If you are in a non-Econ social science PhD program my advice is take a ton of methods, including a lot of causal inference.

Do whatever topic you want but the grad school side hustles and post grad jobs pay alot better if you good data and casual inference tools.

https://twitter.com/demarlewisiv/status/1737541906932842842

I know constructivist snark is coming because…academic twitter. And we can stay up all night criticizing positivism. Sure, we need more qual training too! But even if you want to do construct work in the end. getting these tools anyway they will pay bills along the way.

All this talk of merit and fairness when it comes to black folk reminds me of s story my grandma told me. In the MS delta when she was a kid there was this white family that owned a small plot of land on which they grew cotton and some other fruits and vegetables for sale. They picked it themselves sometimes alongside a black sharecropper family they “hired”. It was a failing farm and they swore the land was unproductive. After years of this they abandoned the land.

It’s wild we still use teaching evaluations at all to evaluate pedagogy. It’s always been a bad instrument but in this era or transactional instruction and grade grubbing it’s worse now. Good or bad my evaluations are almost *never* about instruction or content. Comments are usually about how funny I am (or not), or having kids on my intro slides, or hilariously my qualification to teach material. I know that alot of this is because I’m a black dude teaching analytical or quantitative stuff, which sometimes creates cognitive dissonance.

Nazism gives a sense of identity and belonging it can give otherwise empty people that might have a hard time fitting in. Its emotional and material. It’s an impermeable religious zeal, makes you feel good. But also, fame and money if you’re a not so smart not so popular type.

https://twitter.com/cbssunday/status/1650131355013971969

Like think about a C- med school student or lawyer that had trouble passing the bar. You feel angry at mainstream institutions that reject you, or they may be intimidating. The Fox News stuff demand only loyalty, they embrace hacks and quacks with open arms and big bags of money.

I agree man. The impetus for alot of the higher Ed blowback is in the timing. Universities loudly promoted DEI programming (which omg is so flawed) after george Floyd murder and your average middle class racist, red and blue, is furious over it because they think it’s zero sum.

https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1650140785369665538

We are scapegoated for so much of the failures in there petty bourgeois aspirations and desires, that negroes with their hands out are why they aren’t all balling out, not their 36% credit card interest rate or their boss suppressing their wage growth. And it makes them violent.

Man voting in Georgia is so different than in Illinois. When I lived in chicago, during early voting, I went to the local elementary school, waited in line about ten minutes, and they gave me a sheet of paper. I checked people off then I put it in the machine and left. Not Georgia. We drove downtown because *every* other polling place had a line >90 minutes. We paid ten bucks to park. We went in the building, then emptied out pockets to go through a metal detector. We then saw a sign about where to park to get our parking validated. Inside.

I heard this before, I think from @DaniaFrancis and/or @SandyDarity, but a big indicator for if your black kid will have a good school experience is the number or black kids in the gifted/enrichment track. Especially black boys. That has sort of been our experience so far. We loved our school in Raleigh, a former historically black gifted/talented title 1 school that is now about 70% white because of gentrification. The 9yo got through no problem, but we were worried when she was of the only black kids in the gifted track.

I have spent my entire academic life in the norms of western liberalism. I understand completely that it is that tradition that Nazis and klansmen are free to come to your campus and loudly make their points heard. Anyone who has read any history knows you are cool with this. But students and staff and faculty that hate Nazis also have a right under the same tradition to shout and yell and call them racists. And hear me, famous faculty of the western order and powerful Ivy League admins…

I hate the rain on the Eli Lilly parade, but I feel like the notion that disinvestment by large corporations will straighten out the fascists is generally not a credible threat. I mean look at Mississippi. They don’t care man they like the world small, backwards, and poor. This way they get to control it. Some small yokel sheriff that gets to play god in some backwater, and the small business classes that make money and social status extracting rent from poor people, man they don’t want no damn tech companies or universities fucking up they hustle.

Tip for Public Administration PhD students:

If you looking to fill electives and have finished your quantitative sequence, hop in a causal inference class. If you are not especially mathy (I was not) find one thats accessible. Some PhD programs offer causal inference classes as part of the core. I do not think most do though. so you can glean other departments or if your place has one of those tuition exchange programs with richer schools locally those are good places too. I took my stuff at Chicago.

Manchin clearly not supporting policies unfavorable to his corporate donors is untenable to poor or working class whites. But he can publicly trot out “work requirements” and “entitlements” as his fake sticking points because they are dog whistles that discipline poor whites. I don’t think race is the a lot thing that works this way, I think gender too. Like I imagine the stickiness of a lot of backward labor law in this country is in part due to the threat of women having equal economic power.

I’ve talked about this alot on here and other places but what drives me crazy about this country, even those with whom I agree on alot of policy, is the religious mysticism with which so many of y’all talk about American democracy. Its always been a tenuous political economy. It’s like my whole life you can’t criticize any part of the us system without getting eye rolls and “well but..”s. And it’s hella weird because any halfway educated read of American history would leave one with the impression that this shit is tenuous as hell.

If you a junior person getting alot of rejections man stick with it, keep your head up. My advisor is one of the most skilled around, super well respected and does great work. She got denied tenue at her first gig, got a new gig, kept at it. All that work help her cut her teeth. I watched her like a hawk. Everything she did. She was so skilled man. So knew her shit so well that she did this thing where she would tell a really good story with the data, and hold back just enough where she could kind of dictate the reviewer responses.

We talk a lot about the biased signal that GRE scores send for black and brown and low income kids, but in my opinion grades can be really bad too. I do not study these things empirically, but anecdotally there are several issues: Group work can be super important, especially in analytical fields at highly ranked universities. Black and brown kids are often flat out locked out of many study groups. This is hard for some white people to believe but there’s a shit ton of racism in classes.

I *do* think there are lots of things about academia that are not good fits for some people. Most academics have to:

1) lead themselves through work on detailed, very long term projects with very little supervision or structure 2) Be fine with lots of critical feedback. I shared an article review I got back once with my masters students once and they couldn’t believe it lol. Even when people really like something you did 95% of what they say will be stuff they didn’t like lol

When I was 16, I had two white police officers follow me for 20 mins coming from my aunts house. When I pulled into my parents driveway, they turned their car lights on, got out the car, and unholstered their guns.

For failing to signal. Into my own driveway. On a cul de sac. Senior year of high school, I used to pick my 15 year old cousin up on the way to school at 7:30am. For two weeks a Hispanic police officer followed us, turn by turn, the whole way to school every morning.