UMNews
Momentum campaign gifts create distinguisued profs
A recent anonymous gift to the Momentum campaign will help create five new distinguished professorships to commend faculty scholars in the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Architecture.
Each professorship will provide funding for research pertaining to the scholarly endeavors of each Distinguished Professor.
These new Distinguished Professors are: Dr. Chuck Carver, Distinguished Professor of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences; Dr. David Ellison, Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences; Dr. Howard Gordon, Distinguished Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences; Dr. Susan Haack, Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences; and Dean Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Distinguished Professor of Architecture.
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FBI sought student records for terrorist searches
BY Inna Lifshin
DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN (U. Penn)
(U-WIRE) PHILADELPHIA – Student financial aid records have been helping to fight the war on terror for the past five years – but without students’ knowledge.
The Department of Education acknowledged last week that one of its offices had been running a program, which was discontinued last June, that searched for evidence of terrorist activity via financial aid records.
Under Project Strike Back, the FBI provided the DOE with the names of individuals under investigation for terrorism. The department would then search for these names in databases containing federal financial aid records of 14 million college students.
Through the program, the FBI had access to a variety of personal information compiled from Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms, including Social Security numbers, family income and investments and tax returns.
FBI spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan said in a statement that the program began in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the FBI discovered that terrorists have exploited programs involving student visas and financial aid.
While the FBI and the DOE have maintained that Project Strike Back was legal and had not been secret, the program has raised questions of privacy. One of the main concerns is that information collected by one government agency for a specific purpose was used by another agency for another purpose.
ETC.
The Toppel Career Center will be hosting a “Networking Made Easy” program on Sept. 12 at 4 p.m. and Sept. 14 at 2 p.m. in the Toppel Library. The program will provide tips on how to prepare for the Career Expo on Sept. 20 and similar career networking situations.