OK. What's the Supreme Court up to now?

Who is "we"?

I guess I should read up on this more because the part of these deals I really don't get is that the students are "already using [LLMs] for free," so I'm very unclear about what universities are getting out of these deals, even if they believe using LLMs is good for students.

This has been true in higher ed as long as I've been in it: claims that programs need to be close or reduced due to "budgets" but the details show that the programs in question actually bring in money, meaning the actual reason is ideological.

This is horrific and exactly what those of us in Black studies, gender studies, women’s studies have been warning our colleagues in the sciences about. Their seeming neutrality will not save them.

i think to understand the meaning of the birthright citizenship clause to the framers of the 14th amendment, you have to understand significance of dred scott to the civil war republican party. dred scott wasn't just a bad ruling, it was understood as a rejection of the declaration itself.

it might seem surprising that the people who said “look, let trans people live their lives, but i have Reasonable Concerns about sports and toilets” aren’t up in arms about this, but what you have to remember is that those people who said that are liars who were lying

So I guess the scandal du jour over in the UK is the revelation that the head of the "We Love Racism!" party is, in fact, a racist. Shocking!

This on the other hand is good www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/u...

“She showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.” www.wgbh.org/news/local/2... @gbhnews.bsky.social

They're getting so blatant with it.

I will repeat my Supreme Court reform: 101 members, they hear every case. The slogan: "You shouldn't have to know the names of any of these people."

The rare presidential administration whose character, efficacy and dignity would automatically increase if everyone in it was replaced with a ten year old.

The entire debate over birthright citizenship is anti-constitutional because the purpose, intent, and text of the 14th Amendment were designed to foreclose any argument about who counts as an American citizen.

I'm not an 'there won't be elections' doomer. I'm a long-term doomer. I think the pendulum will swing back and Dems will regain power and then face an even more hostile press than before and won't have the votes to restructure the courts and we'll be in this awful cycle for the rest of my life.

This gets a real "who the hell does he think he is" response from me.

"adding the president’s birthday."

The "normalization of drug abuse by elites" is another one of those recent trends that seems like a pretty bad sign for the future of the US. And, of course, combine that with the fact that a lot of the same people support the "War on Drugs."

Jesus. What is this guy on?

It feels like the dominant narrative on the boat strikes is increasingly losing track that they're all illegal.

this encapsulates the essential relationship between the people running universities, the people doing academic work in universities, and the people looking to smash and grab as much as possible from universities while we're on the way down

I was just telling someone today that the main thing I learned from getting a Ph.D. is that I don't really know anything. It's amazing how many white guys with STEM Ph.D.s come to the opposite conclusion that they know everything.

They're not even trying to appear nonpartisan anymore.

It's weird to even use the word "still." Assuming they were smuggling a boat full of drugs—and we yet to see evidence to that effect—they were never "in any kind of fight" to begin with. They were criminals transporting an illegal consumer product.

best package warning graphic i've ever seen 🪶

For what it's worth, my experience was the exact opposite. I found my students this semester to be more engaged and excited about the work than they have been in years.

Hillary Clinton is one of those public figures that I now and again wonder if I'm being too hard on them. And then something comes along and reminds me that I'm probably not being hard enough.

Labour seems intent on disproving my belief that, if nothing else, political parties are committed to self-preservation.

i'd go even further and say there is a reason even nixon kept this kind of stuff to himself. you would have to go back quite a bit to find a point at which is acceptable for a president to say anything like this *in public*, to say nothing of in the oval office.

Imagine thinking that one of the top problems facing the U.S. today is giving kids extra time on exams, jfc

Abled people, who by definition don't regularly interact with healthcare as patients, are always shocked when told about nurses being *wildly* full of woo. Everyone else is like "yeah dude, half the time your nurse is gonna tell you it's demons and that you need more blue light or something"

I received an "F" on my dental school paper for writing "the tooth fairy takes 'em while you sleep" and now I'm suing the school for religious discrimination

Apparently people should also read the memo b/c it clarifies what the flow chart that is being passed around is for: when a faculty member thinks course content might fall into one of the prohibited categories, then they send it through this process. It's not for literally everything taught.

It's worth looking at the memo. The sections on sex and sexual orientation are particularly alarming. My read is that if you want to teach about Stonewall, you have to get provost approval. If you want to teach about cultures with more than two genders, you have to get provost approval.

TX Tech has a flow chat for guidance on what can be taught in the university system. Two things: 1. Very little content seems to be permitted. This is partisan control of the curriculum. 2. I would not enjoy teaching under these conditions, but I really would not want to be a Chair or Dean.

After I stopped working at a school, they had a president who wanted to triple the student body in like five years. It was a laughable but extreme version of this tendency.

“One person is an autocratic president of the university for decades” certainly wasn’t a flawless system but it’s clear that “admins hop from job to job scaling the career ladder by filling their CV with ‘accomplishments’ that are expensive burdens to the schools they leave behind” is even worse.

A real "ah ha moment" for me when it comes to the stories we tell about the United States is when I realized there was far more right-wing violence in the 1960s than left-wing violence, but we typically tell a narrative that suggests the opposite.

Yet another long feature article about political violence that refuses to acknowledge the basic reality that right-wing violence is far more common than left-wing violence. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

"surprisingly"

I've been saying my entire career that, for many administrators, the ideal university would have neither students nor faculty, as both are just a pain-in-the-ass, and detract from the real mission: accreditation, fundraising, sports, personal career advancement, etc.

What is your favorite "Christian" Christmas song and what is your favorite "Secular" Christmas song? I will probably always adore "O Come All Ye Faithful" and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" for Christian. And "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" for secular.

What do people think the 90s were

As a centrist, I think Donald Trump is bad, but the political and economic conditions that enabled him to become president twice are good

I'm back on my bullshit. (Playing Balatro compulsively.)

People are using it a lot more than we realize. It's bad folks.

I am allowed to fail students for AI use, and I do, and I say I will, repeatedly and emphatically. As a result, I wind up having to fail very few students for AI use.

Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...