NEWS BRIEFS
Asian partners
Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will exchange scholars and curators with the Central State Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan in what is called the first U.S. collaborative project with an archaeology museum in former Soviet Central Asia. The pairing is made possible by a 1998-99 International Partnership Among Museums award from the American Association of Museums.
Partners in the exchange: Frederik Hiebert, Ph.D., Penn's assistant curator for Near Eastern archaeology, and Yuri Peshkov, Ph.D., head of the Middle Ages section of the Department of Ancient and Medieval History at the Central State Museum in Amaty.
Well said
"Our strength as a nation depends upon our unflagging determination to discover new frontiers -- whether they be on Mars or in a single strand of DNA," Penn President Judith Rodin said in her April 28 testimony to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space. Rodin, a member of President Bill Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, touted the importance of federal support for university-based research as "critical to the nation's future." Penn is the largest research university in the middle Atlantic region and one of the 10 largest in the country, based on the level of federal funding for research. Check out the full text of Rodin's speech at the Almanac Web site.
First class, bar none
Penn Law School boasted the highest pass rate of candidates who took the Pennsylvania Bar Exam in February -- 93.34 percent. Only one of 15 test-takers failed. University of Pittsburgh's Law School had the lowest pass rate -- 36.85 percent. Temple University came in a notch above Pittsburgh with a 37 percent pass rate. Out of 642 candidates overall, 55.9 percent passed.