Here’s the U.S. government being officially religious in a country with no official religion.

It goes without saying that we all should be following Chris Newfield’s newsletter. We are all Critical University Studies scholars now & Chris is the OG. But even by his standards, this one blows my hair back.

2025 brought the biggest split between university administrations and faculty in recent history, probably since the 1960s. My new post at Remaking is about this. And the gruesome fiscal consequences (UCalif). And! Hopes for a shadow or parallel U to come. utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/12/line...

"[The New School for Social Research] is a place that built, cemented, and still upholds a legacy of social justice and anti-fascist scholarship. This legacy is what is at stake today." www.e-flux.com/notes/678343...

Simon Fraser University wants only non-union faculty at its new medical school. SFU contends that it's so new and different that the existing collective agreement with university faculty doesn't apply. pressprogress.ca/sfu-medical-...

Massive turnout of organized higher ed workers to protest the brutal austerity measures proposed by The New School management ✊ @newschoolaaup.bsky.social

Sam Altman: hey I made a machine that stole literally all your stuff in order to make CSAM of your child actors, sometimes it encourages people to kill themselves Disney: Holy shit here's a billion dollars Altman: the machine loses more than that each week but thank you. Soon it will become god.

Six of the ten most-downloaded episodes of December so far are from this arc, which suggests to me that somebody is teaching with it, and that makes me very happy.

it’s devastating to see students looking at their professors as cowed and silenced people. Instead, they need to see their professors actively fighting right-wing censorship.

December 2025 ISRF Director’s Note: Ducking and Facing the British University’s Great Contraction @cnewf.bsky.social warns UK universities face a ‘Great Contraction’ of underfunding, mismanagement & collapsing courses as govt denies insolvency risks & offers no real fixes isrf.org/blog/ducking...

What NYT said about the NDAA versus what WaPo did, just in case you wanted to measure the extent to which NYT makes Trump the hero in every story.

I think this moment - an internet native tech magazine choosing to cover authoritarian overreach via a zine - is pretty significant. Print is a rent strike.

Today is the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest. Six myths: 1) She wasn't old or tired. 42 years old that day, she had a "life history of being rebellious" & had spent two decades helping to turn the Montgomery NAACP into a more activist branch alongside ED Nixon and Johnnie Carr.

What do you do when your board never asks for enough money to keep academic quality--& has no plan ever to ask for enough money? A new post at the Remaking blog on responding to the hypernormalization of bad university budgets, with U California as Exhibit A utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/line...

Absolute debasement of academic standards *student submits opinion in psych class *gets bad grade *instructor says she can make whatever arguments she wants but must draw on empirical sources *student & Turning Point says her religious freedom & first amendment rights violated *professor suspended

This thread is 💯. Labor precarity in academia means the evisceration of faculty governance and academic freedom, opening the door to administrative purges of the most vulnerable. And faculty-esp tenured faculty and academic leaders-who aren't defending their trans colleagues are enabling it.

Good morning to Brazilian reporter Manuela Borges, who’s been waiting eleven years for this petty moment. ❤️ 🇧🇷

BRB inviting all my friends over for drinks and insurance forms.

the OBR - the incompetent overloards of a destabilising fiscal rule regime

GIVE US BACK OUR TRAINS, DAMNIT *__this post brought to you by autism__*

really good advice from @latimes.com @hiltzikm.bsky.social for the Unversity of California to be more like Michael Corleone in this one way: "my offer is nothing." www.latimes.com/business/sto...

really good overview by Whitney Curry Wimbish of the Trump health cost crisis with examples of insane premium increases.“It’s kind of like this war,” Sam said, “on everyone.” prospect.org/2025/11/21/a...

My response as a college would to say, bring it on: it is time to start attacking executive order to the states or private entities that are not federal agencies, www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/u.... An executive order is an instruction to a federal agency.

an update on the post below: on the 2 UCLA faculty resolutions--for restoration of shared budget governance and for IT transparency, the votes were 115 Approve, 1 Oppose and 104 Approve, 2 Oppose. It seems to quote Avery Gordon "the repression isn't working anymore."

We’ve talked about how we in the media normalize (even incentivize) aberrant behavior by public figures who make it their brand. But just imagine if an official in your city or town had told a female reporter asking about a sex abuse scandal, “Quiet, piggy.” Headlines for days.

Yeah whatever happened to this?

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

if dems win congress next year they need to introduce an impeachment resolution against emil bove

WE WON!!! The US District Court for the Northern District of California has issued a preliminary injunction in AAUP et al v. Trump et al (the wall to wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of Title VI to reshape the University of California system. Read the order here:

I refuse to believe politicians are forgetting how rancid MTG is. Sure we can have a big tent but we do not need to welcome someone like her. Please everyone get a fucking hold of yourselves.

I spoke at 4 US universities over 3 weeks, had a great time with everyone and learned a ton from people. The post theme is never not telling our story and never not acting on it. The weather was perfect in Bloomington, Indiana and so were the leaves. utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/line...

NEW: Both Pro-Life Wisconsin and Planned Parenthood have registered in support of a bill to expand Medicaid coverage for new low-income moms. Despite the bipartisan unity, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos says, “We already have enough welfare in Wisconsin.”

Ky. Professor ‘Reassigned’ After Call for War on Israel Sues www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

Kevin Hassett: "I think there could be a little bit of an almost quiet time in the labor market, because firms are finding that AI is making their workers so productive that they don't necessarily have to hire the new kids out of college and so on."

NEW — I spoke to DoorDash about the White House claiming the company's report shows "inflation has been tamed" and whether that's an interpretation one should make. An economist also weighed in, pointing out dictatorships use data obfuscation as a tool, and right now they're "grasping at straws."

My employer has announced a voluntary redundancy scheme. By the standards of what’s happening elsewhere in the UK it’s really not that bad… But the fact that the University insists on describing this as an ‘investment’ is mind-boggling.

thinking about how i get anxious writing emails because i don't want to sound like a moron while larry summers is apparently typing emails like this: u kno she dint want to talk tomorrow. make me bad pheel.

In text messages from 2017, Jeffrey Epstein seemingly represented himself as positioned to pass information from the Trump White House to Bill Gates through an intermediary. www.wired.com/story/jeffre...

A Black Hawk helicopter. SWAT teams repelling to the roof. 300 agents. Flash-bang grenades. A TV crew. “It’s 20,000 of them running through my house like we got Saddam Hussein in the closet." For all that, fed prosecutors filed no criminal charges against anyone who was arrested. Stunning report.

Get ready for Trump to tell SCOTUS that murdering Epstein was part of his official duties as president, and them saying "sounds good"

wtf

Something absolutely perfect about Larry Summers riffing about the scourge of woke cancel culture being unfair to predatory men in a friendly email to his pal JEFFREY EPSTEIN.

every woman acutely understands this face.

If only our society took major crimes by rich people as seriously as minor crimes by poor people. Ideally more seriously. But as seriously would be a big improvement.

"Christopher Newfield called for academics to 'seize the means of knowledge production' by working 'step by step ... toward direct control of universities.' ... I think the most imperative, but also the most apparent pressure point for academics looking to act upon his call is education technology."

I’m on @llassabe.bsky.social’s wonderful podcast, American Campus, talking about University Keywords and how the book orients us towards shared study. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a...

unconvincing defence from Bailey - the real question is why is the Bank of England increasing the costs for government by actively selling gilts when NO other large central bank does it. www.ft.com/content/620c...

You can see why Bessent is floating coffee tariff relief today. ☕️