NIH Fellowship awards for FY2025 by ethnicity drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/23/n...

We’re delighted to announce a tenure track ASSISTANT PROFESSOR SEARCH. Fields: public management, implementation, governance, institutions & policy process. We will start reviewing applicants immediately & until position is filled. Start date is negotiable. usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...

New, from me: The federal government is required to track job satisfaction among its employees. The Trump admin stopped collecting the data, so a nonprofit stepped in. The results show that a collapse in morale and zero trust in Trump agency leaders. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/federal-em...

"the decline in [academic freedom in] the United States has been more rapid and pronounced, particularly in the last year. It has deteriorated by 50% from 2015 to 2025 and is now evaluated as moderate autonomy by country experts" academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

💯💯💯 “The search bar replaced the reference desk without replacing the skills behind it: knowing how to ask a question precisely, understanding how information is organized and who funds it, knowing the difference between a primary source and a summary of one”

Resegregation was the point of dropping affirmative action, so this checks out. The White Citizen’s Council agenda is winning, it just took a couple of decades.

Registration is open for the @umichstonecid.bsky.social April 10 conference on measuring and theorizing structural racism. Check out the schedule & panelists, and register: structural-racism.isr.umich.edu

Making my way through Chris Newens’ Moveable Feasts & a chapter on the 11th arrondissement when he cites @jean23bean.bsky.social’s amazing book, Citizen Outsider. A nice surprise with my morning reading.

‘Power to the People, Y’all’ will premiere in Winston-Salem, NC, at the RiverRun International Film Festival on April 18th.  Producer: Tressie McMillan Cottom Director, Cinematographer & Editor: Holland Gallagher Cinematographer: Patrick Lebby Producer:Johnica Rivers Key Art: Shefon N. Taylor

The federal government is trying to gradually shift the federal student loan portfolio from Education to Treasury. It will be interesting to see if there is any pushback from Congress.

I said what I said (and I was deeply honored to be able to say it in such a thoughtful forum @11thhourmsnow.bsky.social with @stephruhle.bsky.social )

POSTDOC OPENING! We are hiring a Postdoctoral Fellow for a mixed-methods project aimed at supporting and researching implementation of high-quality preschool curricula. The position is 1-2 years and can be in person or remote. More details here: edpolicy.umich.edu/what-we-do/j...

Based on something I dug up for this piece – that Santa Clara DA Jeff Rosen's campaign website has a "fighting Anti-Semitism" page where he boasts about prosecuting the Stanford students – the students' lawyers have moved to kick Rosen's office off its retrial. boltsmag.org/stanford-san...

You ever have one of those weeks where it’s such a rollercoaster, & then good news comes through & you are simply content despite the ride you’re still on? Yeah, that’s today.

SCOOP— Trump wants a 24k gold coin w/ his face on it for America 250, but an official at a late February coin advisory committee meeting called it something only done by "nations ruled by kings or dictators." After NYT reported the criticism, US Mint yanked online vid of the meeting w/o explanation.

“The Kentucky tenant union has secured a collectively bargained lease from a corporate landlord — the first of its kind in the South. The agreement includes a 10-day grace period for rent payments, a schedule for major repairs, formally recognizes the union and more.”

Wondering why NIH and NSF aren't making new grants? We explain what's happening at OMB. www.science.org/content/arti...

Things are not okay.

Breaking: In a severe blow to the Trump administration’s health agenda, a U.S. district court in Massachusetts on Monday blocked the government from implementing a series of decisions on vaccines made over the last year by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/h...

I wrote a more honest version of what's happening on campuses recently. newrepublic.com/article/2068...

Should just call this article "The Fascists are Succeeding in their Efforts to Muzzle Academia" www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/u...

NSF Update through March 13, 2026 1/2

‘U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV in Boston issued a temporary restraining order, at the request of 17 Democratic state attorneys, who sued over a newly-added ​component of mandatory, annual surveys (IPEDS) administered by the [Ed Dept] that are used to gather information from universities.’

Everyone in higher ed either has, or should have, learned a lot from Black Studies over the past few decades. Crucial read on the embattled state of the field and how little institutions, and too often colleagues, are doing to protect it. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

The Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard is hiring two Postdoctoral Fellows #AEFP2026 check it out! apply.interfolio.com/183181

I enjoyed this interview @biblioracle.bsky.social did for his column with the author of a new JHUP book, Teaching for Slow Hope. Definitely plan to read this one. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

“Educational institutions are like beekeepers,” according to the report. “While their principal aim is to provide education and raise people’s earnings, in the process they create an array of external benefits...society indirectly benefits, just as orchard owners indirectly benefit from beekeepers.”

and this pain will not be equally shared across the university... social research and progressive scholarship are being targeted... and every decision leadership makes worsens the financial crisis as if by design. it doesn't have to be this way, these are choices by The New School top leadership

Really looking forward to reading this book soon!

A reminder that applications are currently open for the NASEM Schmidt #Scicomm Awards, which come with a top prize of $40K in each category and welcome into a networked community of previous winners. 🧪🔭⚛️ Submit your work for consideration! www.nationalacademies.org/programs/NAE...

My weekly NIH update... The fiscal year 2026 curve still lies below the other curves but appears to be increasing at close to the normal pace. 1/4

Opinion: Professors at Virginia Tech and UVa: Exempting campus workers from collective bargaining hurts college towns

You ever write something and there are so many parts you hope people engage with that you can't figure out which ones to quote? I'll do a wee thread on the 3rd, and final, essay from my Red Scares series www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

This is how it is done. Bier does not back down at all.

The reductions in the number of new and competing renewal R01s by topic (based on simple searches in NIH Reporter). The cuts are across the board: Cancer down 24%, Alzheimer down 45%, Obesity down 29%, Child by 21%. Transgender was down by 84% but represents only a small number of grants.

Great coverage of new work by my colleague Nick Graetz (and collaborators) showing the extent of credit score-based home insurance pricing. Pricing insurance by credit score is a proxy for pricing it by poverty. (Minnesota friends, note the two local examples)

I'm a broken record on this but folks haven't realized how difficult things will be after this regime is over given the tentacles it is leaving behind. Even the most superficial reading of theories of institutional change will tell you this is a path we don't want to depend on.

The U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office. A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies. Read more: https://scim.ag/4boPkq8

Jeremiah Woods is lobbying Virginia lawmakers to overhaul the Virginia Military Institute's governance and funding, arguing that incremental changes will leave its Confederate legacy intact and harm future Black cadets.

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Sociology pulls back the curtain on power - how it's constructed, how it's maintained, and the (il)legitimacy of those in power - and that's why they're so afraid of it. (It's also why Intro Soc is my favorite class to teach.)

Virginia proposes a law to teach facts in schools

one google data center in virginia two million gallons of water per day information only released under court order & risk of contempt

For the first time, we now know how many Black-owned bookstores exist in the U.S. open.substack.com/pub/phillewi...

This reminds me of when I was a PhD candidate during comps (prelims). I was surprised that *I* had to put together all 3 of my reading lists instead of my committee. But then I realized that the act of compiling was an important learning experience.

“UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has shown that deep reading, defined as sustained immersion in a text, builds the cognitive circuits required for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking in ways that skimming, scrolling and short-form video simply cannot.”

Someone putting the Institute for Advanced Study chalkboards to other good use…

I want to take you back, for a moment, to 2020. We are at the beginning of the pandemic and many of us are working remotely. I don't remember this time particularly fondly--this was pre COVID-19 vaccines, and there was a lot of rhetoric around how the virus had come from China. 🧵

These NOFO delays have created so many gaps in longstanding programs, including programs that are congressionally mandated. www.science.org/content/arti...