Five Hanover High School students lost their sports captaincies last month after allegedly stealing exams in June, according to the Valley News. Hanover High School Athletic Director Mike Jackson rescinded the captaincies after receiving a report from the Hanover Police detailing the roles the students allegedly played in the incident. Parents of the accused said that they agreed that students should be punished if they committed a crime, but that they believed the punishment has been applied unequally, as not all students involved with the incident lost their positions. Jackson defended his stance, stating that the students who retained their captaincies did not violate the law, but only committed "academic transgressions," for which there is no athletic penalty.
Harvard University's first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust, was officially inaugurated on Friday. In her inaugural address, Faust responded to criticism from a higher education panel previously assembled by the Bush Administration, according to CNN. The panel had recommended that institutions of higher education focus on training a competitive "global work force." Faust said that while training students for careers is important, the university is a place for "philosophers as well as scientists," where knowledge and learning are pursued because "they define what has over centuries made us human, not because they can enhance our global competitiveness." Faust ascends to her position shortly after the controversy surrounding former President Larry Summer's suggestion that women might have trouble finding employment in technical professions because they are innately worse at math than men.
In a recent study, abortion was found to be as common in countries where it is banned as in countries where it is legal, the Associated Press reported. The study examined abortion rates from 1995 to 2003 and concluded that the number of abortions performed in poor and wealthy countries is virtually equal and that over half of all abortions in the world are performed in unsafe conditions. Gilda Sedgh of the Guttmacher Institute conducted the study along with colleagues from the World Health Organization. The study was published in an issue of The Lancet focusing on maternal health.
