This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey announced this week that the city’s “What Works Cities Certification” from Bloomberg Philanthropies – a designation awarded to cities for their use of data to develop policy, improve city services and allocate funding – has been upgraded to a “Gold Certification.” Heidi Norman, the city’s chief information officer and director of innovation and performance, praised the city’s collaborative effort in a statement, adding that “in leveling up the quality of work and data governance to make the city a better place for everyone,” Pittsburgh looks good in gold.

A cross-party nomination has led to a controversy in Lehigh County. Gavin Holihan, Lehigh County’s Republican district attorney, was censured by a unanimous vote of GOP committee members Tuesday night for endorsing Democrat Josh Siegel’s candidacy for county executive. According to Armchair Lehigh Valley, Siegel said the move “doubled down” on “a cult-like political mentality that says party label is everything and the individual no longer matters.”

Former GOP gubernatorial candidate Jason Richey has been elected as the next chair of the Republican Committee of Allegheny County, replacing outgoing chair Sam DeMarco, who announced in January that he would resign from the role to take a job as Southwest regional director for U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick. Richey, a lawyer and partner at K&L Gates, said in a statement that the Allegheny GOP will “build a movement that stands for working class families” and that the Republican Party is ready to “unite, fight and win.”

In yet another sign of the widespread contraction of higher education, Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi announced this week what many had long expected: The commonwealth’s premier public university will close multiple satellite campuses, bowing to declining enrollment and an increasingly unstable funding landscape. While confirming that the seven largest branches will remain operational, Bendapudi said she will announce closures among the other 12 this spring – a move that many worry will increase economic, workforce and opportunity gaps between Pennsylvania’s regions.

Despite trustees expressing their “unwavering” support for Commonwealth University President Bashar Hanna, that sentiment is not prevalent. Hanna, the first president of Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania – the state institution comprised of Bloomsburg, Lock Haven and Mansfield campuses – received a unanimous vote of no-confidence from university faculty. Hanna, who was already under fire as the university deals with budget woes and declining enrollment, saw his seat get even hotter for his role in terminating a Bloomsburg University dean who won a $3.9 million verdict in federal court over his claim that he was retaliated against for helping an administrative assistant file a sexual harassment report against Hanna, who was Bloomsburg’s president at the time.

Aspiring scientists and scholars will have to shelve their dreams for now – at least at the University of Pittsburgh, which has frozen doctoral program admissions due to uncertainty over federal funding. Pitt, one of the commonwealth's seven top-tier research universities, depends heavily for its programs on the federal research dollars that the Trump administration is seeking to slash. While those funding cuts are on hold pending legal challenges, Pitt is hedging against a vastly winnowed outlook for higher learning, declining to offer doctoral admissions across its departments.