Alex Barnard

It certainly appears that the United States government is run by neo-Nazis.

Actually that's just JD Vance's life because people yell at him everywhere he goes

The EO is also *wasteful*. It takes a subset of people who have needs that can't be met by independent supportive housing and uses them as justification for abandoning Housing First, which remains the most effective approach we have for most.

As a reminder, a psych hospitalization costs $1000/day+.

The EO is *cruel*. It follows the recent Supreme Court decision in Grant's Pass to ramp up encampment sweeps, even though scholars like Chris Herring have shown how forcing people to move, throwing away all their stuff (like IDs!), and piling up fines makes it harder to get into housing.

The executive order is *incoherent*. It follows Trump's pet project of expanding involuntary ttt (which he evoked after the Parkland shooting), even though it is governed by state law and depends on infrastructure (like psych hospitals) that his Medicaid cuts are simultaneously going to gut.

Trump evicts homeless people Podcast Episode · Today, Explained · 08/21/2025 · 27m

Today I fulfilled my millennial dream and appeared on @vox's Today, Explained podcast, talking about Trump's executive order around homelessness and civil commitments. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Honorable Mention, 2025 Best Book Award, Sociology of Mental Health Section, American Sociological Association. Includes the cover to Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness, by Alex V. Barnard. Save 20% with code CUP20SM at cup.columbia.edu

We are pleased to announce that Alex Barnard's CONSERVATORSHIP was named Honorable Mention for the 2025 Best Book Award from the Sociology of Mental Health Section, American Sociological Association. buff.ly/LqsQROV @avbsoc.bsky.social @asasmh.bsky.social #MentalHealth #PublicPolicy

Going to revisit my notes from reading "Citizen and Subject" from qualifying exams to try to make sense of NYC Mayoral Election.

the books – even for seminars in recent trends in the area, then the books aren’t selling. The Press might as well price them like Cambridge or Routledge, at a level that assumes no one will buy them. In my view, we need a Bandcamp moment – people realizing their friends won’t have bands ... 9/

Here's a long thread on an issue dear to my heart. This Tuesday evening I’m doing an Intellectual Publics with Macarena Gomez-Barris on publishing. Like last year’s conversation with Denise Cruz, or the prior year’s with Racquel Gates, we will talk about how to find a publisher, turn a thesis... 1/

Stand Up for Princeton and Higher Education. Join a community of Princeton alumni, students, faculty, staff and friends who are committed 
to making the case for America’s great colleges and universities.

Glad my alma mater is mobilizing alums for higher ed.

Admin should be doing the same with faculty: giving stipends to write op eds, go back to our hometowns to talk about the value of what we do, blasting us with e-mails to call Congress.

NYU admin, meanwhile, doing zilch.

standup.princeton.edu

The future well being of many people in America's largest state and the world's 4th largest economy hinges on finding someone who can really get through to Newsom to explain to him that he is never, never, never going to be President.

Newsom Asks Cities to Ban Homeless Encampments, Escalating Crackdown

Someone once said Gavin Newsom looks like the Marvel President announcing that all the mutants are going to be quarantined, and now he's ordering municipalities to expel one of society's most marginalized and stigmatized groups, so I guess that was spot on.
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/u...

No signature from my employer. But no worries: as the univ attended by the President's son, in the top-10 targets of Trump's anti-semitism investigation, and extremely dependent on international students, NYU will certainly stay under the radar. Thus has no need to mobilize to defend higher ed.

Between this and Princeton Eisengruber's interview, NYU's president doesn't even have to come up with her own talking points to stand up the Trump administration. She just needs a spine.

The University President Willing to Fight Trump Christopher L. Eisgruber of Princeton University talks about the administration’s move to freeze billions of dollars in funding to higher education institutions.

Shit, I might actually have to give to Annual Giving this year.
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/p...

Walking outside Père Lachaise cemetery where they list the names of the ~96,000 Parisians killed in WWI.

A sobering reminder that rekindling colonial ambitions, trashing multilateral institutions, and pushing European rearmament is playing with fire in a very scary way.

🎵 Here we go, Tigers, here we go * clap clap *

The plus side of Trump going after the country club of the Ivy League is we don't even have to pretend this is about anything other than destroying universities as such - regardless of their orientation towards DEI, student protest, antisemitism, etc.

NYU, this is your chance to get out of the Ivy League's shadow.

Opinion | $15 Billion Is Enough to Fight a President (Gift Article) Every university president will face a choice similar to Columbia University’s in the coming months.

Essential reading: rich universities with huge endowments should be acting as arsenals of academic freedom - financing the research the administration is cutting, funding the programs Trump is targeting, and going on the attack in the legal sphere. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/o...

Signed!

Exclusive | Columbia Is Nearing Agreement to Give Trump What He Wants The school faces a deadline to yield to administration demands, with $400 million in federal funding at stake.

And then Trump said “oh that’s great, now I am happy, and I will certainly not come back with further demands” and they all lived happily ever after. www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

I sincerely think that universities should suspend their productivity standards for scientists and ask them instead to hold town halls in schools, public libraries, museums, shopping malls, and anywhere else and communicate what is being lost with the collapse of the research ecosystem.

We really don't spend enough time just stating that Trump hates good things.

Green infrastructure and biking are among the best things in cities and only retrograde losers think otherwise.

Again, Jews were less than 1% of the German population in 1933.

How will academia respond to the attacks from Washington?

Michael There is a disorienting amount of tragedy out there, right now, so it’s hard to know why you wind up fixating on one. But, like so many people who were lucky enough to have been drawn into hi…

Like so many people touched by him, I am at an utter loss for what to say about the passing of Professor Michael Burawoy, but wrote up some memories anyway: alexvbarnard.org/2025/02/05/m...

Trump administration to cancel student visas of pro-Palestinian protesters U.S. President Donald Trumpsigned an executive order on Wednesday to combat antisemitism and pledged to deport non-citizen college students and others who took part in pro-Palestinian protests.

Wow, who would have thought universities collecting the names of students engaged in peaceful protests, and publicizing them via disciplinary proceses, the spring before a potential takeover by a malevolent presidential administration, would turn out badly. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

The way that university officials have begun to treat “peaceful” and “disruptive” as antonyms, when they in fact are not antonyms, is the kind of violence to language that one expects of authoritarians