Amherst College President Carolyn Martin has created a new committee on enhancing sexual respect at Amherst and has met with sexual assault victims in response to an article written by former Amherst student Angie Epifano, Inside Higher Ed reported. Colby Bruno, managing director of the Victim Rights Law Center, said that Amherst is not unique in its problems addressing sexual assault and believes that other schools should model the proactive response Martin took after the issue was brought to light. Martin said her goal is to "integrate discussions about issues of this sort into the intellectual growth of our students in a fundamental way," Inside Higher Ed reported. On Oct. 17, The Amherst Student published Epifano's story about her rape and subsequent mistreatment by the college, according to Inside Higher Ed.
Psychology professor Jerald Kralik and his students recently published a paper on irrational decision-making that concluded that monkeys preference the average value of goods over the overall value of goods when making choices, according to a Dartmouth press release. Kralik tested his hypothesis that people will choose a high-quality good over the same high-quality good mixed with low-quality goods, even if the total value of the latter group is greater, on rhesus macaque monkeys both in laboratories and in the field. The monkeys chose a meal of fruit over a meal of fruit mixed with vegetables because the fruit is more prized, meaning the monkeys chose the meal with higher average value rather than higher overall value. Kralik said that this simplifying and approximating of situations is useful, but can also lead to irrational decision-making, according to the press release.
Conservative activist and associate director of the University of Iowa College of Law's writing center Teresa Wagner has accused the school of discriminating against her due to her political beliefs, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Wagner has applied for positions at the law school on several occasions but has been rejected each time. Wagner believes that she was qualified for the positions and that the law school's liberal bias resulted in her rejections. The school claims, however, that Wagner was not accepted because she expressed during her interview that she was unwilling to perform some of the requirements of the job, The Chronicle reported.
