Election Day: November 2

Penn is a leader in civic engagement and encourages the Penn community to vote on Tuesday, November 2.  In order to facilitate this process, we suggest that managers and department heads allow scheduling flexibility so that staff can perform their civic duty. We ask that all keep in mind the operational needs of their respective workplaces and ensure that the normal business of the University continues as usual.

—The Division of Human Resources

Holding Politicians Accountable

FactCheck.org—a project of Penn's Annenberg Public Policy Center—is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. The Center monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Their goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding. The Center's director Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and one of Penn's most widely quoted faculty, was one of the four faculty on the Inaugural Symposium panel, Creating and Communicating Knowledge in an Unequal World. During her remarks there, she mentioned that FactCheck.org was referred to in the vice presidential debate, albeit with the wrong domain name. (Those five symposia are now available on the Inauguration website, www.upenn.edu/inauguration, in streaming video.)

  Almanac, Vol. 51, No. 9, October 26, 2004

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