Kevin Brian Smith

But I'm young at heart! chronicle.com/article/profes…

Former AEJMC president and Stanford journalism professor emeritus Ted Glasser: "Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it's hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity." This is the organization whose conference used the word 'resistance' 36 times last year and 'impartial' zero. facultyleaks.com/p/why-media-le…

"'Out to lunch' is where much of higher education is — oblivious about how we got here and how we might change course." chronicle.com/article/why-hi…

“If you’ve been in the social sciences for any amount of time, your reaction to this is probably one of two things...Either, ‘Oh my God, half?’ or, ‘Honestly, I’m surprised it’s that high.’ I'm in the "honestly I'm surprised it's that high camp. chronicle.com/article/lots-o…

Data/code not shared for 70+% of published soc sci papers? Holy cow.

Paul Ehrlich provides us with staggeringly certain, practically dispositive evidence that peer review allows basic, critical mistakes to be published with the imprimatur of the establishment.

Political Science's academic job market having its worst post-Covid year -- almost 20% fewer jobs than at the same point in the previous cycle (which itself was bad!) Data scraped from APSA ejobs pdfs.

@mattyglesias argues Dem Party brand "so toxic" to overcome that voters give up on label but are still open to indep cands--Dan Osborn in NE used as e.g. Implies Dem endorsement of Osborn a big negative?? nytimes.com/2026/03/16/opi…

AI can "...erode learning incentives that sustain long-run collective knowledge." nber.org/papers/w34910?…

What's a nice political scientist doing standing next to a tarantula? news.unl.edu/article/husker…

"If colleges and universities want to remain socially relevant and financially stable, they’re going to have to confront the reality that large segments of the public increasingly see them as exclusionary rather than open."expression.fire.org/p/the-decline-…

"You cannot build a high-growth economy on institutions that train young people to distrust reality and sneer at the society they are meant to inherit." telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/2…

"If liberal elites don’t reform the sense-making institutions they control, illiberal populists will." chronicle.com/article/were-p…

"we find that across the world, mass issue polarization is driven primarily by disagreement over cultural issues" royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/1…

I was involved in some of the early heritability studies on ideology and we got a LOT of push back. It's pretty much accepted w/in academia now (at least in my patch), but I'm not sure this has ever seeped into the mainstream. It certainly still comes as a shock to my students when I show them the research comparing the heritability of political beliefs to other phenotypes.

A few comments. First, it's awesome that the WSJ is publishing this sort of opinion piece. Mere acknowledgement of heritability and its impacts is important and extremely welcome. Second, on the heritability of politics: measures of politics are more heritable for highly-knowledgeable persons. When twins are smart, politics tends to be highly heritable, and when twins are dull, it's much more random! Here's an example: Third, parental socialization has a small average effect on kids' politics, but that can be sizable at the extremes. An adoption study from 2021 estimated this. In their sample, if parental socialization were just removed as an influence, there would be ~60% fewer radical left-wingers and ~80% fewer radical right-wingers. Fourth and finally, the impact of differential fertility on the politics of the population has been empirically estimated in a few studies. My favorite one was published in PNAS. The first thing they showed was that there's differential opposition to abortion and gay marriage by religiosity, degree completion level—conservatism, generally. The second thing they estimated was that, indeed, if there was no fertility-conservatism connection, there would be less opposition to abortion and more support for gay marriage today than there actually is. Also, the importance of politically differential fertility for the population's positions on these issues has grown over time. At the same time, notice: views have still trended more liberal, so the social effect is larger than the fertility one. But how long will that remain true? Forever? Maybe, maybe not. We can't know until more time passes. In any case, this WSJ piece is very welcome! Sources: cremieux.xyz/p/the-cultural… journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09… pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

"One quiet way we’re undermining trust is by erasing meaningful performance distinctions." wsj.com/opinion/is-a-f…

"41 percent of Democratic college students would not support a Republican-run business, 37 percent would not be friends with a Republican, and 30 percent would not work for one. (The Republican numbers regarding Democrats were 7, 5, and 7 percent.)" theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Does the open science movement deliver its promised benefits? Apparently, not so much. science.org/content/articl…

"The people who should feel guilty are the ones who are responsible: the administrators, faculty, and students who let the craziness on campus become normal and then acted shocked when the bill came due." thedispatch.com/article/campus…