Beth Popp Berman
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epopppp.bsky.social
Beth Popp Berman
@epopppp.bsky.social
28K followers 2K following 3.9K posts
Professor @ a large Midwestern univ. Wrote a book about economists + policy, one about academic science + policy.

Temporarily on the "government is breaking" beat, but I'd rather be posting about public utility debates from 1906.

I support 🏳️‍⚧️ rights.
Posts Replies Media Videos
epopppp.bsky.social
There hasn't been a lot of empirical evidence yet -- here's a start from Kim + Hamilton.

Faculty hiring of URMs decreases after state introduction (not passage) of anti-DEI legislation. Impact greater for teaching-focused schools, and increases with state revenue dependence. osf.io/preprints/so...
Graph showing relationship between share of faculty hiring going to white men vs. underrepresented minorities at different levels of state revenue dependence with and without introduction of DEI bills.
October 29, 2025 at 11:18 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Organizational Studies at UMich is hiring a full-time lecturer. We're a small but growing program with amazing students at a wonderful university. If this ad sounds like you, please apply. apply.interfolio.com/174964
Description Job Summary: The Interdisciplinary Program in Organizational Studies in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan seeks applicants for a full time Lecturer III position to begin August 25, 2026. Organizational Studies is a small but growing selective undergraduate major in the arts and sciences. This is a non-tenure track position with a university year appointment. The initial appointment period will be four (4) years, and the appointment may be renewed (based on programmatic need, funding, and performance). The appointment is subject to final approval by the college. Responsibilities: Duties and responsibilities for this Lecturer III position are expected to include four (4) undergraduate courses per year, including both lectures and seminars, as well as departmental service, including undergraduate advising and mentoring equivalent to a third class per semester, and service on appropriate committees. Candidates may also contribute to our core class rotation (micro-organizational behavior, macro-organizational theory, and research methods), depending on program needs and candidate background. A typical full-time (100% effort) load for a Lecturer III in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts is three courses per semester, or the equivalent in administrative and/or service duties. Qualifications Qualifications: Qualified candidates will have a Ph.D. in a relevant social/behavioral science or professional discipline prior to the start date of the position and a range of instructional expertise. Candidates must be able to teach lower- and upper-level classes relevant to the study of organizations that are grounded in social/behavioral science and appeal to students looking to develop practical, transferable skills. Candidates must also be capable of teaching at least one and preferably two of our core classes (micro-organizational behavior, macro-organizational theory, and research methods). We espec…
October 10, 2025 at 5:33 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Where we are
Two adjacent posts: I assume we're at war with Venezuela now. Has the U.S. attacked Norway yet?
October 10, 2025 at 10:11 AM
epopppp.bsky.social
Well, this seems normal for October in Michigan.
Image of forecast of sunny weather with highs in the mid/upper 80s
October 1, 2025 at 10:28 AM
epopppp.bsky.social
What I find inspiring is being forced to fly to another continent in the middle of my workweek to listen to my boss give an unnecessary speech.
Headline: Summoned Military Officers Are Expected to Hear a 'Rally the Troops' Message
September 26, 2025 at 10:18 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Good review. I particularly like the opening paragraphs.
The​ sociologist Monika Krause, in her book Model Cases (2021), shows that social scientists have tended to base their concepts and theories on a surprisingly limited range of shared empirical instances. Images of the modern metropolis, for example, have been excessively shaped by studies of Chicago and Berlin. Political theories of populism have been heavily indebted to cases in Latin America, in particular Argentina. The sociology of work developed as a study of car manufacturing. And our thinking about professions relies on the examples of doctors and lawyers. Krause doesn’t seek to challenge this partiality (the natural sciences also use ‘privileged material research objects’, such as fruit flies) but to understand what it tells us about the practices and knowledge claims of the social sciences.
September 17, 2025 at 12:54 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Federally funded R&D (not all of which is spent at universities) as a fraction of GDP is as low as it's been since we started tracking.

Which is a different way of looking at it than "line go up." 4/x ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf2332...
Line graph of the ratio of US R&D spending from various sources to GDP, 1953-2021. The federal percent ranges from about 0.6% of GDP to 1.8%, with the peak in the 1960s, and the low point at the very beginning and over the last 20 years.
April 19, 2025 at 3:52 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
In the 1960s over 70% of higher ed R&D came from the federal government! It's just a bigger enterprise now.

(from same data source) 2/x
Line graph of the percent of higher ed R&D coming from federal government, 1953 to 2023. The range is from about 53% to 74%, with the peak in the 1960s.
April 19, 2025 at 3:34 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
What woke agenda, exactly, do they think Chest Journal has?
Wiki: Chest is a peer-reviewed medical journal covering chest diseases and related issues, including pulmonology, cardiology, thoracic surgery, transplantation, breathing, airway diseases, and emergency medicine. The journal was established in 1935 and is published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The editor-in-chief is Peter Mazzone (Cleveland Clinic Respiratory Institute).
April 17, 2025 at 9:21 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Is it just me, or is military.com significantly more clear-eyed about this than most news sources? www.military.com/daily-news/2...
The change reflects the expanding Trump administration censorship across the Department of Defense aimed at erasing acknowledgment of those groups. It also follows a series of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump and internal policy shifts championed by Hegseth, who has made the erasure of those groups a core goal of his tenure so far. The administration has labeled materials related to women, minorities and gay people as "diversity, equity and inclusion," or DEI, a term that once described efforts toward racial equality but has been repurposed under Trump as a catchall term used to conduct a government-wide purge.
April 16, 2025 at 11:21 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Just spent an hour of my one wild and precious life replacing tiny fairy light batteries secured by even tinier screws out of a misguided sense that things should not be disposable even if they cost $2 apiece
tiny finicky dissassembled fairy light mechanism
April 12, 2025 at 3:11 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Is this bad? This seems bad.
www.ft.com/content/0005...
Text: One hedge fund manager said: “Those huge hedge funds with trillions of dollars of Treasuries relative value trades will blow up today if the Fed doesn’t bail them out.”
April 9, 2025 at 10:15 AM
epopppp.bsky.social
Yes! Although this bit stuck out as maybe not an obvious end goal right now; even the stuff about "workforce development" appears to be motivated by the needs of capital and opposition to a liberal education, not an ROI-driven vision of the university.
Text: "The Trumpist university would also have its function, but as an even more extreme neoliberal engine of return on investment and tied to the cultural promotion of ‘Western civilization’." The part about being a neoliberal engine of ROI is highlighted.
April 7, 2025 at 12:06 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
The whole assignment description is long, but this is the key part
Text: Paying for the Party shows how colleges, intentionally or unintentionally, create “pathways” that channel students into particular majors or make some academic paths easier/harder to follow than others, in ways that intersect with social class, gender, and other identities. In this essay, I would like you to use a close reading of Paying for the Party and your own experience to analyze the ways that U-M creates similar pathways and how they appear to work.
April 6, 2025 at 7:04 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Things are escalating quickly, I see.
Post screenshotting Reddit preppers: People don't realize how difficult subsistence farming is. Many people will starve.
April 4, 2025 at 3:59 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
I just keep thinking about this one
Screenshot of Tweet: Well, I'd like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam! Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily. Ah! Well. Nevertheless.
April 3, 2025 at 5:55 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
I think you're all jumping to conclusions, we've got another 2.5 hours left.
Schedule of Tariff Day for Trump, climaxing at 8pm: Global markets respond as the impact of America's renewed strength takes hold.
April 2, 2025 at 9:31 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
I think this is more true for Ds but pretty secondary for Rs. But also, a lot of the rising tuition goes to financial aid. Net prices are not skyrocketing. research.collegeboard.org/trends/colle...
Text: After adjusting for inflation, the average net tuition and fees paid by first-time full-time in-state students enrolled in public four-year institutions peaked in 2012-13 at $4,340 and declined to an estimated $2,480 in 2024-25. After adjusting for inflation, the average net tuition and fees paid by first-time full-time students enrolled in private nonprofit four-year institutions declined from $19,330 in 2006-07 to an estimated $16,510 in 2024-25.
April 1, 2025 at 6:37 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Having the conversation about trustees is important, and I'm glad this article is making the rounds.

But I don't think "none of them are academics" is a convincing argument outside of academia. 1/2
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Text: Who becomes a trustee? At Columbia there are 21, all of them from business, law and technology, with the exception of a former journalist. Although they are in charge of an academic institution, none of them is an academic. None has ever led a classroom or a lab meeting or medical rounds with interns. None has gone through the process of tenure, where their teaching, publication record and service are rigorously assessed by colleagues in the field both from within the institution and outside it. None has ever had their work peer-reviewed by anonymous readers or panels of experts. None has ever published in academic or scientific journals or presses and had their ideas debated in the public sphere. None has ever framed a hypothesis and tested it on the basis of evidence they have collected. None, in short, has sought truth and had their search confirmed by objective scholars and scientists. How, we ask, can people be entrusted with running a university when they have no lived experience with or understanding of its core functions and aims? What qualifications do such trustees bring to their office beside the capacity and expectation to donate? And what do those qualifications, which pertain to private profit, have to do with the concerns of scholars and scientists and doctors, which pertain to the public good? Universities are replicating the plutocratic domination of the Trump administration.
April 1, 2025 at 6:12 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
I'm deleting this for now. Given the detail of the email they repost, it seems legit, but I'm not seeing independent verification and it's 16 hours old. Don't want to stoke fear without total confidence.
Screenshot of a post linking to a quote from the following article: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/hundreds-of-international-students-are-waking-up-to-an-email-asking-them-to-self-deport-for-campus-activism-or-even-sharing-posts-on-social-media/articleshow/119679695.cms
March 29, 2025 at 3:56 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
This might not do what you're looking for but have you tried playing around with the thread preferences? (under Content + Media in Settings)
Screenshot of the options under Bluesky's Thread Preferences
March 29, 2025 at 2:07 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Maybe not
Screenshot of tweet just above this one: You know I am very frustrated and anxious about living in an authoritarian hellscape but at least Pete Hegseth is getting EATEN ALIVE in the comments Republicans on the Fox News webpage
March 27, 2025 at 7:25 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
We're paying attention to what, four prominent cases? But the State Department says there are another 296. www.axios.com/2025/03/27/t...
More than 300 foreign students have had their student visas revoked in the three weeks "Catch and Revoke" has been in operation, the official said. There are 1.5 million student visa-holders nationwide.
March 27, 2025 at 11:47 AM
epopppp.bsky.social
The Anti-Authoritarian Academic Code of Conduct -- from 2016 but freshly relevant.

We all need to be thinking about where our lines are.
dailynous.com/2016/11/29/a...
I will not aid in the registering, rounding-up, or internment of students and colleagues on the basis of their religious beliefs. I will not aid in the marginalization, exclusion, or deportation of my undocumented students and colleagues. I will, as my capacities allow, discourage and defend against the bullying and harassment of vulnerable students and colleagues targeted for important aspects of their identity (such as race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, etc.). I will not aid government or law enforcement in activities which violate the U.S. Constitution or other U.S. law. I will not aid in government surveillance. I will not inform. As a teacher and researcher, I will not be bought or intimidated. I will present the state of research in my field accurately, whether or not it is what the government wants to hear. I will challenge others when they lie. I will not be shy about my commitment to academic values: truth, objectivity, free inquiry, and rational debate. I will challenge others when they engage in behavior contrary to these values. As an administrator, I will defend my students, faculty, and non-academic staff. I will not allow the expulsion, firing, disciplining, harassment, or marginalization of individuals targeted for being members of disfavoured groups or for expressing dangerous opinions. I will speak up for academic freedom. I will insist on the autonomy of my institution. I will stand with my colleagues at other institutions, and defend their rights and freedoms. I will be fair and unbiased in the classroom, in grading, and in all my dealings with all my students, including those who disagree with me politically.
March 25, 2025 at 5:27 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
We need a name for this person. The vice provost for authoritarian compliance?
Text: The new vice provost, appointed by Columbia, will review curriculum, nontenure faculty hiring and leadership "to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced."
March 21, 2025 at 8:38 PM