In the News

PILLOW FIGHT! Cushions and pillows of all shapes and sizes were pressed into battle April 17 by dozens of students on the lawn outside Frist Campus Center. The pillow fight lasted about 15 minutes; no casualties were reported.

With a sharp increase in applications and a lower enrollment target, the GRADUATE SCHOOL’s admission rate dropped to 10.2 percent this year. But a higher rate of acceptances means that the school can expect more first-year students next fall than planned. Of the 10,133 applicants, 1,029 were admitted and 571 accepted — a yield of 55 percent, compared to yields of 51–52 percent in the previous five years. Offers, acceptances, and the yield all declined from last year for underrepresented minority groups. The number of offers (165) and acceptances (63) for women in science and engineering fell below the numbers of the previous five years. Associate dean David Redman said the graduate school was seeking to hold total enrollment steady at about 2,200 students for the first five years of study, after admitting a record number of Ph.D. candidates a year ago. This year’s entering students include the first candidates in the new neuroscience doctoral program: 16 were admitted and nine accepted.

W.S. MERWIN ’48 won his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry April 20 for The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press), a collection of “luminous, often tender poems that focus on the profound power of memory,” according to the citation. The book is divided into sections that focus on childhood, a series of elegies to dogs, and the later years of life. In 1971 Merwin won a Pulitzer for The Carrier of Ladders.

The faculty approved a new undergraduate certificate program in LATINO STUDIES April 6. The program will provide “a broad understanding of the emergence, transformation, and consolidation of Latinos as a pan-ethnic group,” as well as an appreciation of Latino influences in American culture, according to the curriculum description. Marta Tienda, the Maurice P. During Professor in Demographic Studies, will direct the program. Latino students and alumni have pressed for an expansion of Latino studies for several years.