Kim Weeden
@WeedenKim
Followers
13,356
Following
922
Media
838
Statuses
12,442
More often on 'sky than here. Affiliate @CornellSoc , @InequalityCU , @SociologicalSci but don't speak for these orgs. Higher ed, inequality, work, gender, AK
USA
Joined July 2013
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
キスの日
• 269883 Tweets
Bronx
• 141545 Tweets
Taiwan
• 116042 Tweets
hoshi
• 90932 Tweets
INCOMPARABLE WINNER ELVISH
• 63787 Tweets
Kano
• 55776 Tweets
DILAW OUT NOW
• 36718 Tweets
Ticketmaster
• 32408 Tweets
LAYOVER DOMINATION
• 31001 Tweets
HBD YTSTAR ABHISHEK MALHAN
• 27974 Tweets
CONGRATULATIONS TAEHYUNG
• 27565 Tweets
Live Nation
• 26658 Tweets
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
• 26530 Tweets
FELIX LOUIS VUITTON CRUISE
• 24615 Tweets
CSK BAAP OF RCB
• 23837 Tweets
NEWJEANS IS BACK
• 23509 Tweets
은호야 생일
• 19355 Tweets
FELIX ENAMORA A BARCELONA
• 16559 Tweets
Wanda
• 16290 Tweets
$Retik
• 15634 Tweets
$BEER
• 14795 Tweets
Paquetá
• 14697 Tweets
Claudio Iturra
• 12636 Tweets
Zverev
• 12274 Tweets
SummerSlam
• 12064 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
In normal times, connections between students on a college campus are an asset. During a pandemic, they are not.
My paper with Ben Cornwell on the structure of course enrollment networks
@Cornell
now out
@SociologicalSci
(
#OA
):
1/n
10
117
275
What an administrator says: "this is the rule, but students can petition for an exemption."
What a sociologist hears: "this is the rule, but middle- or upper-class students who grew up thinking it's their right to question school authority figures can petition for an exemption.
52
2K
7K
1-2 weeks before an exam, I give students a list of all possible essay exam questions. A non-soc colleague asked (paraphrased), "aren't you worried about students preparing answers to all of the questions in advance?"
Evidently, we have quite different views on goal of exams.
107
349
6K
Universities need to plan now for how they will protect instructors - disproportionately women, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous scholars, & adjuncts - who teach courses on race and racial inequality from harassment, doxxing, threats, and organized campaigns to get them fired. 1/5
23
829
3K
Should universities resume face-to-face instruction in fall? Ben Cornwell and I posted a working paper with relevant evidence from
@Cornell
on the structure of enrollment networks that connect students and classes.
Summary in thread, preprint here:
1/11
73
1K
2K
RFK Jr. is welcome to submit his research to a peer reviewed conference and, if accepted, present a 12 minute distillation of 2 years' work at 8 am on Sunday morning to an audience of 5 people, 3 of whom are hungover and 1 of whom is the hotel staff who brings water glasses.
25
286
2K
At this point in the term, terrible things, such as a grandmother's death, happen to our students at unnaturally and alarmingly high rates. As instructors, we suspect some excuses are false, but we don't know which ones.
It doesn’t matter.
A story, with a point at the end
/1
65
340
1K
It's naive to think that low-SES kids will have a better chance of admission in a post-SAT world where more weight is given to essays, extracurricular activities, letters of recommendation, AP courses/scores, etc.
I’m proud of
@UChicago
for taking important steps to expand access to the extraordinary college education it offers.
22
66
270
45
319
1K
The Ford Foundation's decision to sunset its fellowship program offers cautionary tale of danger of relying on private philanthropy to fund public good (tho to be sure, recipients also benefited directly).
More reliance on philanthropy also means more volatility in resources.
8
174
1K
So yes, the mortality rate among grandmothers may spike toward the end of term. But I’d rather accept false excuses and “be taken advantage of” sometimes than accuse a student of making up a traumatic event when one occurred. The cost of the latter error is just too high. /9
14
124
1K
Rather than argue over whether to offer algebra in 8th grade, we should be questioning premise that calculus is best end point for HS math education. For vast majority of students, even most heading into STEM, statistics would be more useful, help make better-informed citizens.
47
100
1K
IMO, there is no principle of equity worth defending, no lesson about taking responsibility worth emphasizing, to the point that we hurt students when they are most in need of compassion. /fin
28
85
1K
Three pervasive myths about higher education in the US:
1) Online courses are cheaper for universities to produce and deliver.
2) Student tuition, even when not discounted by financial aid, covers the full cost of their education.
3) Endowments are like big checking accounts.
13
206
869
I can’t stop thinking about
#WhyIDidntReport
. The stories are deeply personal but in some ways universal: not because all women have been raped, but because most of us have experiences stemming from the same culture. I don’t often share personal stuff on Twitter, but here goes.
26
286
819
That sound you hear is hundreds of sociology departments updating their "what can you do with a sociology degree" pages.
#AmandaGorman
2
110
820
14/14
It’s a telling statement about the prevalence of sexual violence in America that women who have never been raped feel like we won the damned lottery. /fin
14
162
799
A bonus: if I unintentionally write a bad question, meaning one with ambiguous or unclear wording, I'll know based on the students' questions to me during office hours or over e-mail. I can clarify the study question for everyone, or just not put it on the exam.
6
17
779
.
@RepTomReed
probably thinks he's safe as a Republican in a heavily gerrymandered, heavily WWC district. He's wrong. The anger is palpable.
Constituent at town hall for Rep. Tom Reed: "I'm a veteran. Everyone here deserves single-payer health care, now."
498
5K
11K
4
196
668
When I was in grad school, a prof tried "what's your favorite TV show" as an icebreaker in a PhD seminar. The very first person answered with a variant of "I'm too much of a Very Serious Intellectual to waste my time on TV." It went downhill from there.
What’s the worst icebreaker activity you’ve participated in?
72
11
37
31
49
725
A prof, not in my dept, suggested requiring students to turn on video feed to ensure they are paying attention. Please don't.
* their computer may lack a camera
* they may have weak wifi
* they may not want others to see their home
* counterproductive if problem is soporific prof
27
81
685
Timely reminder that "IRB approval" and "ethical research" are not synonymous. IRBs have a narrow mandate, namely ensuring compliance to laws intended to protect human research subjects. Many unethical research practices fall outside of IRBs' mandate.
1/
5
95
679
People on a plane who are more obnoxious than crying babies:
* manspreaders
* porn watchers
* tray tappers
* seat kickers
* loud talkers
* people who shoot dirty looks at crying babies
@yashar
This may be politically incorrect response but there’s really little excuse for young parents to bring babies on planes and inconvenience other passengers. My parents didn’t take us anywhere at that age. Nowadays young ppl want to “have it all”.
115
1
9
36
53
666
I'm impressed by how well David Brooks is able to demonstrate such ignorance of intellectual history in a mere 24 words.
32
137
647
@zarqawiyyah
More mandatory, 2 hour, online training videos purchased from external organizations that, for a modest fee, will teach university employees to be changemakers and thought leaders.
7
3
644
Big Data is a helluva drug. In many users, it induces selective amnesia: users forget that they still need a good research question, and that other scholars have likely written smart stuff on the topic before ... even if they lacked complete registry data or 18 bazillion tweets.
6
131
643
I don't care how many hours academics work. I do care that some academics create work hours for others by being "difficult" or by shirking tasks that then fall on someone else. This is not unique to academia, but it's exacerbated by academic reward systems.
7
117
601
@SpeakerRyan
Horatio Alger: fiction.
Atlas Shrugged: fiction.
Decades of empirical research that shows strong "condition of birth" effects in US: fact.
3
64
547
Regrets? Not so fast.
A 🧵on the
@washingtonpost
article on college majors, based on poking around in the data on which most of it is based - the Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decision-making.
Data:
Story:
9
229
541
"Gee, I was about to sexually harass a colleague, but then I remembered that hour-long training video with the overly perky actors and the super-easy on-line quiz that my employer requires everyone to complete each year," said no sexual harasser, ever.
11
39
532
@NAChristakis
A pretty useless bit of data unless you know the total n of courses, how many students take these courses, and whether any are required (I suspect not).
Assuming these courses aren't required, what is objection to offering them? Isn't this consistent with "marketplace of ideas"?
55
9
499
Wow.
Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University and CNN's Chris Cuomo discusses Cornell's
@WeedenKim
's research on network analysis showing that the vast majority of students could reach each other within three degrees of connection.
4
26
101
15
39
495
@katiedimartin
I don't have my copy of Distinction handy, but didn't Bourdieu claim that professors like to run b/c it requires little financial capital, can be done alone, and fits into the whole masochistic, anxious striving thing many academics have going on?
(I may be making this up, too.)
7
11
490
@hsoussoko
@jenniferdoleac
"Why don't female academics boycott"?
Because boycotting a conference does far more damage to the career of a woman who boycotts than to the career of the harasser, esp. if (as is likely) woman is junior to harasser.
Harassers need to change, not the people they harass.
13
14
480
I genuinely don't understand why so many social scientists have bought into the idea that letters of recommendation are *less* biased, less likely to reflect past advantage, and more predictive of future success than GRE scores.
17
61
455
I don't usually bother with titles, but I think I'm going to start going by Doctor Professor Distinguished Chair Director Deputy Editor Presidential Fellow Kiddo Weeden.
7
17
459
I doubt there's a woman in academia who hasn't made this face at some point.
My first conference panel. Another panelist asked me to get fresh glasses and water for the table. Curiously, he didn't ask any of the other panelists, all men, to help.
The panel was on inequality.
7
36
437
By putting more and more weight on UG or pre-doc research experiences in grad admissions, Phd programs are (1) compounding role of luck and structural inequities in access to RA positions and (2) creating incentives for students to specialize too early and become narrow thinkers.
15
43
441
Grad student me: yikes, I have a talk next month
Assistant prof me: yikes, I have a talk next week
Associate prof me: yikes, I have a talk tomorrow
Now me: I have a talk today
Amazing how things that once seemed so hard get easier. (Granted, some things get harder, too.)
11
24
439
The lack of knowledge about how PhD programs work is not just a "first gen" thing. There's no good reason to assume that 2nd gen college grads magically know how to get into and thrive in grad school, or that they have anyone in their network that they can ask.
11
35
426
When a faculty member in a dept. is exempt from doing service or service teaching, whether b/c of an investigation or demonstrated incompetence or structural arrangements or ego, that work doesn't simply go away. It falls on others.
Good for Dr. Subramanian for calling this out.
6
70
419
Study: men are more likely to receive favorable grade changes because they are more likely to ask professors for a regrade.
Assuming this replicates, it's a great example of an inequality that should be addressed by getting men to lean out, not by getting women to lean in.
Male students are much more likely to ask for and receive favorable grade changes.
Paper: "Ask and You Shall Receive? Gender Differences in Regrades in College"
Context: "a large 4-year public university"
#SocSciResearch
Link:
10
167
382
14
126
416
The toll on faculty who teach *required* anti-racism courses likely to be especially high. Many students won't want to be there, creating negative energy in class. Some will take out ire at requirement on instructor; a few may be overtly hostile. Just exhausting. 2/5
4
40
412
@emmy16901
@MehrsaBaradaran
For first gen students or student from households at or below median income, elite private universities are often much cheaper than state public universities once you factor in financial aid.
4
11
401
Olympics recap:
*women's volleyball team must wear bikinis
*female runners DQ'd b/c natural T levels too high
*deaf & blind female swimmer quits b/c PCAs prohibited
*female sprinter DQd b/c weed
*female gymnast has max score capped
*female athlete can't bring breastfeeding child
12
107
406
@BDStanley
@mivich
A clear causal effect: each nine percentage point increase in the share of imported gas from Russia decreases a country's last name by one letter in the alphabet.
2
18
393
Academia: 30% teaching, 30% service, 40% research, and 80% providing feedback on other people's research.
7
35
390
What should unis do?
1) Ignore student evals, unless they identify obvious shirking.
2) Provide additional pedagogical support for these classes.
3) Have plan to protect faculty in case of doxxing, rape threats etc, e.g., w/ optional filtering service for e-mail & mail. 3/5
4
35
384
Social scientists rarely assume they can be engineers. Sure wish fewer engineers and journalists assume engineers can do social science.
11
116
376
Cambridge's reputation survived 800+ years of affirmative action for white men.
1
67
377
Why it's so important to cancel classes to prevent spread of
#covid19
, in 3 network graphs. Students (red=wom, blue=men) connected by courses (boxes) offered in one
@Cornell
dept in one semester.
This graph:
@cs_cornell
. Only 1 class shares 0 students w/ other classes. 1/3
12
198
377
As a sociologist, I can't say "no" to a request to fill out a survey, even if it's a hot mess.
As a former waitress, I can't tip less than 20%, even for terrible service or in a country where tipping isn't expected.
Occupational guilt is a thing.
4
9
368
A gentle reminder that "no one has ever studied X" is not, in itself, effective way to motivate paper. 1st, it's rarely true, so claim basically begs readers to find papers that study X. 2nd, novelty alone is insufficient. What is Q? Why should readers care about the answer?
6
73
365
Odd how the same set of politicians who want to force pregnant women to get medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds are so opposed to 10 second anterior nasal swabs that save lives.
I’ll take medical direction from actual physicians, not my political opponent.
4K
383
2K
5
85
362
If people requesting travel or other reimbursements from universities and other large bureaucracies could charge interest, the median time to reimbursement would immediately decline by at least 50%.
5
41
352
If mid-career depression in a job is so common that employing organizations feel the need to create and widely advertise a program to address it, maybe the organizations should change how they structure the job. Treat the cause, not the symptoms.
11
80
351
Giving assistant professors an extra year on tenure clock in recognition of covid-19 related disruptions to research is well meaning, but it comes at a cost for APs: another year of career uncertainty and, at institutions where tenure comes with a raise, a financial hit.
1/6
5
39
353
I've avoided wading into the work hours wars, but I've read enough of the comments on
#academictwitter
to see, predictably, the advice to "say no to everything" pop up.
I have thoughts, both as a chair and as a former co-PI on NSF-Advance grant for women faculty in STEM.
1/n
8
107
347
STEM "weed-out" courses don't discourage low-performing students equally:
Women, URM, 1st gen, & low-SES students who get C or below are less likely to retake course, move to next course, or persist in STEM. Holds adjusting for HS grades, test scores, & STEM major intent.
1/6
6
71
346
@stephaniemlee
One of the speakers is Niall Ferguson, who resigned from a Stanford free speech committee after it came out that he encouraged Republican students to collect "opposition research" on a liberal student with whom he disagreed.
At least he's not on the "practical solutions" panel.
1
47
340
Kim's law of physical distancing:
The further from Greek and other off-campus student housing that university planners live, the less realistic their assumptions about the share of students who will follow state or university policies about physical distancing.
7
43
339
On mandatory diversity statements: there's some irony in adding another element to job app packets that rewards a particular type of cultural capital, in this case the knowledge of how to write about diversity & inclusion in a way that shows commitment but doesn't scare anyone.
4
32
324
4) Support the instructors and depts that teach these classes, esp. if large & required. Give the instructors a course release. Give departments the budget to hire enough qualified instructors that individual instructors can take a break from service teaching.
4/5.
1
29
317
Not a fan of universities spending $20,000+ for celebrity speaker to give 1.5 hour book talk.
Instead, uni could fund:
* a course
* ≈100 hrs of paid research experience for undergraduates
* $1000 in conference travel for 20 grad students
* 1-2 yrs of a dept's speakers
etc.
12
22
316
I'm not sure who is advising prospective graduate students to send long emails to individual faculty members about (a) how wonderful they (the applicants) are and (b) how wonderful the faculty member is, but I wish they'd stop. These emails do not increase chances of admission.
36
23
317
Kudos to the
@Cornell
students for 7 days with NO positive cases.
Mask use is pretty close to 100%, at least in public spaces and classrooms. (I don't know about dorm norms.)
8
41
309
Universities: our policies are evidence based.
Also universities: we're going to mandate anti-bias / anti-racism / diversity training even though much social science shows that mandatory diversity training is ineffective and, worse, can activate bias.
7
71
301
Harvard b-school prof's home setup includes $1000 in gadgets plus cost of 2 monitors, laptop, ipad, software.
Meanwhile, unions at CUNY schools fought (are fighting?) to get soap in bathrooms.
No link b/c not trying to shame this prof. He's just part of massively ≠ system.
15
57
298
I see a lot of draft academic papers, especially by jr authors, that leave readers guessing what the paper will do - its research questions, core argument, etc - until page 3 or 4.
IMO this should be clear by paragraph 2. (Unless you are Bourdieu, in which case para 2 is pg 3.)
12
31
298
5) Facilitate peer mentoring groups, similar forms of informal support for instructors. Provide adequate mental health services, too, though supply of qualified MHPs is a real challenge in many university towns right now.
5/5
6
23
293
In my mind's eye, I can still picture the anguish on the student's face as he fought a losing battle against tears, and the horror on our teacher's face when she realized what she had done.
/8
2
7
283
Many of the occupations that are deemed "essential" when it comes to putting workers at risk for covid-19 will suddenly become inessential again when it comes to prioritizing access to vaccines.
The politics of classification.
2
38
280
NYT, tomorrow: Should a President who came into office in an election that some people claim was stolen get a Supreme Court nomination? We asked four Trump voters in a diner ...
27
25
259
I'm hard pressed to think of a null finding that has weaker empirical support (hello, conditioning on a collider and variance inflation) and yet greater popularity in academic circles than "no strong correlation between GRE scores and academic success in graduate school"
The GRE is expensive.
It's systemically biased, disadvantaging women and minorities.
And there's no strong correlation between GRE scores and academic success in graduate school.
So, we're getting rid of the GRE as an admissions requirement to BUSPH:
40
238
963
22
58
267
Universities that are "supporting" on-line teaching by asking instructors to spend part of their summer taking an on-line course on on-line teaching should pay instructors for this time.
(Most faculty, even tenure-track, on 9 month contracts, don't get paid by uni over summer.)
14
41
265
Seeing a bit of conflation of "IRB approved" with "ethical" in my timeline. An incomplete list of why I think academics should hold themselves to a higher standard, and not outsource ethics to IRBs. Feel free to add. 1/6
7
39
265
Upshot: The “small worlds” networks on college campuses create fertile social conditions for an epidemic spread, even if only consider the connections among students created through courses.
Preprint: . Comments welcome.
@CornellCAS
@CornellSoc
11/11
11
115
260
Aww, how cute: Clint Eastwood's chair is all grown up, and it brought friends.
#InaugurationDay2017
7
114
228
Cornell's encampment taken down, voluntarily, after 2.5 weeks of being more or less left alone by uni administration.
Peaceful endings to peaceful protests don't make national news, but they do happen.
30
68
263
Irony: economists' paper on interdisciplinary citations fails to cite sociologist Moody's 2004 ASR paper on interdisciplinary citations.
Citations to economics from other social sciences and vice versa
Figure 2 in this new paper by Joshua Angrist et al
6
165
172
10
107
256
I reclassified my last "revise and resubmit" as "accepted," just by thinking it.
6
16
257
1st glaring problem: article is framed around "regret," but this word (or its derivatives) DOES NOT APPEAR in the survey. As anyone who has worked w/ surveys knows, even tiny variations in question wording can have large impacts on observed frequency of response values.
2/n
1
26
256
A white male whose parents sent him to an elite boarding school and who is a legacy at Yale claims his success has nothing to do with connections and everything to do with his hard work. This is not just "so 2018:" the American Delusion is a story as old as the American Dream.
6
38
255
Social mobility is important not only because it allows the talented sons and daughters of the poor to "move up," but because it allows the dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks sons and daughters of the rich to move down to where they can do less harm.
6
46
254
Reminds me of family night at my son's HS orientation. An assistant principal proudly announced that the strongest predictor of success in HS is involvement in extracurriculars. Only a desperate, pleading look from son stopped me from blurting out, "no, it's parental SES."
While my daughter was in her swim class, I had to resist temptation to go full R2 on this poster
7
15
228
7
28
251
If you make $452K per year (single) and can't afford to pay an additional 2.6% marginal tax on income over this, you are financially irresponsible. You should be forced to take regular drug tests before you can receive any tax deductions, and be shamed when you buy chips.
6
16
248
I give 6-8 study Qs, depending on length of unit. I put 2 on exam, word for word; students choose which 1 question to answer. This means they really only need to prepare for (# of study Qs - 1) questions, but also that 1 or 2 missed lectures won't kill their grade. Stuff happens.
3
4
247
If you are working on 5 different papers that are 95%, 90%, 85%, 75%, and 50% completed, you are only .95*.90*.85*.75*.50*100=27.3% of the way to your goal.
I can't decide if this is a problem of compounding interests, a problem of compounding disinterest, or both.
9
15
251
I'm a bit surprised by how many students don't know that Canvas records their site use, page views, and when and for how long they had Zoom lectures open. I'd think students of this generation would just assume every app, especially big brother-y ones like a LMS, is tracking use.
13
11
247
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Social mobility is important not only to allow the talented children of the poor to realize their potential, but to allow the dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks and immoral children of the rich to fall to positions where they can do less harm.
“Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it... That advice worked far more powerfully on [Trump] than what the scientists were saying.”
298
2K
5K
2
28
251
Long time ago, a sr. male colleague got wind that a PhD advisee was saying inappropriate things to female students. Advisor told him (paraphrased), "if this continues, I can't write you a recommendation." Always respected that.
Harassers not born, they're enabled. Don't enable.
1
12
247
Beckett & Evans' research, which sought objective facts to Q, "are blacks more likely to be sentenced to death?," helped kill WA's death penalty. Had they written as scholar-activists w/ obvious political motives, work would have been ignored. Lesson.
15
84
235
Dear Dr. Strickland. Congratulations on your Nobel Prize. We regret to inform you, however, that the Proceedings of the Nobel Committee is not on our list of approved journals, and hence cannot count toward your promotion case. Maybe next year. Sincerely,
@ass_deans
.
2
31
243
Part of the challenge of bringing students back to colleges & universities in fall:
* 25% of professors working in these settings are age 60+
* 19% of librarians
* 19% of janitorial staff
* 18% of admins
* 14% of grounds workers
* 12% of office workers
* 7% of food service
10
55
239
Lots of chatter today, sparked by a
@noahopinion
thread, about how women's choice of majors, and in particular their decision to major in humanities, explains their lower pay and/or student loan repayment rates.
It doesn't.
A thread
7
52
241
For all the time and energy universities spend on DEI initiatives, there is remarkably little discussion of the toxic crap that (some) students fling at instructors, and disproportionately at instructors who are women, people of color, LGBTQ, etc.
1/4
2
48
238