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:
I love college football. I also love studying lobbying in higher education. So, I thought, why not combine those two loves and see what happens? So, I present to you the first annual College Lobby Bowl.
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.
They say every day is a great day to be a Wildcat, but today is an especially great day for me. I am so excited to announce that I’ve accepted a two-year appointment as a visiting faculty member in the Department of Educational Studies at my alma mater, Davidson College.
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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.
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
Good Morning #GradStudentTax / #GradSchoolTax opponents! I have some positive news for you – and updated action items. TL;DR version is your hard work is paying off – but we need you to do more!
After suggesting in my previous post and on Twitter that writing Op-Eds might be useful in combatting the #GradStudentTax, I was asked by the LA Times to write about the issue. I was honored to be asked and figured I should follow my own advice. Here is a copy of the Op-ed as it ran in the print version of the L.A. Times.
The following was a Twitter Thread I posted on Saturday, November 18th, 2017. I was asked to put it into one post for sharing. The post offers my advice for lobbying Congress on the proposed tax on graduate student tuition waivers.
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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.