy Walters - a leading sports agent who inspired the title of Adam Sandler’s film “Happy Gilmore.” “We have orchestrated the event to mirror the transition from amateur to professional athletics, with discussions about amateur sports in the morning, and pro league discussions later on,” said David Simon, second-year law student and the group’s treasurer and symposium chair. The symposium comes at a time when many of the regulations limiting college athlete compensation have come under fire.
SEE COMMENCEMENT PAGE 2
SEE SPORTS LAW PAGE 6
Photo by Andrew Gardner/Illustration by Yolanda Chen
BY LAUREN FEINER Staff Writer For several Penn students, the announcement of John Legend as commencement speaker felt like deja vu. Legend, a 1999 College alum, spoke at
Capping UMOJA Week by looking at past and future
DOCTOR BY DAY, ARTIST BY NIGHT
BY ESTHER YOON Contributing Writer P e n n’s bl ac k c o m mu nity celebrated progress in spite of adversity at UMOJA Week ’s capstone event on Saturday. U MOJA hosted a d inner a nd d iscussion i n Du Bois College House to reflect on the events of UMOJA Week. The week is an annual week celebrating the culture of the African diaspora at Penn. At the event, called “Sankofa, Our Family Dinner,” speakers and students talked about “looking back to look forward,” according to Director of Makuu and Africana Studies professor Brian Peterson. He set the stage for discussion by posing questions to the audience. “How do we as a community want to respond when there are serious incidents and issues?” He asked. “How can you get the community moving so that you can go where you want to go?”
Peterson mentioned the “internal and external difficulties” that minority students face. “How do you take on the backpack of being a student of color on a pre dominantly white campus,” he asked. “Or when something impacts you because of your direct culture or connection?” Peterson said that although minority students face challenges, Penn is committed to diversity. That commitment is “not just to benefit people of color but for the entire university,” he said. “We can’t be afraid to talk about race and our struggles - we all have to have these hard conversations.” W har ton sophomore and Co-Director of UMOJA Week Valencia Lewis hoped that this week’s participants rea lize that “U MOJA ca res, the community cares, and no one is alone. UMOJA Week
SEE UMOJA PAGE 6
Nada Boulam/Associate Photo Editor
The Penn Med Art Show opened at the Fox Art Gallery in Claudia Cohen Hall this weekend. The exhibit features artistic works by faculty, staff and all types of students at the Perelman School of Medicine, the School of Veterinary Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as well as the University of Pennsylvania Health Care System. The exhibit is free and will be open until to the Penn community during normal gallery hours until March 5.
Penn study finds poverty risk factors affect school performance
The study built on previous ones by using data from across municipal organizations BY JILL GOLUB Staff Writer
Poverty does not affect a school’s performance as significantly as having students with risk factors associated with poverty, a recent Penn study found.
The study co-authored by Graduate School of Education professor John Fantuzzo found that having enrolled students with risk factors, including homelessness, maltreatment, lead exposure and poor prenatal care, will impact other students’ educational experience. It also showed that students with risk factors generally do worse in school. The study also found that concentrations of risk factors are more important than poverty in examin-
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ing classroom outcomes because poverty causes different disadvantages which affect people in different ways. “Going to school with kids with risk factors [affects] students who aren’t going through that,” Fantuzzo said. “Take homelessness: If a school has a high concentration of kids coming from emergency shelters, that school is going to then have a high turnover.” When schools have high turnover
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rates, the curriculum, teachers and other students are impacted, often negatively. While past studies only used data from schools, Fantuzzo explained that his study expanded the knowledge base by synthesizing public data from Philadelphia agencies to examine factors other than education that impact the third grade students he studied. Jean Boyer, a professor of education at Temple University, praised
the novelty of the study. “Rather than looking at an individual child and looking at risk factors, [the study] was able to do some really important developmental psychology looking at this cohort of third graders,” Boyer said. Fantuzzo, who also directs the Penn Child Research Center at GSE, used an integrated data system he helped create to link data SEE POVERTY PAGE 3
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