The Academic Minute

On Union College Week: What can we do to improve education for Black students in majority white communities?

Stephen Schmidt, Kenneth B. Sharpe Professor of Economics, examines possible solutions.

Faculty Bio:

Stephen Schmidt has been professor of economics at Union College since 1994, after completing his Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University. He was appointed the Kenneth B. Sharpe Professor of Economics in September 2019. His research interests include the economics of education, especially education finance, and the normative evaluation of economic outcomes and policies. He has published articles in American Economic Review (Papers & Proceedings), Journal of Public Economics, Contemporary Economic Policy, Economics of Education Review, Journal of Higher Education, Theoria, Restoration Ecology, Journal of Economic Education, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, Southern Economic Journal, International Journal of Industrial Organization, and others. He teaches courses in econometrics, game theory, intermediate microeconomics, the economics of race, and normative economics, as well as the College’s first-year inquiry seminar.

Transcript:

There is a racial divide in the United States economy, which means that people of different racial and ethnic identities don’t have the same economic prospects in life. One source of this divide is differences in education. Students of color, especially African-Americans, often don’t get the same level of education funding that other students get. One explanation for this pattern is stigmatization theory. It says that when members of a majority stigmatize a minority, they spend less on public services, since the stigmatized group cannot be excluded from the benefits of those services. My research examines the way school districts set spending levels to see if the patterns that stigmatization theory predicts are found in the data. In particular, I look to see whether the racial composition of a district’s student body affects spending levels differently when the adult voters in the district are dominantly White. There is good news, which is that in districts where the adult voters are less than about 90% White, education funding is higher when the student body contains more African-American or Hispanic students - presumably to address disadvantages children in those communities face. But, in districts with more than about 90% White voters, this effect is found only for Hispanic students, not for African-American students. Why are only African-American students, not Hispanic students, treated differently when districts have highly White voters? Stigmatization can explain this pattern. If White voters stigmatize African-American children - but not Hispanic children – and they can only act on this stigmatization when they are dominant in education politics, then we would see the pattern that we actually see in the data. What should we do? We can redraw district lines in ways that increase the diversity of voters, not just students, where that is possible. When it isn’t possible, state governments could provide funding that local voters are reluctant to provide.

Racial Stratification and Local Education Funding

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On Union College Week: How do we unravel the secrets of volcanoes?

Holli Frey, professor of geosciences, examines tiny crystals to gather clues.

Faculty Bio:

Holli Frey is a professor of Geosciences from Union College (NY). She studies volcanoes, trying to understand the plumbing systems beneath them, looking for clues as to how and why they erupt. She is particularly interested in mineral chemistry and chronology and uses a variety of analytical tools to address fundamental questions about magma evolution. She has active field-based projects in the Caribbean (St. Vincent and Dominica) and Central Oregon (Tumalo Tuff) and previously did work in the western Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt and plutons in coastal Maine. She enjoys mentoring students, who are frequently co-authors on her publications. Her most recent work is on the eruptions of St. Vincent and she is a project partner of Dr. Jenni Barclay (University of Bristol) on a funded, collaborative grant, “Ex-X: Expecting the Unexpected (Understanding Dangerous Volcanic Transitions)”. This summer, Dr. Frey will take several students to Dominica, continuing to explore the eruptive history of the island. Dr. Frey received her B.A. in geology from Franklin and Marshall College and her PhD in geosciences from University of Michigan, supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Transcript:

In early 2021, the volcano La Soufrière in St. Vincent in the Caribbean rumbled to life after more than 40 years. Thick lava slowly oozed out at the summit, not a real threat to the 16,000 people living in its shadow.Then, in April, everything changed. The shaking beneath the volcano shifted, prompting an evacuation. In less than 24 hours, powerful explosions began, sending ash high into the atmosphere. For two weeks, more than 30 explosions rocked the island, transforming the landscape and destroying more than 1000 homes.So, what happened inside the volcano during that sudden transition?To find out, we turned to the crystals locked inside the rocks that erupted in the first 48 hours. It was the smallest crystals – called microlites – that were key to understanding the volcano’s behavior. The microlites are like time capsules; they preserve clues about where magma has been and what it experienced on its journey to the surface. As these tiny crystals formed, they caused the magma to become more gas rich, increasing the pressure past a tipping point which caused the explosions.What we found in the microlite chemistry tells a story of magma moving through two very different environments on its way to the surface.The first crystals formed deep underground, more than fifteen kilometers beneath the volcano, where magma sat under intense pressure and water-rich conditions. Those crystals were carried upward, survivors from deep in the volcanic plumbing system.The next series of microlites didn’t come from depth however. They crystallized as the magma was moving more quickly to the surface, after the initial throat clearing first blasts that destroyed the lava dome.By reading the record preserved in the tiny crystals, we can better understand how quiet dome-building eruptions suddenly become explosive and hopefully improve how we anticipate hazards at active volcanoes.

Read More:

[Lyell Collection] - Petrology of the explosive deposits from the April 2021 eruption of La Soufrière volcano, St Vincent: a time-series analysis of microlites

[Union] - Frey Awarded NSF RAPID Grant

[U.S. National Science Foundation] - Award Abstract # 2132566 RAPID: The effusive to explosive transition of La Soufrière, St. Vincent: Insights from petrology and hygrometry

DangerousVolcanoes.org

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On Union College Week: Why are democracies suspending the rights of their people?

Guillermina Seri, professor of political science, explores this.

Faculty Bio:

Guillermina Seri is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Union College, NY, where she teaches courses in political theory and Latin American Politics. Seri is the author of the books Seguridad: Crime, Police Power, and Democracy in Argentina (Continuum, 2012) and Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance. The Crisis of Democratic Rights (University of Michigan Press, 2026), and co-editor of the volume Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies (Palgrave, 2018).

Transcript:

We often assume democracies are safe havens for human rights, but my research tracks a troubling trend: Across a number of democracies, state abuses and police violence are starting to mirror the abuses linked to emergency measures that suspend rights in authoritarian regimes.Drawing on media and archival research, I’ve found that while emergency powers used to be the tool of dictators in the 1970s, by the mid-2000s, democratic governments were actually using them more often than nondemocracies. These records challenge established beliefs in political science that democracies “almost never” suspend rights.Why is this happening? One trend associated with the rise of emergency regimes is the subordination of politics to protecting markets. We’ve entered an era where protecting the market has become the state's highest priority—its Reason of State—often bypassing legal safeguards. This global experiment began under the military dictatorship of 1970s Chile, then extended through and from the Global North. Today, it thrives in the “chainsaw” economics of Javier Milei's Argentina by subjecting everyone and everything to a market rationale, even when it may undermine rights protections.However, my research also highlights the democratic extraordinary moments when citizens reclaim voice and rights. These are the moments that open possibilities to strengthen democracy and take care of both people and the planet.

Read More:

[University of Michigan Press] - Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance

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On Union College Week: Learning goes on, even during war.

Kristin Bidoshi, professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, discusses this through language teaching in Ukraine.

Faculty Bio:

Kristin Bidoshi is a professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the director of Russian and East European Studies program at Union College, a small liberal arts college in Schenectady, NY. She conducts fieldwork in Eastern Europe and publishes on topics including the use of oral tradition in the works of Anton Chekov, Nikolai Gogol and Liudimila Petrushevskaia. She also publishes in applied linguistics, specifically in Russian language pedagogy, and has recently presented workshops on building, evaluating and using custom AI tools in the language classroom. Kristin also directs a Teaching English Practicum in which Union College students teach English as a Second Language (ESL) classes online to Ukrainian children or in-person ESL classes to refugees and immigrants in the NY Capital District.

Transcript:

What does it mean to teach language during war? The answer seems obvious. Language instruction can resume remotely, focusing on basic communicative skills. But this captures only part of the problem. War-time language teaching is never pedagogically neutral. Instruction unfolds within asymmetries of vulnerability and responsibility as classrooms become places where global politics and ethical judgment emerge.

My research, grounded in applied linguistics, examines foreign language education during war. Drawing on Michael Byram’s theory of intercultural citizenship, qualitative data from student teachers’ reflections and classroom observations of their remote English classes with Ukrainian children, this research examines how wartime English instruction moves beyond its expected focus on grammar and communication to become an ethical and civic practice, reshaping everyday instructional approaches, classroom roles and even student teachers’ understandings of language teaching, power and civic responsibility.

A student’s apology for missing class because “the power was out,” is a stark reminder of how the war shapes daily life. When a student mentions life “before the war,” grammar becomes less important as the teacher decides how to preserve instructional routine and acknowledge hardship. In these moments, skill instruction gives way to responding with care to lives shaped by conflict.

In times of war, education is fragile. This research reminds us that language pedagogy, theorized through intercultural citizenship, can sustain human connection when war seeks to undo it.

Read More:

[Space of Knowledge] - English speaking club with American students

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Cannabis may affect your memory after use, but to what extent?

Carrie Cuttler, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Co-Director of the Cannabis Research Center at Washington State University, investigates this.

Faculty Bio:

Dr. Carrie Cuttler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Co-Director of the Cannabis Research Center at Washington State University. She directs the Health and Cognition (THC) Lab, where her research examines both the beneficial and detrimental effects of cannabis and cannabinoids. Her recent work focuses on the therapeutic potential of cannabigerol (CBG) and the effects of chronic cannabis use and acute cannabis intoxication on cognition (e.g., memory, creativity, executive functioning), mental health (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism, ADHD), physical health (e.g., pain, sleep), and stress. Dr. Cuttler has published several books and more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Transcript:

One of the most well-documented effects of acute cannabis intoxication is impairment in memory. However, memory is not a single process—it is a complex system composed of multiple subsystems that rely on different neural mechanisms. Despite this complexity, most previous research on cannabis has focused on a narrow set of memory tests, particularly verbal memory tests and working memory tests.

Far fewer studies have examined how cannabis affects other types of memory that are more relevant to everyday functioning. These include temporal order memory, prospective memory, source memory, false memory, and autobiographical memory.

To address this gap, we conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in which 120 participants with substantial experience using cannabis, vaporized either placebo, a moderate dose, or a high dose of cannabis. We observed significant detriments across several domains, including verbal memory, visuospatial memory, working memory, prospective memory, source memory, false memory, and temporal order memory. To our knowledge, this is the first study to detect significant detrimental effects of acute cannabis intoxication on prospective memory and temporal order memory.

We did not observe significant effects on short-term memory or autobiographical memory. However, this is the first study to examine autobiographical memory following acute cannabis intoxication. Future research using more complex autobiographical memory tasks that capture real-world experiences is needed to corroborate this finding.

It is important to note that participants were mostly young adults frequently using cannabis recreationally. Effects would likely be stronger in less experienced cannabis users and findings may not generalize to older adults or medical users.

Read More:

[Sage Journals] - Mapping the acute effects of cannabis on multiple memory domains: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study

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Anyone can make a Jackson Pollock painting, right?

Jonas Mureika, chair and professor of physics at Loyola Marymount University, examines what physics has to say on the matter.

Faculty Bio:

Jonas Mureika serves as chair and professor of physics at Loyola Marymount University. Mureika spent much of his academic training at the University of Toronto, where he earned his B.S. in astronomy and physics and Ph.D. specializing in theoretical cosmology. He also holds an M.S. from the University of Waterloo where he studied particle physics.His research is focused on modified theories of gravitation, from implications for early universe cosmology, to micro black hole formation in high energy particle collisions. One such proposal that Mureika has helped advance is the idea that at high energies, the effective dimensionality of space decreases. A novel implication of this theory is that the universe was effectively one-dimensional in the moments following the Big Bang.Mureika is currently interested in the observational signatures of quantum gravity that might arise in future experiments, including LIGO gravitational wave detections, and imaging of supermassive black holes through the Event Horizon Telescope. He has also spent years analyzing Jackson Pollock’s art through fractal and lacunarity analysis.

Transcript:

20th-century abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock is most well-known for his pour paintings. Though highly regarded in the art world and a household name, many people have wondered: “Is his technique random?” “Can’t a child do that?”There are many fascinating aspects of Pollock’s work, but one of the most striking is the fractal patterns consistent throughout. Fractals exist everywhere in the natural world: in coastlines, lightning, and plants, to name a few, and can be mathematically analyzed to understand the physics that made them and how the structure will evolve over time.A group of physicists, psychologists, and I studied the paintings of adults and children ages 4-6 to distinguish whether artistic style is defined by age and how to differentiate paintings made by the two groups, allowing us to understand not just Pollock, but how to distinguish between any artists’ work at a mathematical level.We used fractal and lacunarity analysis – the measurement of clusters and gaps between them – techniques used in astrophysics, geophysics, biology, and beyond, to examine the artwork. We found that age and biomechanics create distinct artistic signatures, with factors such as balance, height, and vision producing statistically different patterns. Children produce smaller fractal dimensions – less clustering of fine structure, and larger lacunarity – more gaps between clusters, while adults demonstrate the opposite.As part of the study, we analyzed Pollock’s “Number 14,” finding that the lacunarity and fractal measurement resembled those in the children’s paintings more closely.For decades, people have questioned Pollock’s legitimacy, yet his paintings are more complex than they appear when examined mathematically. Pollock’s work teaches us many things, but what is particularly fascinating is how his paintings show us that age, balance, and how you move through space all leave traces that physics can interpret.

Read More:

[Frontiers] - A question of Jackson Pollock’s balance: using lacunarity and fractal analysis to distinguish poured paintings by adults and children

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What role does friendship play in political and resistance movements?

Kim Miller, professor of art history, and coordinator of the Peace and Social Justice Studies Program at Wheaton College, examines this.

Faculty Bio:

Kim Miller is Professor of Art History, and Coordinator of the Peace and Social Justice Studies Program at Wheaton College. Formerly, she directed Wheaton’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program (2006 – 2020), served as co-director of the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Humanities, and held the Jane Oxford Keiter Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Kim is also a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, where she works to develop strategies to expand access to education for underserved populations. She serves as a professional mentor for South Africa’s “Future Professors” program, a nation-wide effort which aims to support young faculty and graduate students of color with their research and scholarship as they advance through the faculty ranks. Kim’s research focuses on the ways in which women artists and activists in South Africa use artmaking as a form of activism and empowerment, particularly in the context of that country’s anti-apartheid movement. Her forthcoming book, How did they Dare? Women’s Activism and the Work of Memory in South African Commemorative Art, examines how memorial practices and commemorative sites are associated with women’s political struggle in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. Kim is co-editor, with Prof Brenda Schmahmann, of the book, Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents: Public Art in South Africa, 1999 – 2015.

Transcript:

In 1955, two South African women brazenly defied apartheid laws when they slipped past the feared security police, boarded a plane for the first time in their lives, and crossed the world to speak the truth about what was happening to their country. Lilian Ngoyi and Dora Tamana were formidable activists, skilled organizers, and close friends — chosen as delegates of the Federation of South African Women to represent the anti-apartheid cause abroad. Their illegal journey took them to Switzerland, England, Germany, Romania, China, and Russia, where they stood before crowds and described the cruelties of apartheid with clarity and courage. When they returned home, they worked with other women activists to organize the 1956 Women’s March. The largest public demonstration in the history of the anti-apartheid movement. My research asks a question history has largely ignored: what role did friendship play in sustaining that movement? What role does friendship continue to play as a sustaining force in political and social movements? My work considers friendship as a “knowing practice” in the way that Audre Lorde imagined it, to understand the development of political subjectivity in the lives of female anti-apartheid activists. How might a close examination of women’s lives demonstrate how relationships between women strengthened the resistance movement and rejected the patriarchal and separatist ideology of apartheid?Through letters, diaries, newspapers, and photographs, I’ve been recovering what I call hidden histories — the intimate bonds between women that made political resistance possible. These were not incidental relationships. Ngoyi and Tamana’s friendship survived imprisonment, torture, solitary confinement, and house arrest. They held each other up when the state tried to break them down.African feminist scholars are now building a rich body of work that theorizes these bonds — understanding friendship and intimacy not as private matters, but as political ones. My work joins that conversation, centering the women who dared to resist, together.

Read More:

LinkedIn

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Healthy aging is critical for the present and the future.

Jean Wactawski-Wende, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health at the University at Buffalo, discovers more.

Faculty Bio:

Jean Wactawski-Wende, PhD, is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and dean of the University at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions. She is an epidemiologist who focuses her research on understanding factors that influence women’s health.

With more than 25 years of research experience, she is the principal investigator of UB’s Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Center and also leads the WHI Northeast Regional Center, comprising 9 other institutions. Initiated in 1993, the WHI is an National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded, multi-centered study that involves both randomized clinical trials and an observational longitudinal study examining the major factors influencing morbidity and mortality in older women.

In addition to the WHI, she has been principal investigator on dozens of research studies funded by the NIH and other federal agencies. Her interests include research on risk factors and prevention of cancer, osteoporosis and periodontal disease in postmenopausal women. Her current research focuses on the oral microbiome and health outcomes. She has also conducted several studies on reproductive health issues in younger women. As part of this work, she has led several large-scale prevention clinical trials in women.

Transcript:

Thanks to the generosity of thousands of women across the country, researchers like me continue to learn more each day about the major causes of death and disease in postmenopausal women.

Many of these women have completed yearly surveys as part of the Women’s Health Initiative, a long-term national study that began in the early 1990s and has yielded important insights into the risk factors for cancer, heart disease and osteoporosis, among other conditions, in a rapidly growing U.S. demographic. We’re also learning more about the role the microbiome plays in influencing human health and disease.

This research is critical. The number of Americans 65 and older is projected to increase by 42%, to 82 million, by 2050, with women accounting for the majority of this group.

That’s why it is so vital that we continue to learn about how things like diet and exercise play a role in healthy aging.

WHI ancillary studies have allowed my research colleagues and me to report recently in major journals on associations between muscle strength and reduced risk of death in women between the ages of 63 and 99, and the use of menopausal hormone therapy and incidence of a leading cause of corneal blindness. We’ve also investigated how two types of gut bacteria may be associated with a diet high in red meat, eggs and full fat dairy products, which can lead to the hardening of arteries.

Through WHI, we will continue to make further discoveries, while giving young researchers opportunities to advance their careers.

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Is there a size limit on planets?

Jean-Baptiste Ruffio, research scientist in astronomy at the University of California, San Diego, checks in to find out.

Faculty Bio:

Jean-Baptiste Ruffio is a research scientist studying extra-solar planets in the Astronomy & Astrophysics department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He has been developing statistical and instrumentation techniques to push the frontiers of planet detection and characterization with the largest telescopes in the world, both on the ground and in space.

Transcript:

How big can a planet be before it’s no longer called a planet? We used the James Webb Space Telescope to answer this question. In our own solar system, Jupiter is the largest planet. But astronomers have found much larger planets around other stars. In 2008, astronomers took the first picture of a surprising system called HR 8799. They saw four massive “maybe” planets orbiting the same star, each being 5-9 times the mass of Jupiter. We have tried to understand if they are planets or brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs form like stars but they don’t get big enough to trigger the fusion of hydrogen. On the other hand, we believe planets generally from in a disk of dust and gas around young stars. Grains of dust collide and get bigger to form planetary cores. When a core gets big enough, it also pulls in large amount of gas to form gas giants like Jupiter. However, classical theories of planet formation struggle to explain the formation of the largest systems like HR 8799. In order to determine if they are truly planets or brown dwarfs, we can measure the composition of their atmospheres. Indeed, if we see a lot of icy and rocky material, that is the telltale sign of a planet. Brown dwarf would instead have a composition similar to the star. We therefore used James Webb to image the four planets around HR 8799. We then spent two years developing new analysis techniques to be able to measure the composition of these planets in unprecedented detail. We found that the planets had much more carbon, oxygen, and sulfur than their star. These observations finally provided the most direct evidence that HR 8799 is truly a planetary system and that planets can be much bigger than we thought.

Read More:

[UC San Diego Today] - How Big Can a Planet Be? With Very Large Gas Giants, It Can Be Hard to Tell

[Nature Astronomy] - Jupiter-like uniform metal enrichment in a system of multiple giant exoplanets

[ARXIV] - The compositions of the HR 8799 planets reflect accretion of both solids and metal-enriched gas

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Why do implicit biases still exist in hiring decisions?

Samantha Dodson, assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resources at the University of Calgary, answers this.

Faculty Bio:

Samantha Dodson’s research program focuses on when and why women experiencing roadblocks and adversity are evaluated as deserving of opportunities and support at work.

Transcript:

Since women began joining the modern workforce after World War II, support professions such as secretaries and paralegals have been predominantly occupied by women. The more powerful professions they support, such as executives and lawyers, are predominantly held by men. These low-power support professions often involve developing efficient processes and paying close attention to detail. In contrast, individuals in high-power organizational roles tend to engage in tasks like identifying and creating values, strategies, and visions. Thus, women are more likely than men to be in roles that require concrete mindsets and less likely to be in roles that require abstract mindsets. Drawing on research linking gender role segregation to gender stereotypes, we theorized that people might believe there are innate attributes that enable women to perform well in process-based roles requiring specificity and attention to detail, whereas men have attributes that help them excel in roles that require seeing the big picture.

Six experiments showed that we do, in fact, hold implicit and explicit descriptive stereotypes – or beliefs about what men and women are – such that people tend to believe women are more concrete than men, women are more concrete than abstract, and men are more abstract than concrete. Women tend to hold these beliefs more deeply than men, and these stereotypes arose across dozens of occupations and industries. These beliefs have real-world consequences. In one study, we found that in nearly 550,000 LinkedIn recommendations, connections are more likely to use words such as “detailed and exact” to describe women and “visionary and farsighted” to describe men. Critically, we also found that these beliefs increased the likelihood of women being assigned detailed tasks at work, such as filing paperwork and proofreading, on top of their existing workload, perpetuating gender roles and organizational inequity.

Read More:

[APA PsyNet] - She sees the trees, he sees the forest: Descriptive gender stereotypes of concreteness and abstractness

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