Dr. Trevon D Logan Profile picture
Aug 31, 2020 10 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Yes, I did finish the PhD program @berkeleyecon in 4 years. There's a story behind this which is neither legendary nor remarkable. The punchline: it was NOT by design. (A Thread)
When I was a student, Berkeley had a 3 semester core sequence, so you didn't begin their field courses until the 2nd half of the 2nd year in the program. I took a field course in my 2nd semester, which was a lot of work, but allowed me to finish my fields earlier than others.
After my first year I received a research position for the Summer where I found my dissertation topic by accident. I stumbled upon it while researching child costs in household surveys but found I could do food demand. So I found a research topic that was doable early.
By the time I was finishing the core courses in the 1st half of the 2nd year I was taking my first field exam in Dec. and working on the data that would be part of my dissertation. It required a lot of manual coding so very laborious, but doable and I was still in classes so OK
By the end of my second year I was able to complete my two PhD fields as well as most of the requirements for the MA in demography and continue to work on what would become my dissertation. Having @delong & Ron as a co-advisors helps because smart people know what you should do.
Cannot stress enough the importance of the Economic History Teas that @MarthaOlney hosted. It was where you got used to talking about your work and getting feedback at preliminary stages (those "labor/applied lunches" are basically seminars, & very stressful for students, IMO)
In my third year I was working full time on the research and the economic history faculty told me that Spring that I had a job market paper and I was ready to finish. That is literally how it went. It was not by design in any way imaginable, it was unintended.
I was also working mostly outside of the department itself, hanging out in Demography with @blqueiroz. This probably helped because econ grad students can be quite taxing and competitive and it drained people's energy. I was not in Evans Hall very much, tbh.
Recall that the job market was very different then. People did not have papers under review or published then. In my defense, however, all three chapters of my dissertation are published, so I think I did a decent job. But that's the story. Nothing legendary at all, so stop!

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More from @TrevonDLogan

Jul 9
During the family reunion, I walked through downtown Coffeeville, MS with my family, and the history of #segregation & Jim Crow was everywhere. First, a new mural depicts the segregated Hamblett Hotel in town, (long closed). It shows a Black butler attending to White guests 1/N
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Walking with my uncles, they recall the simple things of childhood, like getting an ice cream cone when they came downtown on a weekend. But as Black children, they were served from the side of the creamery, because Black people were not served at the front door. 2/N
In those days, car dealers were downtown businesses, but they were not allowed to enter the showroom. They could look through the window and dream about driving, but that’s it. They couldn’t touch the new cars, lest their Black hands infect the shiny new automobiles. 3/N
Read 8 tweets
Nov 5, 2023
My opinion: I think the decline in the humanities due to the exact opposite of “lack of exposure.” Students are actually saturated with the humanities. High school requirements are typically 4 years of English, several history courses, and years of foreign language. 1/N
Humanities courses are typically the most likely to be transferred in with AP and with dual enrollment (taking college courses in high school). For better or worse, we have designed secondary education in a way that selects the humanities first due to the existing exposure. 2/N
Where do we see humanities enrollment growth? In creative writing. In technical writing. In military history. In media and film. In gender and sexuality. All of these are largely unique to college-offered humanities courses. There isn’t a high school/AP substitute here. 3/N
Read 11 tweets
Aug 6, 2023
Recall “the habitual be” and how Black people are mocked for a sophisticated linguistic structure that includes a conjugation of the verb “to be” that goes beyond the limits of English and has tangible, identifiable meaning. They use it instead to humiliate our children. 1/N
Evidence is clear that Black children understand the conjunction of “to be” at a point in time versus “to be” as a normal state. For someone to say “Trevon be on they necks” does not mean I’m doing so right now, but is something I do habitually. It’s sophisticated and nuanced 2/N
This is not grammatical standard English, but is part of the grammatical structure of AAVE. English doesn’t have a habitual conjunction of “to be,” but some other languages do. It’s not made up, strange, lazy, nor invalid. It’s language and is easily discerned by its users. 3/N
Read 5 tweets
Jul 31, 2023
The bottom line: Elite private universities do NOT have a land grant mission. They were not created to be engines of social mobility, provide opportunity to disadvantaged students, or serve the broader public. They are exclusive finishing schools.

Stop asking dogs to fly. 1/N
Elite schools educate a very, very small number of college students, but have an outsized impact on perceptions of higher education. Most higher education in America is open admissions (or nearly so) and the best of these DO serve as economic mobility engines. 2/N
If we invested more strategically in universities that are serving a broader public, providing world class education, producing cutting edge research, and changing lives we’d all be better for it. I’d settle for better community college funding. 3/N
Read 7 tweets
May 2, 2023
Watching Black conservatives confront the naked racism of their fellow travelers is fascinating. Murray is upset at teenagers because they’ve defied his belief that Black people are incapable of high cognition. Yet Black conservatives must give him the benefit of the doubt.
The level of naïveté required to believe that Murray is anything other than a racist who is so angered by any evidence of Black achievement that he argues it must be (1) not true and (2) a product of media manipulation is mind boggling. But here we are.
Murray now wants to attack the entire “Hidden Figures” movie as a false narrative that White NASA scientists could not correct because of wokeness. This ignores the source material from Margot Lee Shetterly’s book because facts do not matter here. Where is his evidence?
Read 8 tweets
Apr 27, 2023
Recently, I've been working on gender and American enslavement. Inspired by @sejr_historian's brilliant work, I want to quantify the propensity of White women to be active as economic agents in the market for enslaved people. Preliminary results are in! Buckle up!! A 🧵 1/N
We know that enslavement was an area where White women overcame coverture. For example, Mississippi was the first state to allow married women property rights in their own name in 1839. Four of the 5 sections of the Act specifically referred to rights to own slaves. 2/N
Key curiosity: Mississippi partly passes the Act because of Fisher v. Allen, in which a Mississippi woman of bi-racial Chickasaw heritage claimed property rights as Chickasaw practices for property ownership were matrilineal. Mississippi needed to extend this to White women 3/N
Read 14 tweets

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