According to the American Council on Education, the gender gap has stayed consistent since 2000 — 57 percent of college students are female and 43 percent are male. Interestingly, the gap appears to be largest among Hispanics — only 9 percent of Hispanic men have earned a bachelors degree compared to 14 percent of Hispanic women.

I ran into this article about two weeks ago and it’s has had me thinking a lot about the gender gap on Penn’s campus ever since. According to a USAT interview with Jacqueline King, assistant vice president of ACE’s Center for Policy Analysis, “while the gender gap is important and should be addressed by educators and policymakers, these findings suggest the current female majority may be higher education’s new normal.”

When I look around my classrooms at Penn, I can’t help but think King might be right.

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On Jan. 13, the Notre Dame Observer, the campus’ student newspaper, ran a cartoon that has Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in an uproar.

The cartoon, pictured at right, shows two characters who share the following dialogue:

“What’s the easiest way to turn a fruit into a vegetable?”

“No idea.”

“A baseball bat.”

According to the cartoonist blog, the answer to the question had initially been “AIDS” and the paper rejected it, deciding it that was inappropriate. But apparently this version didn’t raise a red flag on publication night though? (I really don’t think I need to make a case for how homophobic and hateful this cartoon is.)

Editor Jenn Metz was not present the night the column was run (and apparently provided GLAAD with a tearful apology for the cartoon). The ultimate decision to run the cartoon seems to have been made by Assistant Managing Editor Kara King, who resigned this morning.

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Most college newspapers let loose once a year and, sometime around April 1, put out a joke issue. Most of the time, this issue manages to offend someone. As the person that people email or call with their DP complaints, I’ve seen this first hand.

Sometimes, though, the offense is widespread. Last year, the Hoya, the student newspaper of Georgetown University, caused such a stir with its April Fools issue (students found it racist and inflammatory) that student staged a sit-in at the newspaper’s offices.

Well, another Georgetown publication has managed to cause a stir again.

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Juliette already mentioned that we took a week off for Thanksgiving, but my apologies for my extra-long hiatus from reading/writing/breathing higher education. Catching back up to real life after a week in the Happiest Place on Earth — yes, my family went to Disney for break — took a few extra days (It’s totally okay for 21-year-olds to love WDW, by the way).

I ran across this column in USAToday this morning. It’s pretty interesting, I must admit, as it argues why men — like legacies and athletes and bootstrap-pullers — deserve special consideration in the college-admissions process. The reason why? Young women are overwhelmingly out-enrolling  young men at college, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is investigating whether or not this is leading to stricter admissions standards for women.  The author argues that it’s colleges’ imperative to keep both genders at relative parity, even if that means considering gender alongside other categories meant to bring diversity.

I’m not a fan.

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According to National Public Radio, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is currently investigating whether women have been discriminated against in the admissions process at a number of public and private colleges.

Since the 1970s, the amount of women on college campuses has risen dramatically.  Today, women are a majority of most college campuses and earn about 60% of all college degrees.  As awesome as this is for us females in higher education, it seems that this has caused a dramatic backlash.

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Two Northwestern students decided they wanted to do something different for Halloween this year. This year, they wanted to become African Americans. … So they painted their bodies black.

I know I’m not the only person who just flinched.

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Jessee Vasold, a member of the College of William and Mary’s Class of 2011, was just elected homecoming queen.  This would not have made news, except for one critical fact: Vasold is transgender.  Vasold, who prefers to be known by the gender-neutral pronoun “ze” in place of “he or she” and “zir” instead of “him or her,” identifies as gender-queer.

Vasold was nominated by her friends and was elected by her classmates in a school-wide election.  There is no existing school rule preventing men or women from running for opposite roles, and students who made nominations were simply asked to describe how the nominee exemplified school pride.

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First they brought us the news that taller people are happier, now another Princeton researcher has taken a look at Asians’ chances in the admissions game.

As reported by the Prince, Asians who scored 1600s on the SATs (this was based on 1997 numbers, before SAT reform) had the same chances as white students who scored 1460 and African American students who scored 1150 when applying to private colleges. The researcher, sociology prof Thomas Espenshade, noted that he didn’t have access to “soft variables” like extracurriculars or teacher recs.

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A proposal to change the Student Government Association’s bylaws to allow same-sex couples to run for homecoming king and queen was shot down last Thursday at the University of North Texas.

The Student Senate voted 10-5 against, with eight in abstention.

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In academic circles, David Horowitz is a controversial man.

He regularly speaks out about what he calls “Islamo-Fascism” and the threats of Muslims to the U.S. In 2007, he organized a nationwide Islamo-Fascism awareness week across dozens of campuses — the event, deemed racist and offensive by many, caused quite the stir (especially here at Penn).

Saint Louis University seems to have decided to try and avoid the controversy altogether — ”An Evening with David Horowitz: Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights” on the Saint Louis campus has been cancelled. According to the university, it did not ban the October event, hosted by the College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation, it simply asked that it be modified. Either way, they earned themselves a scathing response from Carlson Nelson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, for abandoning the college ideal of free exchange of idea.