Just some links to things I’ve been reading, listening to, or watching this past week.
Higher Ed
People can sometimes talk about certain states as if what happens there stays there. This is one of the reasons I appreciated this Vanity Fair article on the ways Florida’s recent attack on the New College is just the beginning for the country. This does push me to question what we are doing to ensure these types of attacks do not succeed at other institutions across the country. Just take a look at this Texas Tribune article on a memo from the Texas Governor’s “chief of staff Gardner Pate [who] told agency leaders that using diversity, equity and inclusion policies in hiring violates federal and state employment laws.”
Chris Bennett, dope researcher and even cooler husband, recently published a piece on the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center chalkboard providing an overview of his recently published article in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. This open-access brief does a great job outlining a massive experiment focused on estimating the likelihood of receiving a callback from employers for fictional applicants with MBAs from different types of institutions. (Spoiler alert! There’s no evidence of a difference even when comparing to folks with only a bachelor’s degree.)
Anything but Higher Ed
The New York Times did a big piece chock full of figures on the ways that childbirth is deadlier for Black families, even if they’re rich. This is an upshot overview of an NBER working paper (not yet peer reviewed) published this year from Kate Kennedy-Moulton, Sarah Miller, Petra Persson, Maya Rossin-Slater, Laura Wherry, and Gloria Aldana studying California. I’m a big fan of rich, descriptive research that works to document the extent of these types of disparities. I’ll also note though that this has been something social scientists have been documenting for a number of years. I wonder when policy actors start believing that this is a real issue that needs actual solutions.
I keep trying to read anything I can on the devastating ecological disaster unfolding in East Palenstine, Ohio. I’m especially keen to read work that pushes us to consider the intersections between the recent calls for change from railroad labor and the derailment so I appreciated this article from The New Republic highlighting those connections.
NPR’s Throughline (deep dives into the history of tons of interesting things) did a piece on the myth of “Whiteness.” In it, they highlight the case of Bhagat Singh Thind which is a very interesting legal case that helps show just how flexible our definitions of racial groups are. In a recent working paper (also not yet peer reviewed) investigating the use of racial categories in education research, my colleagues Karly Ford, Samantha Viano, Marc Guerrero, and I noted the issues with using the term “Caucasian” in research. We spent a bit of time teasing that out so I’ll just throw that in here:
“In the US, key legal battles around which peoples could hold citizenship eventually led to “Caucasian” not just being a sociopolitical category, but a legal one with much consequence. The early 1920s U.S. Supreme Court cases Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Thind demonstrate the variability of justifications used to police and solidify the boundaries of Whiteness. While Japanese-born Takao Ozawa was denied naturalization because, despite his white skin color, his race was not deemed “Caucasian,” the court later ruled against Bhagat Singh Thind that despite his “Caucasian” or Aryan origins, his brown skin meant he was not white (Haney López, 1997). ”