Tracking College Responses to COVID-19

How did colleges respond to COVID-19 in Spring 2020? That was the question a team of brilliant Davidson College students (Katie Felten, Luis Toledo, Maddie Buitendorp) and I set out to answer the second that Davidson went online. Well, we’ve now collected data on 1,442 colleges and universities… and we have some answers for you. We’d love for you to read a paper we’ve written on all this, but here is the TL;DR version:

Article focused on civic engagement and residence life published in Educational Researcher

Given that tomorrow is Election Day, I’m sure many of us are thinking about what it means to be civically engaged. Well, I’d like to add to that conversation. I’m very excited to announce that a paper I wrote on the topic of civic engagement on college campuses with Brent Evans from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College and Courtney Lennartz from the University of Maryland has finally gone live online at Educational Researcher. The paper shows that residential colleges have greater civic engagement outcomes than commuter campuses. That’s a problem because around 75 percent of all college students are commuters. If all colleges are supposed to be creating civic-minded leaders, we need to figure out what is going on at residential colleges and export those practices to commuter colleges. You can find the paper here and in the Research section of my website.

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March Madness, SEM Mayhem, and “Geek Alternative Brackets”

I grew up in North Carolina where the state religion is College Basketball. I have vivid memories of my teachers wheeling in the A/V Cart and putting a paper clip in the cable jack the back of a huge CRT TV just to get the signal to put on whatever ACC or other March Madness game was happening at the time. March was a month of “worksheets” and very little instruction. It was horrible for my education, but wonderful for the soul.

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5 Great Quotes from University Lobbyists

As many of y’all know, most of my research focuses on political action in higher education, and specifically postsecondary institution lobbyists. As part of my dissertation, I’ve gotten the chance to interview some of the best in the business. In honor of presenting some of this qualitative work at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association this week, I thought I’d share five of the most interesting quotes given to me by higher education lobbyists.  Continue reading

Does your campus have a Confederate statue?

I’m pleased to finally showcase a project I’ve been working on for about a week or so. After the events of Charlottesville, a number of colleges and universities have begun to reexamine their Confederate pasts. The University of Texas at Austin and Duke University both removed statues of Robert E. Lee from places of prominence, while the President of Texas A & M university announced that the university would not take down its statue of Sul Ross, a Confederate General who led the university after the Civil War. In part to flex my data visualization muscles, and also because I think it is important that students, faculty, staff, and alumni know if there is a monument to the Confederacy on their campuses, I’ve cataloged all of the college campus-based Confederate memorials I could find on the map below.

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