‘Keep the volume low’: Being black on campus
“The world has never been fundamentally fair and decent for most people in most places, and yet they manage to build lives full of meaning and suffering and joy.”
I shared this not long ago, but it seems that not everybody is yet aware of or talking about this landmark paper in PNAS. The summary says: “By analyzing data from nearly all US PhD recipients and their dissertations across three decades, this paper finds demographically underrepresented students innovate at higher rates than majority students, but their novel contributions are discounted and less likely to earn them academic positions. The discounting of minorities’ innovations may partly explain their underrepresentation in influential positions of academia.”
I’ve spent my life birding while Black, and here’s why I can’t and won’t forgive Amy Cooper.
Thoughts from your Black colleague
In which the New York Times explains that the editor of the opinion section did not actually read an astoundingly horrific op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton before he allowed it to go to press. The NYT says that it should never have gone to press, and says that they will now use better fact-checking for their op-eds. Do they recognize that this is the same shambolic nonsense that has caused so much climate denialism to be printed without factual correction in their pages?
This is what the race gap in academia looks like (I did link to this short blog post when it came out more than two years ago, but its data visualization is getting a lot of attention this week, so I thought I’d re-share it.)
Black Birders Week takes on racism in the outdoors
Also, another landmark paper in PNAS that not everybody is talking about but is huge, showing how active learning minimizes educational inequities. I think it can support the argument that choosing against active learning methods in teaching is a choice for inequity.
Have a safe weekend, y’all.