My university made the FT, not in a good way. The squeeze in overseas students is definitely an issue. But the corporatization of UK university management has been disastrous.

How does the Department for Education keep getting away with these non-statements? You clearly did not take any action that meaningfully improved the situation in the #UKHE sector, as 79% of said sector is making voluntary redundancies. Can journalists please push back? www.ft.com/content/ded7...

(Corrected) table showing proposed academic headcount reductions at UoN. Still just as unjustified and drastic as before.

To the 800+ of you who have signed the letter of support for Physics and Astronomy at Nottingham since yesterday, I cannot thank you enough. Please continue to sign and share as much as you can. nottinghamphysics.github.io/Open_Letter/

For even further context: here’s a list of cuts across the university. From a financial standpoint we are roughly break even right now, once you remove the non-cash real estate write down and redundancy payments. Nothing to justify this.

Hardly the point and solidarity with all arts & humanities colleagues everywhere facing this nonsense, but here's where the British use of "redundancy" doesn't seem right--the American "fired without cause" is perhaps more apt.

Nottingham job cuts ‘pose systemic risks to research’, union warns. Research-intensive university told it risks “intellectual stagnation” as 2,700 staff put at risk of redundancy. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

The University presents this as 'Future Nottingham' but it absolutely guts the arts and humanities. They want to sack 40% of the Dept of English, for example. Languages will be cut entirely. If that's the future, it's shit (and very far from what a University should be)

Thousands of University of Nottingham staff told they are at risk of redundancy

Coincidentally, the number of staff currently at risk of redundancy (2700) at the University of Nottingham is the same as the number of jobs at risk at British Steel. Yesterday, the govt said they aren't neutral on job losses & so pledged to save those steel jobs. Watch as they blithely ignore HE.

2,700 staff at the University of Nottingham have received 'at risk' letters from the management. The same management which refused to cut their own pay, and the same management which refused to resign after losing £60 million on a disastrous attempt to build a new campus. #JoinAUnion

Photo by @tregenza.bsky.social

There are several universities who pay the fees to be in the Russell Group (it's a membership*, not inherently a marker of quality) that are slashing + burning the curriculum breadth, hollowing out multiple disciplines, limiting capacity to research, stacking workload 1/2 *At least over £100k p.a.

My scorching hot take on this (at least in the uk) is that a bunch of more public-sector-ish jobs: teaching, universities, media, civil servant had been relatively downwards mobile in this time and it’s actually falling inequality that is making people mad.

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

When will the UK government wake up to the wholesale destruction of HE that's happening? This affects towns and cites across the UK, our businesses, the NHS, schools, young people, our global standing, everything! Higher Education, Universities, contribute over £265 BILLION to the economy.

‘Is university still worth it?’ is the wrong question ft.trib.al/EYhqm5I | opinion

This is emblematic of the consumer culture that fees have engendered. What the hell did the students expect? It was a ONCE IN A CENTURY PANDEMIC. There were LAWS against congregating in public. Staff worked themselves to the bone to get online delivery working. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

1) Today (23:59) is the deadline for submitting responses to the Home Office "consultation" on their plans to make life a lot more difficult for foreigners living in the UK: www.gov.uk/government/c...

I urge you to fill in this consultation if you can - with this very helpful support from Amnesty International - although AND because ! it is heart-breaking that this country has sunk so low that Amnesty suggest in a number of cases to provide no answer as the terms of the question are so evil

🚨🧵The 2024 UCU General Secretary was so corrupt that @vickyblake.bsky.social + I are fighting a Certification Officer case to re-run it, 10 Feb. Grady won by 182 votes from 114,310 members, turnout 15%. In secret, Grady ordered UCU managers to "Re-elect GS" +said she'd "destroy" her opponents...

BREAKING: UKRI shelves physics infrastructure projects worth £280m Major international collaborations with Cern and US Department of Energy in jeopardy, as agency pulls back funds Scoop by @francesjones.bsky.social www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

The Royal Astronomical Society is gravely concerned at the drastic cuts to support for UK astronomy outlined by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Read our statement 👉 ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

Given that the UK punches way above its weight in curiosity-driven physics research, hobbling it is short-sighted.

Carney: "American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, a stable financial system... this bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon. Tariffs as leverage ... "

The UK government is completely delusional. www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-priv...

When will this crisis get any attention whatsoever!? A THOUSAND ACADEMIC STAFF AT ONE INSTITUTION SERVED REDUNDANCY RISK NOTICES! And that's not counting what's surely being visited on professional services staff too. This is an economic catastrophe, to say nothing of the intellectual catastrophe!

The equating of income with "giving" is really irritating. So postdocs earning under the threshold are "takers".

New paper led by @annalenakofler.bsky.social: Extending our gravitational wave SBI code Dingo using transformers, making it adaptable to realistic data conditions and boosting performance. Congrats Annalena – a lot of hard work went into this and it produced excellent results! Great poster too!

1/ 🌀 New paper alert! We introduce Dingo-T1, a flexible transformer-based deep learning model for gravitational-wave (GW) data analysis. It adapts to different detector & frequency settings, improving inference efficiency and flexibility 🚀 #AI #MachineLearning #Physics #Astronomy #AcademicSky

Nottinghamshire MPs have written to @uniofnottingham.bsky.social, urging the university to reconsider proposed course suspensions and potential closures, which would significantly impact staff, students, and our wider city and county.

What a stupid government.

I find insane that shabana mahmood is going out there and saying "white british people cannot be asked to accept too many of us outsiders, it is not in their nature, and their pushback against all of us is to be placated". What???

Shabana Mahmood's proposal to stop being told to "go back home" is to send people "home". Her proposal to stop black and brown people from feeling like they don't belong, is to bake in to the immigration system that they will never belong.

Personal note: London has been home for a very, very long time, but as of today, I am also officially a Brit - that is to say, a British citizen. I feel relieved and I feel grateful - but not, perhaps, in the forelock-tugging way GB News/Starmer expect a new immigrant to be.

Govt scraps all electrification investment. Midland Main Line to stay forever diesel Leicester Nottingham Derby Sheffield. Hugely embarrassing and inexplicable www.ft.com/content/5ecd...

A policy this expansive would certainly mean mass stripping of permanent residence status from people with ILR (including pensioners and parents of British children) on a scale far beyond anything any democracy has ever done before. There is no public support for such an extreme policy.

Postdoc application deadline extended to Monday 13 October! Looking for experts in black hole perturbation theory, gravitational waves, or numerical relativity. Come join the growing team at Nottingham. Please share and apply if interested. Reach out with questions!

Happy to have such a good MP!

Job Announcement! Postdoc in Gravitational Waves at University of Nottingham * Two year position * Deadline soon: 29 September * Details and application form: jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Retrospectively removing indefinite leave to remain would be immoral and economically damaging. It would tear families apart. Attacking it as ‘potentially illegal’ is completely beside the point. Argue with the (awful) idea. Don’t try ’well, actually you can’t do that’.

Solidarity with @uonucu.bsky.social members who are striking against compulsory redundancies and job losses at the University of Nottingham. I urge the university’s leadership to come back to the table and work with staff to reach a fair settlement.

Labour must finally stand up firmly against a Reform policy. Call it out for the obscenity it is. Starmer has recently finally spoken out against populism and division. What could be more populist and divisive than this? Nor for heaven's sake, don't dodge it, or excuse it. Challenge it.

It would signal the the de facto end of nearly all immigration to this country, from those coming to work to those who come for love. It would crater our economy, tear up relationships, remove status from millions of European, result in endless legal battles and leave us as an international pariah.

Reform are now coming after people with permanent residency. It'll be citizens next. No one is safe from authoritarian governments.

Let us name those who should take responsibility for this situation. The senior management of universities failed to negotiate a sustainable system of funding, and then sleep-walked into mess. But will they be held accountable? Of course not. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

I see people bleating yet again that "elections are won from the centre". Let's examine this claim. 1. Not long ago, the current Labour government, with its grovelling to corporations and oligarchs, extreme deregulation, island of strangers rhetoric etc, would have been classed as radical right. 🧵

Results from the first part of our fourth LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA observing run are out today! We're pleased to share the largest catalog of gravitational-wave observations with more discoveries of black holes and neutron stars 📰 arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082 🔭🧪⚛️☄️ #GWTC4

128 new mergers between black holes and neutron stars. Today we're revealing the biggest ever update to our count of gravitational wave detections. New data from May 2023 to January 2024 has more than doubled the number we've seen. 🧵 1/3 @ligo.org #Virgo #KAGRA #GravitationalWaves 🔭 #GWTC-4 #O4a