Quick Takes

The State Department has pledged to speed up the visa review process for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from outside the United States -- many of whom have been experiencing serious delays, The New York Times reported. The department said it would bring in extra staff to deal with a backlog, and would also adopt new procedures to prevent future delays. Eventually, routine visa applications should be dealt with in two weeks.

Harvard University plans to announce this week that it is creating an endowed visiting professorship in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies, and that it believes that its chair will be the first of its kind in American higher education, The New York Times reported. (In 2003, the University of Maryland at College Park announced a planned bequest to endow such a chair, so Maryland may have bragging rights on the first announced plans.) The Harvard chair will be named for F.O. Matthiessen, a Harvard literary scholar whom -- as described by a draft press release quoted by the Times -- was "an unusual example of a gay man who lived his sexuality as an ‘open secret’ in the mid-twentieth century,” and who “leapt to his death from the window of a Boston hotel room” in 1950, despondent over the death of his partner.

Loyola College in Maryland announced Tuesday that it will no longer require the SAT or the ACT for admission. Those who wish not to submit scores may instead provide an additional teacher recommendation and/or essay. Loyola’s president, Rev. Brian F. Linnane, said in the announcement: “High standardized test scores, while a laudable accomplishment, tell you far less about a person’s talents and potential to succeed in college than course selection, grades earned, personal statements, and extracurricular involvement and achievement. We believe this approach will allow us to become a more inclusive university that recognizes more fully the great depth and breadth of gifts and experiences our prospective students could bring to our community.”

An analysis of contemporary data sets on gender and math ability finds that culture, not biology, is responsible for any gender gap in performance. The analysis appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is based on a series of statistics, showing, for example, that girls at all grade levels now perform on a par with boys on standardized mathematics tests, that American girls are now taking calculus in high school at the same rate as boys, and that the percentage of U.S. doctorates in the mathematical sciences awarded to women has climbed to 30 percent, up from a nadir of 5 percent in the 1950s.