Genesis Nunez

After a series of problems with the Common Application, eighty-three schools are coming together to create a new joint college application portal that will serve as an alternative — but Penn is not taking part.  The new application portal, offered through the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success, aims to attract a greater number of lower income and underrepresented and will allow students to upload projects they've worked on throughout their high school years to create an inventory of their work.

Students at Harvard protested Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to the school on Monday.  Abe's visit to the school is part of a week-long tour of the United States.

A Texas A&M University Galveston professor failed his class via email and stated he would no longer be teaching the course.  "None of you, in my opinion, given the behavior in this class, deserve to pass, or graduate to become an Aggie, as you do not in any way embody the honor that the university holds graduates should have within their personal character," management professor Irwin Horwitz wrote in the email to his students. The email comes after what he describes as a "semester of disrespect, backstabbing, lying and cheating." Hortwitz is known to he a challenging professor.

Slate reporter Katy Waldman sat in on Penn's controversial "Wasting Time on the Internet" course.  "Wasting Time," a creative writing course, is taught by Penn professor Kenny Goldsmith.

Paul Nungesser, the alleged rapist of Emma Sulkowicz--who has been walking around Columbia with a mattress to protest the school's lack of action against Nungesser--is now suing Columbia for failing "to protect him from a 'harassment campaign' by Sulkowicz." Nungesser is suing the school's board of trustees, president and a professor that allowed Sulkowicz to write her thesis on the matress-carrying protest. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday, reads, "Columbia University's effective sponsorship of the gender-based harassment and defamation of Paul resulted in an intimidating, hostile, demeaning...learning and living environment." The popularity of Sulkowicz's protest, which was picked up by The New York Times and New York Magazine, has also been damaging to Nungesser's and job prospects.  Columbia had no comment on the lawsuit.

Fraternities are having an identity crisis, according to Scott Ellman of Quartz.   Hazing practices and their "exclusionary nature" are the source of fraternities' problems.

A student at the University of California, Santa Barbara is speaking out against a meeting held by the student senate to vote on a resolution written by UCSB students that called for the school to divest from companies that assist the Israeli Defense Forces that turned into hours of UCSB students making derogatory comments about Jews.  "I am disturbed that half of my student representatives felt it right to pass a resolution that countless Jewish students vocalized as being offensive, threatening and blatantly anti-Semitic," Margaux Gundzik wrote in a letter to the editor.

Cornell's 2015 Convocation Committee has selected Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly to speak at the school's 150th Convocation ceremony.  Giffords, a Cornell alumna, served as an Arizona district representative from 2007 to 2012, during which time she was nearly killed during an assassination in 2011.

A look at student spending on housing, food and commuting at Texas Christian University has led athletic directors to consider standardizing the allowances athletes are granted as part of their financial aid packages.  The study, which revealed that students spend an average of $4,000 throughout the year, has been concerning for athletic directors  that believe they will be "at a competitive disadvantage in recruiting players" if their schools are not able to offer athletes financial offers that will meet all of their expenses.

In his paper presented to the American Educational Research Association last Sunday, postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Collin Ruud found that Facebook plays a crucial role in helping students get accustomed to college life.  Rudd reports in the paper, "Social Networking and Social Support: Does It Play a Role in College Social Integration?," that there exists a relationship "between social-media use and feelings of belonging to the broader campus community" and that those students that used Facebook to stay in contact with their friends from high school felt closer to their communities at college.