Allison McKim

no where near the most important point but: what kind of kids movies could he possibly be thinking of?

University general counsel, university trustee, university president

News coverage of the Trump administration's proposed "compact" with universities has been, so far, shockingly bad.

I hate to pick on NPR reporter Elissa Nadworny, who's usually a solid reporter, but almost every important thing I heard her say this morning about the proposed "compact" was false.

Punishment in All but Name - Mary Ellen Stitt - Inquest Drug diversion programs are hyped by reformists as alternatives to prison—but they function just like punishment and people often end up incarcerated anyway.

"Treatment providers are asked to exercise . . . coercive control over their court-mandated clients, warping the therapeutic relationship." Mary Ellen Stitt w/
@uchicagopress.bsky.social on how treatment ends up feeling a lot like punishment when courts get involved:

this is exactly what I thought!

Graph showing that the U.S. incarcerates women at a rate more than 3x any other founding NATO country

🚨NEW REPORT: The U.S. incarcerates women at a higher rate than almost any other country in the world

So much for the “land of the free” 🧵

Still use mine and I have a backup I bought before they discontinued them! So much storage for music. Such an easy to use interface.

I see this mistake often in my college students. Somehow I grew up knowing this distinction, as did the ppl I know of my age. And so I keep trying to figure out where the difference is in current education or cultural discourse that makes so many otherwise educated young people not know this.

THIS. Campus Reform, The College Fix & Turning Point's Professor Watchlist created a harassment campaign of mostly Black & Brown women & queer folks who were also junior professors. Our universities & admins opted for silence when we needed defense. Here's the story they wrote about me in 2017 1/

Since ppl love campus anecdotes so much, here's one: I have colleagues who give students they know to be MAGA an A (in one case I'm aware of overlooking clear AI use), because the colleague is on a Green Card or H1B, and they know: one complaint like at Texas A&M, and they're on a flight home. (1/3)

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also worth adding that I'm sure Durkheim would see this all as terribly pathological

Kai Erikson's wonderful intro to Wayward Puritans also makes the case that such panics over "crime" signal (moral/social) boundary crises, and that societies (esp elites) socially construct the crime/deviance that enables boundary reassertion

those moral boundaries also require exclusions

helps produce legitimate authority (especially via later durkheimian thinkers)

public rituals of punishment are key to this process

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This timeline is reviving some aspects of Durkheimian theories of punishment, the extent of this dynamic is unexpected ways for me.

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He is also leaving out the (Catholic) Irish!

In mid-June 2023, Cernovich broke some shocking news to his 1.1M followers on Elon Musk’s Twitter: drinking is woke, actually. Not even “drinking Bud Light,” mind you—drinking, period. Here’s the whole tweet3 (emphasis mine throughout): Alcohol culture is woke. Boozing means participating in cultural rot. This is what the left wants. Liquor stores stayed open while gyms and churches shut down. Conservatives don’t want to admit this. Couple drinks here and there fine. Otherwise - WOKE. This is a rich text we have here, friends. Like the sun itself, you shouldn’t stare directly at it. Me though? Psssh. Years of reading about and occasionally covering freaks like Cernovich have smoothed my lobes to the point that this sort of corrosive brain poison just slides right off. And I’m very serious when I say this flailing gibberish is actually a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the evolving, converging paranoias of America’s too-online right wing.

There’s a faction within the contemporary right that subscribes to a flatly fascistic politics of bodily purity and is openly hostile to booze as a result. That cohort has been very successful forwarding its ideas into the broader MAGA ecosystem: www.fingers.email/p/the-unbear...

People working in universities know a lot of the work that makes the organization function is outsourced to for-profit companies (catering, landscaping) or runs on platforms requiring payments to such companies: Workday, Canvas, Microsoft, Zoom.

This thread will be for less obvious examples. 1/

Oh god that’s awful!

Ok - so I'm going to do a real context+write up but for now, here's what some of these things look like.

To start my data reference is DCinbox which is ~208,000 official e-newsletters over the past 15 years.

I still use mine!

I love cilantro and I can smell stinkbugs. There is a slight resemblance in smell, but I think cilantro smells nice while stinkbugs do not.

I Tested How Well AI Tools Work for Journalism Some tools were sufficient for summarizing meetings. For research, the results were a disaster.

www.cjr.org/analysis/i-t...

In the case of literature reviews, they found the ai results “underwhelming and in some cases alarming.”

One coming from Bard soon…

Google's Gemini AI tells a Redditor it's 'cautiously optimistic' about fixing a coding bug, fails repeatedly, calls itself an embarrassment to 'all possible and impossible universes' before repeating 'I am a disgrace' 86 times in succession

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

‘A $360M mistake;’ Massachusetts should not rebuild women’s prison at MCI-Framingham (Viewpoint) Rebuilding this facility, which houses only 218 women, is a costly and misguided move — especially when the state has other tools to reduce incarceration and support women’s reentry into society.

Gov. Maura Healey recently announced plans to renovate MCI-Framingham, the only prison for women in MA. In this op-ed, Susan Sered writes that this plan ignores existing alternatives and misclassifies women as medium-security. #PrisonReform

@masslive.bsky.social:

Federal court refuses to block Alabama’s “divisive concepts” law, says university faculty classroom speech is government speech with no First Amendment protection. This dangerous development allows lawmakers to dictate what professors say in class. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Nonetheless, the protesters seemed to have an effect. Some officers, disheartened by public criticisms, quit their jobs. Police departments began reporting staffing shortages. Other officers stayed on the job but pulled back from enforcing the law. Sometimes, this pullback reflected genuine uncertainty among officers about how to do their jobs; other times, it came from a cynical desire to punish communities that police departments considered hostile. Virtually all sides in the debate made mistakes during this intense period. Among the most damaging was the growing belief among Democratic officials that enforcing the law could be counterproductive when it involved low-level offenses such as public drug use, shoplifting and homeless encampments. Some Democrats believed enforcement of these laws disproportionately hurt minority groups and did not contribute much to public safety. This argument never made much sense, especially given that polls showed strong support for basic law enforcement across racial and income groups. And the real-world results were miserable. Parts of San Francisco; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; and other cities came to feel lawless, with people defecating and shooting up in public and store owners locking up items to reduce theft or simply closing their shops.

I don't even know how to handle this part of the NYT editorial piece on why crime is falling.

But I'd like to start with the most obvious thing: WHY IS THE EDITORIAL PAGE WRITING THIS AT ALL?

"Why crime fell" is a DIFFICULT EMPIRICAL QUESTION. One that, you know, EXPERTS should be asked to answer.