With five games to play in the fall season, Penn's teams have an overall record 43-37-5 and will not bring home any Ivy League titles. Some teams have been disappointing, some have played up to mediocre expectations, and some have demonstrated that there are reasons to have high hopes for the future.

For many students, the decision to pursue higher education is not a particularly difficult one to make. For St. Francis junior Bassith Yessoufou, the decision meant leaving his country, learning a new language and adapting to a culture that is wildly different from his home in the Ivory Coast.

The new College of Arts and Sciences curriculum just premiered a few months ago, but some students are pushing for more changes. Last night, about 50 students came to Rodin College House's Rooftop Lounge to discuss a proposed requirement that would mandate that College students study minority culture in the United States.

Avery Lawrence is a College junior from Charlottesville, Va. His e-mail address is lawrence@dailypennsylvanian.com.

The fish may have been fresh, but that doesn't mean students were biting. Faced with the task of pleasing the often-sophisticated palate of the average Penn student, Dining Services put its faith last month in the small island nation of Iceland to get students excited about eating on campus.

While the Penn men's basketball team is one of four Ivies without a black coach, the Red and Blue is still doing its part to support diversity. This weekend, the Quakers will compete in the Black Coaches Invitational, an event sponsored by the Black Coaches Association.

An estimated 10 million Americans under the age of 30 cast their votes in Tuesday's mid-term elections, 2 million more than in 2002. High voting rates on Penn's campus reflected this trend. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which studies voting among the young and reported these preliminary data, youth voting increased by 4 percentage points from the previous mid-term election.

Few students would want to go back to eating lunch at their elementary-school cafeterias. But that is exactly what Jan Poppendieck does. A professor of sociology at Hunter College, a part of the City University of New York, Poppendieck studies poverty, hunger and food assistance in the United States.

On Nov. 24, 2002, Penn beat Iowa State, 84-77 in the Midwest-dominated Las Vegas Invitational (the other two teams were Illinois and Eastern Illinois). That was the last time the Quakers played three games in three days - winning two - until this weekend, when the Quakers will take on Texas-El-Paso, Saint Francis (N.

After struggling against the zone last year, Penn faces a coach who has made a living with the 2-3

Some semblance of sanity finally returned to the Tracy McIntosh trial this week. The former Neurology professor and convicted sex offender had - up until this point - gotten away with his crimes with little more than a slap on the wrist. After promising to show the niece of his friend around the Penn area, McIntosh took the 23-year-old to various local bars and then back to his office, where he allegedly raped her.

Lack of cash will no longer be a problem for students looking to hail a cab.

High-profile basketball recruiting prospect Josh Owens has chosen to play his college ball at Stanford, rather than at Penn or Vanderbilt, the other two teams on his list. According to a source close to the situation, the Austell, Ga., native is expected to sign a national letter of intent to play for the Cardinal.

Former Penn football coach John Stiegman died of cancer in his home in Lawrenceville, N.J., on Oct. 31, at the age of 83. The Buffalo, N.Y., native spent time as a head coach at Rutgers and at Iowa Wesleyan, as well as Penn, during a coaching career that spanned three decades between the 1940s and the 1970s.

After a video showed horrific animal-testing experiments 20 years ago, Penn and others have cleaned up their acts.

Tenure-track professorships are among the most coveted jobs in academia, but that's not stopping a growing number of women from turning them down. At Harvard University, the percentage of women who accepted tenure-track positions during the 2005-06 academic year dropped drastically, according to a recently released Harvard report.

A documentary alleging that the American media is biased in favor of Israel sparked debate in Logan Hall last night. A discussion panel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was held before an audience of about 10 by the Muslim Students Association. Moderator Arsalan Iftikhar, the legal director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has appeared on talk shows on numerous news channels, including CNN, the BBC and Fox News.