Video: Problems with Academia

This wasn't the video I wanted to shoot. I had planned to talk about workflow and writing, but instead I spent the day saddened and outraged by what happened to a colleague...

What follows are some thoughts for them, and about systemic problems of racism and equity in academia we must address. Further, as a person who has been privileged, fortunate, and blessed beyond anything that is reasonable in this life, I have a moral duty to be an agent of this change.

How we Perceive Racial Demographics

Last year I conducted a short online survey to (attempt to) answer a simple question:
How accurately do people know the racial demographics of their neighborhood?

This was prompted by overhearing a great many generalizations about the racial composition of Seattle, and the UW in particular. The survey was straight forward: simply provide your guesses for the % of each race in your neighborhood, as well as a few details about yourself (age, gender, race, and most importantly ZIP code in the USA). The ZIP code was used to compare the user-estimated %'s to data from the US 2010 census.

I'd like to share a bit of what I learned...

1. Respondents, or, The Kindness of Strangers

Happy MLK Day

Today is notable for (at least) two reasons:
1) it marks the public Inauguration of President Obama's 2nd term
2) it is Martin Luther King day for America

As someone employed in higher education, and a strong believer in education as the best remedy for our society, I have high hopes that the next four years will see increased attention and passion for education equality.

In that spirit, here's a map derived from a previous article I wrote:

Food for thought: Why are rural colleges/universities more likely to have fewer black students per capita than their state as compared to urban schools?

Good luck, Mr President. I don't envy your job.

Race in US Colleges

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The Chronicle posted a nice spreadsheet containing race, ethnicity, and gender data from ~4300 institutions of higher education across America. (Note: the article and data file are now behind a paywall, which was not in effect when I downloaded the data set)

It's a really intriguing data set, and I thought it was worth a few minutes of my time to play with it. My results are amusing, but I don't think I've fully captured the rich potential this data has to offer serious researchers.

My first question was simple: what does the most basic racial composition of US Colleges look like?

Racial Perceptions - A First Glance

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Last night I had a few hours to kill at a cafe. The cafe had decent coffee, and slow wifi, so I thought it would be a good chance to mess around with the preliminary results from my race perceptions survey! I am intending to dress this up quite a bit when I get more respondents (the survey will remain open for now).

For now, here is a first "quick and dirty" look at how our perceptions of racial composition track with reality.

Map of Respondents

Here is the updated map, with ~380 people responding across the country. There is major clustering around certain major cities, owing to my sending the survey to my Facebook friends (largely in WA), and two region-specific subreddits (r/seattle and r/sanfrancisco). The sample of respondents is ~80% white, 55% male, and 90% are within the 18-25 or 25-35 age groups.

In red: density of zip codes across the US. Survey respondents are marked in blue.