The U.S. is mirroring a pattern that has happened in authoritarian regimes around the world. When a government erects barriers to reproductive care, it doesn’t just cause death and suffering for women and their families. Such policies are often a first step in the gradual decline of democracies.

Pretty soon you'll be able to adopt The Professor and have him live with you if you want. You can give him tenure.

Some arguments demand unserious responses: “Because of me, male employees are no longer allowed to make lewd jokes, hold men-only work gatherings, or type with their penises. Yes, this has ruined the workplace, although it has also drastically reduced typos.” www.newyorker.com/humor/shouts...

Oh crap I’m screwed

Major breakthrough in writing today. Hard to explain but let’s just say I see a way forward now that I didn’t before. Onward!

The University of Alabama chapter of AAUP stands with students against the closure of [alice] and Nineteen Fifty-Six magazines.

Our students are raising money to keep their magazines going after the University of Alabama suspended them for foregrounding the voices of women and African Americans. If you've got the means, please support them. givebutter.com/F0LNOA

I want everyone to realize how long straight white men have been crying “Masculinity is in crisis!” then they go start a war.

I wish a notice like this wasn't necessary. www.icrc.org/en/article/i...

The fact that we even have to make this argument proves how much higher ed is broken!

White Supremacist: Pantone’s (un)intentionally political color of the year.

They claim financial exigency, but then turn down $4 million pledges to keep the PhD programs open and disregard financial analyses that point to the real problem—bad real estate deals, spending on consultants, and their own salaries 2/2

Speaking as a private citizen on a matter of public concern, yes leadership is apparently planning to cut 50% of the faculty at the New School for Social Research in order to eliminate social research and replace scholarship with a trendy MA degree mill For the 21st Century 1/

Disappointed to see this. 160 union workers are fighting for a fair contract at Individualized Shirts, a US factory that makes high-end men's button-ups. The managers there have rejected the union's request for fair wages and health insurance. The union is asking for support 🧵

Is there no depth to which they will not sink? No low too low?

2025 Erasmus Prize awarded to feminist scholar Donna Haraway!

People often excuse this by saying the money comes from donors and doesn't take away from the university But do we really believe the counterfactual is that NONE of this $228 million would have gone to the university?

Omar is an immigrant woman of color in a position of power. Her existence challenges his fantasy of native-born, white, male supremacy. His obsession is an expression of long-held misogyny and a xenophobic racism and nativism.

“An instructor's freedom to teach includes the right to assess student academic performance. We are gravely concerned that a climate of escalating authoritarian assaults on academic freedom is normalizing politicized interference in classroom teaching & learning.” — Todd Wolfson, AAUP President

Historians on hiring, tenure, and promotion committees should be cautious about relying on Google Scholar, and we need to fight against others using it to assess us. I just noticed three citations to my articles in an American Historical Review article by Jo Guldi, and none show up in my profile.

Straight men's obsession with homosexuality is kinda... gay? #NoHomo

“Some people need to be allowed to auto-Darwinate.”

It’s 9am and somehow eugenics has already become the Bluesky main character.🧐

Here’s the thing: her “beliefs” are irrelevant. Students can “believe” anything they want but I grade submitted work based on demonstrated learning of assigned course materials. A student’s “beliefs” are really none of my business.

With rising attacks on university teachers, have you checked out the toolkit the Joint Academic Freedom Committee created for members facing challenges to academic freedom on campus, in the classroom, and beyond? Read and share with your colleagues: https://rutgersaaup.org/academic-freedom-toolkit/

Historian of eugenics here. I don't normally like to retweet bad arguments, but this is such a fundamental misunderstanding of eugenics, I think it's important to point out. I don't have time to debunk all of the ways this is inaccurate, but I'll highlight a few things and then recommend some books🧵

Prepping next semester's syllabi and why were there 15 weeks in the fall semester but 16 weeks in the spring? Is this the new math? Daylight savings time? Neoliberal capitalism?

Again reminding you that this is the university that rescinded a res life job offer to me when I was a grad student after they found out I was gay and partnered. BTW, a few spicy stories like that one appear in my forthcoming book. Preorder now so you can see me spill tea in print in a few months.

Higher ed is broken…

I used to wonder if sports were worth the investment at state schools because of how important they were for public support that contributed to state legislatures being willing to fund them. But state appropriations have cratered and the amount spent on athletics keeps going up. What are we doing?

Having a hard time taking campus “free speech” activists seriously when they’re simultaneously banning books, censoring course content, and targeting queer faculty for unemployment. Why is theirs the only speech that gets to be “free”? 🧐

The banned topics at Texas Tech only show that conservative critics really have no idea what's happening in classes that include those topics. It's partisan political policy, not the outcome of any serious inquiry into teaching and learning. Students will find it tarnishes and cheapens their degree.

Too many boards and presidents appear to believe that the value and legitimacy of their university resides in the brand when it, in fact, resides in knowledge and judgment, which in turn resides in the faculty and academic staff.

We somehow have to convey to uni admins and BOT's that the value of an academic program cannot be reduced to number of majors or tuition dollar generation. There is also value in having a broad, diverse curriculum in which all students can find themselves represented.

"But it’s not really indoctrination they worry about. The worry is that students will develop the ability to question received truths, see through the ideologies that justify social and economic inequalities, and resist manipulative political rhetoric that bypasses rationality."

Maybe if we’d funded the social sciences and the humanities, science funding wouldn’t be in such a crisis situation.

Trying to explain to non-academic friends how legitimately terrifying it actually is to be in academia right now is hard.

for World AIDS Day, a 1988 cartoon from the Advocate's Gerald Donelan

If you have to get your syllabus approved by an apparatchik before you can teach a class, you're not a university anymore you're a regime indoctrination center.

Great thread!

In the U.S., *public* uni students have a constitutional right to freedom from school censorship of their speech. That doesn’t mean anything a student says or writes satisfies the requirements to pass an assignment. We need to separate these things in our minds.

this is a very good time to review what your institution's procedures are (if any) and talk with your grad students about them. i already had a student today ask what to do if this happened to them, and it's part of our responsibility as faculty to have + know the plan

Great thread!

I knew it was going to be a grad student or an adjunct. And because grad students and adjuncts are cheap and easy to replace, they're the front line in the student-as-customer model of higher ed. Unhappy customer? Sacrifice a lowly TA or adjunct, problem solved. Unions now. Unions forever.

*Especially* for marginalized grad students, instructors, and other contingent faculty.

If you are a chair of a department or supervise grad students, it might be important to collaborate with your colleagues on ways to strategize when a "problem essay" comes down the pike. It's one small way of protecting each other.

IDK whether the OU incident was a thinly veiled effort to purge trans uni instructors but the best defense would have been an assignment with clearer learning objectives, directions, and grading criteria, and feedback that aligned with those. That didn't happen. Because TAs are stlll learning...

Given the fascistic attacks on trans people, migrants, women, disabled folks etc, talking about “free speech” in abstract terms without confronting our political reality just enables bigotry to thrive. Bad faith actors use “free speech” to bully marginalised people. We must refuse this intimidation.

“If you have an opportunity to stand up and you can do it with a greater degree of safety than a lot of your colleagues do or can, then you have an obligation to. Everyone has an obligation to do what they can.” @uawregion6.bsky.social | @uaw4811.bsky.social edsource.org/2025/uaw-481...