Will Marble

Job/life update: Today was my last day at Penn, where I've been lucky to teach amazing students and work with great colleagues for the past 3 years. This fall, I'll join @hooverinstitution.bsky.social as a Hoover Fellow—I'm excited to join a vibrant, interdisciplinary community of scholars there.

Authoritarians are attacking universities. Here's how it's going at one public school. I'm publicly documenting an event timeline to help bring order to the chaotic nature of events and help other schools plan the responses they are likely going to need.

I made an event timeline to try to make sense of all the federal overreach at @georgemasonu.bsky.social and whoo boy. When you lay it out like this, the executive over reach comes into focus. open.substack.com/pub/misofact...

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump.

Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt.

Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

Screenshot of title page. "The Long-Run Effects of Colleges on Civic and Political Life" by Michael J. Andrews, William Marble, and Lauren Russell. Abstract: Social theorists and education advocates have long argued for the civic benefits of education. As large, durable institutions, universities are especially likely to affect the civic life of their communities. We investigate how the establishment of a university alters the civic and political trajectory of the surrounding area. For identification, we leverage historical site selection processes in which multiple locations were considered for new colleges. We bring together data on social capital, political preferences, and elections to assess the long-run impacts of college establishment. Communities with colleges exhibit higher levels of civic engagement and greater social trust today, relative to “runner-up” locations without colleges. These counties are also more politically liberal — a gap that has grown substantially since 2000. Our findings suggest understanding universities as place-based policies that shape the long-run civic and political development of their communities. They also shed light on current political battles over higher education policy.

Universities often serve as "anchor institutions" that deeply affect the character of their communities. In a new paper, we estimate how (and when) the establishment of a college influences local political and civic life. 🧵

osf.io/preprints/so...

Nothing more American than getting a head start on work by taking a meeting in your car while you commute to work by yourself

Very cool paper about how important social networks are in driving movement
conference.nber.org/conf_papers...

I just posted a new paper on @ssrn.bsky.social, titled "The Chadha Presidency". Here's the link, and I'll post the abstract in the next post. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

On Data and Democracy (Mid-Year Roundup): Charting the Assault on American Democracy and A Path Forward A narrative of a democracy in the balance, told through 29 data visualizations.

Been a busy year in the data mines.📊 Just published my mid-year roundup: 29 data visualizations on the state of US democracy, tracking everything from judicial resistance to billionaire influence to why Dems have a mobilization crisis, not a moderation problem.

All charts free to use:

The current administration's attacks on universities risk undermining engines of civic life, just as they harm innovation and prosperity. Places with colleges are more liberal, yes, but colleges also promote the types of social capital that we need.

These results contribute to a literature that understands universities as place-based institutions. We know that they profoundly affect the local economy, as economists (including my co-authors) have shown. This paper documents how universities contribute to the civic life of a community as well.

Are universities distinctive, or would any large public investment generate the same results in the long run? Using a subsample where the runner-up location got a "consolation prize" (eg a state capital or penitentiary), we find that universities are indeed distinctive on most of our outcomes.

There are also differences in contemporary public opinion: people living near colleges are more liberal on a range of issues. These attitudinal differences are not solely driven by the presence of students nor by differences in the average educational attainment in the community.

From Reconstruction through the end of the 20th century, there were minimal differences in voting patterns between places with a university and "runner-up" locations. Since 2000, though, a gap has emerged, with college counties becoming significantly more Democratic. In 2024 this gap was ~10pp.

The establishment of a college also leads to a county casting significantly more votes in presidential elections—an effect that's explained by a population growth channel rather than a turnout rate channel.

We find that places with colleges have significantly higher levels of social capital and trust today, relative to "runner-up" locations that were considered but not chosen.

To further illustrate this methodology, we describe several of the as-good-as-random site selection experiments here. In some cases, which of the finalist locations won the college was literally random, with the winning location drawn by lots (this occurred for the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University). In other cases, such as University of Illinois, Purdue University, and the University of Florida, multiple towns submitted similar bids to receive the college, with only one ultimately chosen. In still other cases, it took multiple rounds of balloting to find a winner (7 rounds of balloting for University of Mississippi, 8 rounds for Southern Arkansas University, 24 rounds for the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a whopping 111 for what would become University of Nebraska at Kearney). The fact that finalist locations were tied for multiple rounds of voting suggests that both the winning and runner-up locations were similar in terms of political influence and enjoyed comparable popular support. Site selection experiments occur as early as 1839 and as late as 1954, though the majority of experiments are concentrated in the 1880s and 1890s.

How do universities shape the surrounding community? Building on meticulous archival work by my co-author Mike Andrews, we answer this question by focusing on cases where multiple locations were considered for a major university and the winning location was chosen for idiosyncratic reasons.

Decades of research documents differences (observational and sometimes causal) in turnout, volunteering rates, office-seeking, political preferences, etc., between those with and without college degrees. But universities are place-based institutions, the effects of which may extend beyond students.

Screenshot of title page. "The Long-Run Effects of Colleges on Civic and Political Life" by Michael J. Andrews, William Marble, and Lauren Russell. Abstract: Social theorists and education advocates have long argued for the civic benefits of education. As large, durable institutions, universities are especially likely to affect the civic life of their communities. We investigate how the establishment of a university alters the civic and political trajectory of the surrounding area. For identification, we leverage historical site selection processes in which multiple locations were considered for new colleges. We bring together data on social capital, political preferences, and elections to assess the long-run impacts of college establishment. Communities with colleges exhibit higher levels of civic engagement and greater social trust today, relative to “runner-up” locations without colleges. These counties are also more politically liberal — a gap that has grown substantially since 2000. Our findings suggest understanding universities as place-based policies that shape the long-run civic and political development of their communities. They also shed light on current political battles over higher education policy.

Universities often serve as "anchor institutions" that deeply affect the character of their communities. In a new paper, we estimate how (and when) the establishment of a college influences local political and civic life. 🧵

osf.io/preprints/so...

Horrendous. In attempting to reclassify Head Start as “welfare” rather than education, the Trump administration is trying an end run around Supreme Court precedent that protects undocumented children from limits to education based on their immigration status. 🧵

War on universities, war on science, war on knowledge

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years.

NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

A reminder of how the number of centrifuges in Iran soared after Trump’s 2018 JCPOA withdrawal.

@brendannyhan.bsky.social

Imperial President at Home, Emperor Abroad American foreign policy in an age of unrestrained executive power.

America now has the foreign policy of a personalist dictator. New piece from me in @foreignaffairs.com

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

There are nearly 100,000 people at the rally in Philadelphia. #NoKings

She is saying, in effect: "We are going to liberate the city from its democratically elected leadership using the military"

What would you say if you saw it in another country? A senator from a coequal branch of government dragged away by security to prevent him from asking a question of a Cabinet official and arrested

Arrested in L.A. My interview with a fellow scholar who was recently arrested for participating in an anti-ICE protest

Eyewitness account from someone arrested at a (small, peaceful) protest in L.A. The arrests of journalists should be particularly alarming: open.substack.com/pub/smotus/p...

On the campaign trail, this was JD Vance's suggestion for making childcare more affordable:

"Maybe grandma and grandpa [want] to help out a little bit more, or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more."

(www.vanityfair.com/news/story/j...)

The claim that Trump is just "enforcing immigration law" is ridiculous given that the administration has repeatedly *violated immigration law* by detaining/deporting people without due process.

Some Journalists Are Injured While Covering L.A. Protests

Just spotted in the NYT: "A New York Times reporter was struck with a nonlethal round by officers late Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. The reporter was treated at a hospital but not seriously injured."

That's at least five journalists I've heard of who ended up in ER or urgent care over weekend.