Elizabeth Burland (she/her)

The doctoral student community group organized a terrific lineup of virtual sessions for conference prep! 🎉

Check them out here: aefpweb.org/calendar_lis... #AEFP2026

This is a huge win for higher ed! Unfortunately, many institutions complied in advance and already folded many of their DEI efforts. This is an example of why it’s so important to resist until there is no other option. Most of the programs that were terminated won’t be resurrected. What a loss.

two images of an arrest, one digitally altered by the White House to make it look like the arrestee is crying

This is the first example I’ve seen of an American government using AI to meaningfully misrepresent actual events with the intent to deceive the public. We are at Stalinesque levels of propaganda.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/past-the-b...

I really want ppl w/o Minneapolis connections to understand

You might've heard that Mpls public schools went hybrid bc so many families are in hiding. Well, a coworker just told me that today, during his kid's hybrid class, a kid's apt building was raided onscreen

*Everyone has stories like this*

Influencer, White House welfare fraud claims are distorted, but the system has risks Federal officials are targeting Democratic-led states over alleged safety-net fraud. Critics worry a drumbeat of unfounded accusations could undermine public trust.

Federal officials are targeting Democratic-led states over alleged safety-net fraud. Critics worry a drumbeat of unfounded accusations could undermine public trust.

Videos Show How ICE Vehicle Stops Can Escalate to Shootings A WSJ visual investigation found that the Minneapolis ICE killing is one of 13 incidents where federal immigration agents have used deadly force against civilians in vehicles since July.

WSJ investigation: In the past 6 months ICE agents have fired at vehicles 13 times, leading to:

* 8 people shot
* 5 of which were U.S. citizens
* 2 died
* no victims drew a weapon

The playbook: Agents box in a vehicle, block attempts to flee, then fire

www.wsj.com/us-news/vide...

If you think the elections in November are going to fix this you are delusional. Every year, regardless of leadership, ICE’s budget went up, every year our borders became more violent. This is an escalation yes, but a chapter of a much longer novel.

@chrislhayes.bsky.social: “A 37-year-old American citizen, the mother of a young child is dead tonight. She was shot in the face by an agent of the federal government, and that government has spent the day telling despicable lies about her.”

The basic sequence of the ICE shooting in Minneapolis on Wednesday is not in dispute: A Honda Pilot reversed, then moved forward; an ICE agent was close to the vehicle; the agent fired shots. A 37-year-old woman was killed. But that sequence has been interpreted in radically different ways. Was the officer struck by the vehicle, as President Trump insists, or did the car pass by or around him? Was he positioned in front of the vehicle or to the side? Did he have a genuine, reasonable fear for his life in that moment, or did he create the very danger he then used lethal force to escape?

"Was the officer struck by the vehicle, as President Trump insists, or did the car pass by or around him?"
If we only had some trusted institution that could adjudicate between competing claims by relying on facts.

NY Times headline Live Updates: Minneapolis Mayor Disputes Federal Account of Fatal ICE Shooting

If the headline is "disputed shooting" rather than straightforwardly telling the public what happened this rewards the DHS for lying about these events

Keeping the social safety net as small and as punitive as possible helps to ensure that there will always be a steady stream of people for employers like Bezos to exploit--people in such a precarious position that have no choice but to take whatever underpaid, overworked job they can get.

We use novel, large-scale data on 17.5 million Americans to study how a policy-driven increase in economic resources affects children's long-term outcomes. Using the 2000 Census and 2001–13 American Community Survey linked to the Social Security Administration's NUMIDENT, we leverage the county-level rollout of the Food Stamps program between 1961 and 1975. We find that children with access to greater economic resources before age five have better outcomes as adults. The treatment-on-the-treated effects show a 6% of a standard deviation improvement in human capital, 3% of a standard deviation increase in economic self-sufficiency, 8% of a standard deviation increase in the quality of neighbourhood of residence, a 1.2-year increase in life expectancy, and a 0.5 percentage-point decrease in likelihood of being incarcerated. These estimates suggest that Food Stamps’ transfer of resources to families is a highly cost-effective investment in young children, yielding a marginal value of public funds of approximately sixty-two.

If your concern is about fraud, and making sure the poorest receive funds, block grants are the opposite of what we should do. They allow states to redirect the money away from the neediest.
OTOH, there is very persuasive evidence that SNAP really helps people.
academic.oup.com/restud/artic...

College costs are soaring! www.brookings.edu/articles/wha...

This got a lot of interaction but it's weird that leading conservatives can admit that their coalition is fracturing over exactly how much racism they should support and not see this debate as disqualifying their entire project.

I do believe that universities will continue to give preferences to men because the administration wants that to happen and SFFA is unlikely to sue for this group of students. Always remember, it's not hypocrisy, it's power.

I have come to the idea that we have to collectively, brutally, ritualistically kill Target just to show capital that we truly aren’t fucking around.

OU puts graduate instructor on leave after student claims discrimination on Bible-based essay grade OU has placed a graduate student instructor on leave after a student publicly contested a grade and filed an illegal discrimination claim after receiving a failing grade on an essay

The essay deserves a failing grade. It doesn’t tie to the assigned reading or engage its claims or evidence in any serious or sustained fashion; it just repeats the students’ pre-existing beliefs, and does so poorly. Even personal experience requires showing real engagement & no sign of that here.

This is just my opinion, but I don't think departments need to change their strategy for reading or grading student work.

Departments need a strategy for responding to harassment and attacks.

"As one senior researcher told me, decades of painstaking work vanished overnight in an attack by an inexperienced and ideologically driven staff intent on dismantling the bureaucracy without understanding its purpose."

"What *is* sociology, exactly?"

Sir I have no idea.

Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out A new Gmail update may allow Google to use your private messages and attachments for AI training. Here's how to turn it off.

Google has started automatically opting you in to let it read your stuff to train AI. You need to turn this off in SEVERAL places in your settings (not just for Gmail), if you want to maintain privacy and confidentiality.
www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

ED is sticking close to an antiquated definition of professional programs that hasn't really mattered for decades for grad student loan access. A bit of good news: as my analysis of College Scorecard data shows, most nursing programs have average debt burdens below the new $100k limit.

College Prices Have Not Risen Dramatically in the Last Decade—But Will That Change? Higher education is facing a crisis of confidence among the general public, and much of that is driven by concerns regarding affordability. For example, about 80 percent of Democrats and Republican…

I was sufficiently annoyed with a piece claiming that inflation-adjusted college costs have doubled over the last 20 years that I wrote a response. There really haven't been increases over the last decade, but I fear that promising trend may be changing.

“I Lost Everything”: Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime Authorities said Tren de Aragua “terrorists” had taken over the building. A ProPublica investigation found little evidence to back up the government’s claims. For the first time, the Venezuelans arres...

"300 agents stormed the building, rappelled from a helicopter, knocked down doors and hurled flash-bang grenades. Agents ziptied and detained many US citizens for hours..."

Prosecutors have not filed a *single* criminal charge against anyone arrested that night:

www.propublica.org/article/chic...

I am begging America to not be stupid enough to embrace a racist and an antisemite because Donald Trump thinks she's a meanie. Just grab some popcorn and watch the Nazis fight.

I will never get over the fact that the president of the United States talks and writes like this.

Trump's Pentagon name change could cost up to $2 billion Officially changing the Department of Defense to the Department of War can only be done by Congress and would require updating thousands of signs, rewriting digital code and creating new letterheads,...

Spending $2B for an unnecessary and wholly symbolic name change when the gov't says it can't afford to feed its people, provide heating support in winter, or help people pay for healthcare would be quite the statement.

Those interested in assessing the enforcement capacity of the IRS should determine how many staff are still working in enforcement, especially the Pass-Through Entities Practice Area, including the Global High Wealth unit and Pass-Through Examinations. They should also ask about audits opened and closed this year, and the income distribution of those taxpayers being audited. Another crucial question is the impact on revenue. A collapse in the IRS's capacity to audit higher-earners will certainly increase the $700 billion annual "tax gap" — the difference between tax money owed and tax money paid voluntarily and on time. Three fifths of that shortfall is due to underreporting of income by the top ten percent of earners; an additional dollar spent auditing these earners returns an estimated $12 in revenue. The damage to enforcement capacity this year is so unprecedented, it is hard to predict the cost. But one model has suggested that, over a decade, it could reduce revenue by about two hundred billion dollars.

The DOGE cuts seemed to focus on tax teams that pursued enforcement of high income earners. The IRS had been building up enforcement on this area because most of the tax gap is driven by higher earners. Lax enforcement could cost hundreds of billions. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/five-quest...