Guns on Campus

Back in 2016 when the Georgia legislature was considering "campus carry" I wrote about the irony of rules for faculty and staff that prohibit weapons on campus. I am updating that post as the latest "campus carry" bill awaits the governor's signature or veto.

(My money is on him signing it as the exceptions meet some of his concerns last year when he vetoed it)

Quite simply, if the governor signs into law "campus carry," UGA will have to think about its own rules that ban employees from having weapons on campus. There's probably a story here. Just saying.

UGA, in its employment section on workplace violence, says it's against the rules to "possess, use, or threaten to use an unauthorized weapon as defined by the Policy." What's a weapon? At the end of the page it defines a weapon as "any objects that may be used to intimidate, attack, or injure another person or to damage property" and then points you to a page that doesn't exist: http://www.police.uga.edu/weapons.html. Don't bother, it's a dead link. Here's an archived version or here is an updated version with a different URL that sums it up for you. I did all the work. Enjoy.

Take a look at that list of weapons. It includes bats. So you baseball and softball players, you're in technical violation of the law? Nope. There's an exception for "legitimate athletic purposes" and a whole long list of others the law doesn't apply to.

But the real point here is, if the governor signs into law "campus carry," I would think UGA will have to alter its rules some to allow faculty and staff the same access to concealed carry of a weapon that the law would allow for students who are over 21 and meet all the other requirements. That's a good question to ask the administration, I suppose, as if the governor signs the law it will go into force (I think) July 1.

Income Inequality

What's up with Twiggs County, Georgia?

In fiddling with the 2017 health data, it turns out Twiggs County is #1 in Georgia and #4 in the whole country in terms of income inequality. Hmph.

I don't know anything about Twiggs County other than what I can skim from census numbers and the magic that is its Wikipedia entry. It sits near Macon and has relatively few people, a hair over 8,000, but it scores really high in terms of income inequality.

So how is income inequality measured? You take a county's 20th percentile average income and compare it to the 80th percentile average income and generate a ratio. So for Twiggs county the 80th percentile average of salary is $79,276 and the 20th percentile average salary is $,959. The ratio, dividing the bigger by the smaller, is 7.96 or, in this case, rounded to 8.0.  In other words, it has a big gap between residents who earn the most and residents who earn the least, at least compared to the gap seen in other counties.

The national list is a mishmash of places. Below are the Top 5 U.S. counties in terms of income inequality:

1. Radford City, Virginia
2. New York, New York
3. Clarke, Alabama
4. Twiggs, Georgia
5. Terrell, Texas

Radford is relatively small as well. I know nothing about it. NYC kinda speaks for itself, but Clarke, Alabama? It's a burb of Mobile, best I can tell. Terrell County, Texas, is tiny as well. So what can we say from these top five? There's no consistent explanation, not a one. They're not all college towns, not all major cities.

Is income inequality a bad thing? Generally yes, though there's something to be said for places with lots of different kinds of people rather than everyone being about the same -- or all above average. 

Now closer to home. Athens-Clarke County, where I live, rates pretty high in income inequality. We're #2 in the state. Below, the Georgia list and the income ratio, which is simply how many times smaller the bottom salaries are compared to the top salaries:

1. Twiggs (8.0)
2. Clarke (7.4)
3. Clinch (7.0)
4. Baldwin (6.7)
5. Ben Hill (6.6)
6. Bulloch (6.6)
7. Crisp (6.5)
8. Bibb (6.4)
9. Dougherty (6.4)
10. Burke (6.3)

By the way, the average for Georgia is 5.0. The Georgia county with the least income inequality has a 2.7 ratio (Chattahoochee). In the map below, darker colors signify counties with a greater income inequality ratio. Click on the map and a county to see its ratio.


Not a lot you can tell from the list of counties above. Again, there's no single consistent indicator that I can readily see. No major cities on the list except, maybe, Bibb County and Macon, otherwise income inequality isn't on the surface easy to explain. The poverty rates for these counties are high but not shockingly higher than other counties and in some instances actually lower. Glancing across a number of other indicators, nothing pops up to me to explain why these counties versus other counties lead the list. Athens-Clarke I get -- high poverty and a major university in the same place, but that doesn't really explain the other counties.

No Home Favorite

It's a big weekend here in Athens when we host the Deep South's oldest football rivalry, Auburn vs. Georgia. While losses on both sides make it of less national significance than many expected, down here both sides take it seriously.

It's also a game where, unlike is usual, being the visitor is not so bad a thing.

UGA is a 2.5-point favorite this Saturday. That sounds about right, and you might guess it has to do with the game being in Athens versus being played on the loveliest village on the plain, but there's also a semi-tradition that the home team often loses in this match-up.

But is that really the case? Let's look at the data.

To keep it simple and modern, I'll only go back 20 years ago, to 1994 (a tie, by the way). Since 1994, the home team is 8-11-1 (see table at bottom). In other words, the home team has won eight times in 20 games -- assuming I'm reading the data right. There's even a stretch of five straight games in which the home team lost, cementing what seems to be a semi-expectation in recent years, one broken by the godless Prayer at Jordan-Hare last year.

So, is eight home wins bad? Well, it's less than 50 percent. The easy and wrong comparison would be to look at how often either Auburn or Georgia win their home games, but that would include cupcake teams paid to fill out the schedule. A better comparison might be to take an SEC rival and see how well either Auburn or Georgia does against them, home and away. The problem with that approach is teams often get on streaks. Take UGA vs Tennessee, for example. UGA has won the last five, and there's a nine-game stretch in the 1990s that the Vols won.  How about the Dawgs vs. South Carolina? In the last 10 games, it's an even 5-5 split in terms of home versus visitor wins, so perhaps there's something a little special about the Auburn-Georgia game -- the ties the programs share, the geographic proximity, the oldest Deep South rivalry.

Year	Winner
1994	Tie
1995	Visitor
1996	Visitor
1997	Visitor
1998	Visitor
1999	Visitor
2000	Home
2001	Visitor
2002	Visitor
2003	Home
2004	Home
2005	Visitor
2006	Visitor
2007	Home
2008	Visitor
2009	Home
2010	Home
2011	Home
2012	Visitor
2013	Home

A Major Called "Newspapers"

I'm gonna stray a bit off the what people know track.

I teach in the Department of Journalism, yet we don't have a major called journalism. Instead we have three majors: newspapers, magazines, and publication management. Anyone with a clue about the changing dynamics of the news business realizes having a major called newspapers makes about as much sense a business school having a major called convenience store management. We teach journalism, not newspapers, not magazines. We teach it for dead trees and online and all the rest. Journalism is a verb, something you do.

And yes, turf protection rears its ugly little head. No place is so petty as academe. We don't want to upset anyone by having a major called journalism in what coincidentally is a Department of Journalism. Extend this brilliant line of thought to its logical and deeply disturbed conclusion and you can complain about Department of English having a major called English -- because, after all, many of us use English. Dammit, how dare they claim it!

Let the brainiacs run free and you arrive at only one possible answer -- we change our name to the Department of Newspapers and Magazines.

So can I drag this vent, kicking and screaming, back to a what people know discussion? Probably not well, though of course our curriculum influences what skills students have when they enter the market, which influences how news is produced, which influences what people learn about their social and political world. So yeah, all of this petty crap does make an indirect difference.

Except not, because we still have a major called newspapers. We're roaring fearlessly into the 1950s.