Developing Revolt at the AEA?

We have previously posted about developments related to sexual harassment at the American Economic Association (AEA) which is having its annual meeting this weekend. But it appears there is also an incipient revolt of a more general nature:

As thousands of economists gather this week for the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, the field and the association are facing criticism on a number of fronts.

One scholar's posts on Twitter -- receiving praise from others on social media -- note that the association's leaders, its top journals and a key prize increasingly appear tied to a very small number of departments at elite universities, in his view potentially excluding good people and good ideas from the attention they deserve. While many disciplines have particularly influential departments, this critique suggests that economics may be in a class by itself. The criticism also comes as hundreds of graduate students have issued a public call for the field, its departments and the association to adopt codes of conduct to prevent abusive treatment of graduate students and young scholars.

The tweets about the profession came from Jacob L. Vigdor, an economist who is a professor of public policy at the University of Washington...

Full story from Inside Higher Ed at:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/03/economics-and-its-main-association-face-criticism

Open vs. Closed - Part 3

The exchange discussed below related to the UCLA dispute with Elsevier* appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. We have already reproduced the Villasenor column which triggered the response below.**
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January 2, 2019
 
Essay Critical of UCLA’s Elsevier Memorandum Was Misguided

To the Editor:

As chair of the UCLA Academic Senate, I am working closely with both Scott Waugh, executive vice chancellor and provost, and Ginny Steel, university librarian, on broadening awareness of the University of California’s negotiations with Elsevier over our journal package. Last month, we co-signed a memorandum to all faculty, in which we urged colleagues to consider for themselves whether to decline reviewing articles for Elsevier journals until the negotiations move in a productive direction. Asking colleagues to consider carefully their choice of publisher is just one aspect of our broad efforts to control costs. The main focus, however, is on UC’s negotiations with Elsevier.

We have received thoughtful, supportive responses from numerous faculty members in discussions about this complex issue. These include comments made in a question-and-answer session at the November meeting of the Academic Senate’s Legislative Assembly as well as the messages our office has received in relation to the memorandum.

It is unfortunate that my UCLA colleague John Villasenor didn’t have the advantage of hearing and reading those comments before writing his essay (“The Trouble With Institution-Led Boycotts,” The Chronicle, December 19).** If he had, he might have realized that his criticism mischaracterizes both the intent and the language of the memorandum.

Almost all faculty members understand that the problem of rapidly rising journal prices can only be addressed through their participation. The journals only exist, and only achieve high impact factors, thanks to the intellectual capital of the faculty.

John Villasenor’s suggestion that the memorandum calls for a “boycott” and his comparison with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement are inaccurate and misleading. This is not a boycott but a request to colleagues to consider whether they can continue to support Elsevier’s journals at a time when the licensing costs have become too high to bear.

Joseph Bristow
Chair, UCLA Academic Senate, 2018-2019
Distinguished Professor, English Department
University of California at Los Angeles

Source: https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/letters/essay-critical-of-uclas-elsevier-memorandum-was-misguided/

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2018/12/open-vs-closed.html
**https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2018/12/open-vs-closed-part-2_20.html

Seismic

LA County is unveiling an earthquake warning app that might give you a few seconds alert ahead of the shaking, depending on your location and the location of the quake. Yours truly was able to download it for the iPhone at the Apple app store. Presumably, it is also available for other brands. See below:

Los Angeles County residents could soon have precious seconds of warning before the Big One hits. A new app to be unveiled Thursday will provide Angelenos with early warning for quakes of magnitude 5.0 or greater in Los Angeles County.

It is the nation's first public early warning system, and it could be a major lifesaver. The app is part of a pilot program with the U.S. Geological Survey, AT&T and The Annenberg Foundation.

"Earthquakes are a matter of when -- not if. We're officially launching #ShakeAlertLA tomorrow, and today you can become one of the first to use our early warning technology," according to a statement on Mayor Eric Garcetti's Twitter account. 

The ShakeAlertLA app will be officially unveiled at City Hall Thursday...

Full story at https://patch.com/california/centurycity/app-give-westwood-century-city-early-warning-big-quakes

AEA Grad Students' Letter

We have earlier posted about concerns at the American Economic Association (AEA) concerning sexual harassment.* The AEA's annual meeting is about to take place in Atlanta and, in advance, some graduate students have posted a letter concerning this issue. See below:
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An open letter regarding harassment and discrimination in the economics profession

Advocates for Diversity in Economics, Dec. 27, 2018

Last week, Harvard economist Roland Fryer resigned from the executive committee of the American Economic Association (AEA), after a university investigation found he created a hostile and sexualized work environment for the research assistants in his lab.

This is a painful moment for our discipline. Abuses of power, bullying, and harassment damage peoples’ health and happiness, ruin careers, and reduce the quality of scholarship in economics. Moreover, it is well documented that these abuses of power disproportionately harm women, minorities, and queer individuals. These frustrating realities have pushed us to ask how economics can address the power imbalances that drive out talented individuals, prevent the inclusion of underrepresented groups, and collectively damage our discipline.

As current graduate students and research assistants (RAs), we offer a unique and useful perspective on the opportunities our departments and the AEA have to protect us and ensure that our discipline is as diverse and vibrant as possible. Here are our suggestions.

1. Listen to us.

We are the experts on how your colleagues treat their advisees and research assistants. We are usually the first to know, and the first to be harmed, when their behavior steps out of line. And many of us would be willing to tell you about it, if it wouldn’t mean risking a future in the field we love.

Overall, the most important thing department leadership can do is stay informed about the climate as experienced by graduate students and RAs. To do this, departments should create anonymous avenues for us to report incidents that have made us feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. For example, ensure there is someone in the department — a faculty member who is not a Title IX mandatory reporter, if possible — whose door is open to hear complaints. Such a mechanism is critical to catching issues early and addressing the pervasive low-level harassment that drives marginalized students out of the discipline.

Next, pay attention. Who is leaving your program? Who did they work for? If you notice a pattern with a particular faculty member or lab, keep digging. Follow up with alumni once they have established themselves elsewhere to see if there were issues they could not raise while in the department. Bad behavior is too often an open secret among graduate students and junior faculty.

Finally, involve graduate students in your department’s institutions. Incorporate our anonymized feedback in tenure and other promotional reviews, and reward faculty for work they have done to improve department climate. Talk to the former RAs and advisees of potential faculty members before hiring them. Involve us — substantially, not just nominally — in admissions, diversity, and hiring committees.

We shouldn’t have to rely on whisper networks to protect us from abuse and inappropriate behavior. And we don’t have the power to discipline our supervisors, or even our peers. You do. Please, listen to us.

2. Create, communicate, and enforce department-level standards of conduct.

What does your department expect of its members? In many contexts — particularly seminars and advising relationships — university-level codes of conduct simply do not go far enough in answering this question, or in addressing concerns unique to our profession. Moreover, passively adopting the policies of your parent institution does not send the signal that department leadership will monitor or enforce them.

So, departments — in conversation with RAs and graduate students — ought to make their own standards. A good place to start would be the AEA’s new Code of Professional Conduct. Other resources include the American Finance Association’s code of conduct, which explicitly addresses abuses of power and includes an obligation for bystanders to act; the Geological Society of America’s code of conduct, which prioritizes conduct towards students throughout; and the American Statistical Association’s conduct policy, which specifically targets harassment and discrimination.

Once you have standards in place, make sure everyone knows them. Have your department chair email them out with a personal note every year. Hold engaging, meaningful, tailored training sessions. Communicate, repeatedly and enthusiastically, that these are the rules by which everyone — no matter how brilliant or famous — is expected to abide. And demonstrate that those who do not abide by these standards will face specific consequences, up to and including removal from the department.

Gray areas give bad actors room to justify their behavior and obscure victims’ entitlement to a harassment-free workplace. Tailored codes of conduct go a long way towards removing gray areas and making it harder to excuse the sort of behavior that disproportionately harms marginalized economists.

3. Implement a discipline-wide reporting system to document bad behavior.

Finally, the AEA should establish a centralized platform where individuals at all levels of the profession can securely report harassment, coercion, and assault. One such platform, Callisto, allows users to submit timestamped, encrypted reports that can later be used as evidence should the user decide to file an official complaint. Users can also choose to be notified if there are other reports on the same offender. These features empower victims who may be reluctant to come forward if they think their experience was an isolated incident, or happened too long ago for them to be believed today.

Indeed, an AEA committee recommended that the association adopt Callisto or a Callisto-like option back in April. As the committee noted, such a platform would allow us to have a record of incidents at conferences and other professional settings where faculty and students from different schools commingle — where there is currently no clear reporting mechanism or accountability structure.

The usefulness of this platform depends on how willing departments and the AEA are to investigate and sanction reported offenses. The events of this past year demonstrate that, as a discipline, we don’t have a great track record on this front. We can do better, and we must.

We are asking for our departments to be entrepreneurial in solving these problems. We are tired of seeing friends and colleagues who could have been brilliant economists forced out by the terrible climate in our discipline. We are tired of leaders in the field refusing to see problems happening right under their noses. And we are tired of having these problems distract from what we came here to do: meaningful, high-quality economic research.

But we believe that things can change. We cannot do it alone.

(The letter has a large number of grad student signatures including two from UCLA and several from other UC campuses.)

Source: https://medium.com/@diversityinecon/a-letter-in-response-to-roland-fryers-resignation-from-the-aea-executive-committee-6761217abfa
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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2018/10/allegation-of-hostile-work-environment.html

Enforcement? We'll See...

Helmet use on motorized scooters (AB 2989, Flora): Bicycle helmets are no longer required for riders of motorized scooters who are age 18 or older. Motorized scooters may operate within a Class IV bikeway as well as a Class II bikeway and on highways with speed limits up to 25 miles per hour. Local jurisdictions may pass ordinances to allow motorized scooters on highways with speed limits up to 35 miles per hour. It is still illegal to operate a motorized scooter on a sidewalk.

Source: https://patch.com/california/santamonica/s/gl4p4/traffic-safety-laws-coming-to-ca-in-2019

Read the Blog as a Book (from last quarter)

As we do towards the beginning of each quarter, we again make the prior quarter's blog available to those who prefer to read it in book format.

Of course, all audios, videos, and animated gifs are omitted in that version.

You can read the blog from last October 1 through December 31st at:

or at:

or download at:
https://archive.org/details/UclaFacultyAssn.Blog-4thQuarter2018

Our New Years Day Offering

For the past couple of days, we have been offering audios related to New Years for obvious reasons - and also because little else is happening in the university world.

So today we present our final offering below and wish our readers Happy New Years: