The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities

The American system of higher education appears poised for disruptive change of potentially historic proportions due to massive new political, economic, and educational forces that threaten to undermine its business model, governmental support, and operating mission. These forces include dramatic new types of economic competition, difficulties in growing revenue streams as we had in the past, relative declines in philanthropic and government support, actual and likely future political attacks on universities, and some outdated methods of teaching and learning that have been unchanged for hundreds of years.Governmen

How Social Science Research Can Improve Teaching

We marshal discoveries about human behavior and learning from social science research and show how they can be used to improve teaching and learning. The discoveries are easily stated as three social science generalizations: (1) social connections motivate, (2) teaching teaches the teacher, and (3) instant feedback improves learning. We show how to apply these generalizations via innovations in modern information technology inside, outside, and across university classrooms. We also give concrete examples of these ideas from innovations we have experimented with in our own teaching.Governmen

Essays on Causality, Race, and the Law

Making causal inferences about race is difficult because no means exist to manipulate units into treatment and control groups. Chapter 1 addresses this predicament. First, I argue that race should be defined as a composite measure in which some elements are mutable. Second, I note that identifying the units of analysis is particularly important when thinking about race. These extensions allow us to synthesize two instances in which causal inferences regarding race may be permissible: (1) studies that measure the effect of exposing an entity to a racial cue and (2) studies that disaggregate race into constituent pieces and measure the effect of a mutable element. Chapters 2 and 3 provide examples of the first “exposure” approach in the context of judicial politics. Chapter 2 analyzes the role of race and gender in judicial confirmations and demonstrates that minority and female nominees to federal courts are awarded lower qualification ratings by the American Bar Association (ABA) than are white and male nominees. This is the case even when comparing only judges with similar education, ideologies, and experiences. Furthermore, I present results showing that ABA qualification scores are not predictive of judges’ reversal rates. Chapter 3 explores what happens once minority judges are confirmed. Focusing specifically on African Americans, I show that opinions authored by black judges are overturned more than cases authored by whites. The effect is robust and persists after taking into account measures of judicial qualifications, previous professional and judicial experience, and partisanship. Taken together, Chapters 2 and 3 have clear implications: despite attempts to make judiciary more reflective of the U.S. population, racial disparities continue to persist.Governmen

The Endgame of Court-Packing

At several points in history, politicians and commentators have proposed adding seats to the Supreme Court to accomplish partisan ends. We explore the incentives for a political party to initiate “court-packing” and what the Supreme Court would look like in a world where political parties engage in repeated partisan court- packing. To do so, we use an Agent-Based Model and different data sources to calibrate the behaviors of Presidents, Congresses, and Supreme Court justices. We then simulate the future composition of the Court in worlds with and without court-packing. The simulations suggest that a political party with an initial minority of seats on the Court would meaningfully increase the share of years it controls the Court if it were to initiate a cycle of repeated court-packing, especially early on. However, although the number of seats would likely quadruple within 100 years, the simulations suggest there would be only a modest expansion during the likely time horizons of politicians who initiate court-packing. By putting structure on what the Supreme Court would look like in a world with and without court- packing, we hope to generate more careful reflection on the incentives to court- pack and the potential consequences of it

Modeling protein complexes using restraints from Crosslinking Mass Spectrometry

Modeling macromolecular assemblies with restraints from crosslinking mass spectrometry (XL-MS) tends to focus solely on distance violation. Recently, we identified three different modeling features inherent in crosslink data: (1) expected distance between crosslinked residues; (2) violation of the crosslinker's maximum bound; and (3) solvent accessibility of crosslinked residues. Here, we implement these features in a scoring function. cMNXL, and demonstrate that it outperforms the commonlyused crosslink distance violation. We compare the different methods of calculating the distance between crosslinked residues, which shows no significant change in performance when using Euclidean distance compared with the solvent-accessible surface distance. Finally, we create a combined score that incorporates information from 3D electron microscopy maps as well as crosslinking. This achieves, on average, better results than either information type alone and demonstrates the potential of integrative modeling with XL-MS and low-resolution cryoelectron microscopy

The Legal Academy\u27s Ideological Uniformity

We study the ideological balance of the legal academy and compare it with the ideology of the legal profession more broadly. To do so, we match professors listed in the Association of American Law Schools’ Directory of Law Teachers and lawyers listed in the Martindale-Hubbell directory to a measure of political ideology based on political donations. We find that 15 percent of law professors, compared with 35 percent of lawyers, are conservative. This may not simply be due to differences in their backgrounds: the legal academy is still 11 percentage points more liberal than the legal profession after controlling for several relevant individual characteristics. We argue that law professors’ ideological uniformity marginalizes them but that it may not be possible to improve the ideological balance of the legal academy without sacrificing other values