This from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social hit me over the head like a mallet of truth. This is the thing. This is what I’ve been trying to warn people about perfectly crystallized. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/o...

My sense that neither party supports higher education is driven in part by Democrats' efforts to have students earn more college credit in high school. I've been yearning for someone to write about the negative effects of these policies on learning. Here's a start: www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

I have a lot of compassion for people using AI for work (which is basically every professional I know). The pitch for AI is utterly disconnected from how LLMs actually work. Things that would be easy to do with a little code LLMs totally botch. They have to. It's how they're built.

We've gone 87 years with no minimum salary for teachers. Exempt from the minimum wage. Exempt from overtime laws. Exempt from the minimum salary. Exempt from respect.

Big news: The Trump administration has essentially proposed shutting down tribal colleges and universities, displacing more than 20,000 students. My latest for ProPublica:

Finally. The takeover of the USIP was one of the most egregious DOGE actions. The refusal of a TRO was baffling, given that it is a nonprofit. Would not be surprised to see lawsuits or criminal charges over the building seizure & destruction of property. Gift article: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/u...

Yet we can't even get a minimum salary for teachers, who legally can be paid a penny a pay period.

That they can't teach AI how many stars and stripes the American flag has tells you everything you need to know about how AI programs work. That the DOD doesn't proof its posts (or doesn't care if the flag is wrong) tells you everything you need to know about Hegseth's Pentagon. Also, his finger!

That the mainstream press doesn't routinely refer to the administration as "white supremacist" in every article bogles my mind. They're not exactly subtle.

The authoritarian turn came first for universities, which can't be the bulwarks of democracy they once were unless they re-democratize themselves.

The rise of end times fascism. An essay by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

Musk and DOGE keep making public claims of fraud without running them past the workers who understand the systems they are examining. I can't tell if they are just really incompetent or purposefully using incompetence as cover for lying to the public.

Curtailing people’s ability to read widely and carefully, to locate, assess, and compare different sources for themselves, and to write in their own voice about what they find and what it means, is arguably more effective than censorship. It is also one of the most obvious effects of generative AI.

This is what genocidal governments do. They treat people as non-human, even classify them as such in paperwork, to justify their crimes.

I'd also bet most Americans also don't know that when we put people of Japanese heritage in concentration camps during WWII, we renditioned them from Latin America as well, including from El Salvador. They were stripped of their passports, declared "illegal aliens," & imprisoned without due process.

ChatGPT is singlehandedly taking care of grade inflation. LLMs inhibit student learning and produce absolute garbage work, at least in the humanities (I can't speak beyond that). I would love to see a larger data set, but the grade distribution in my classes has entirely changed.

Trump has repeatedly said he wants to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the military to be used against Americans. Here's world-class nonviolence theorist Daniel Hunter on what to do if that happens: wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/what...

My greatest fear: Trump is going to need a war to compensate with his base for crashing the economy. And he'll want one because war powers are basically unlimited. Worse, it'll need to be a war he can blame on the other party, so more likely China than Canada or Greenland. Nobody wins that war.

As we all know, NEH funding was already almost inexpressibly meager. It bears repeating that they’ve targeted NEH and IMLS exactly because they’ve been *incredibly* efficient at spurring new thought, writing, and community-building.

In a democracy, Congress would vote on eliminating federal funding for libraries and museums (and vote no, because knowledge is essential for informed democratic decision making). Instead, the world's richest man has seized the power of the purse from Congress. We are no longer in a democracy.

As I’m always telling people, my job is 70% giving feedback and thereby engaging students in conversations about their ideas and hopes for their writing. It’s not grading. It’s not correcting. It’s thinking with.

As always Tressie McMillan Cottom connects all the maneuvers and sticks the landing #AcademicSky www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/o...

The book purges are coming for higher education. The military is already complying with the white/hetero/cis supremacist censorship agenda (see gift article). It's only a matter of time before even private universities are asked to purge books or lose federal funding www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/u...

I wrote about why American science is under attack. TLDR: it's because authoritarians demand the power to define what is true, and the entire project of empirical study is a threat to that power. www.brookings.edu/articles/pop...

"Creating a ruckus" is his euphemism for wrote an op-ed in a newspaper. The Constitution protects all people under U.S. jurisdiction (not just citizens) from government actions penalizing them for speech, use of the free press, or peaceful assembly.

My biggest takeaway from the leaked signal thread is that the people who helm the biggest military the world has ever seen are incredibly glib and disrespectful about the people they kill, and talk about green-lighting bombings like they're ordering takeout at McDonald's.

JD Vance, devout Catholic who prides himself on being a deeply moral person, learns that the government of which he’s 2nd in command has just taken the lives of innocent people and responds with “Excellent.”

This is how you defend higher education, at least to the audience of the NYT (important as the Democrats have often aligned with the GOP to downgrade higher ed to worker training so they can reserve liberal arts educations for the wealthy white elite). Gift article: www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/o...

Legislative leaders just aren’t going to be great opposition leaders. But Schumer and Jeffries can do something bold and original—this is not the time to be playing it safe.

The admin's use of Signal to discuss official/classified information fits well with the classic authoritarian playbook. Making officials break the law to do their jobs is a classic way of gaining power over them. It creates strong incentives to obey and to keep the regime in power at all costs.

Every single member of the Columbia administration should step down. Through their complicity and their cowardice, they've betrayed their faculty, their staff and most of all their students. There's no way they can lead that university in any meaningful sense from this point on.

“The CTRL-F brigades” is a perfect phrase to capture the reckless stupidity of Hegseth and his DOD minions.

Wow, this thread is quite something. Read the whole thing

It's clear that the Trump administration denied due process to the migrants it banished to El Salvador *precisely because* any measure of judicial oversight would've proved their innocence immediately. Deported, imprisoned, and condemned to hard labor—for a soccer tattoo. slate.com/news-and-pol...

You know, if universities wanted to exercise their power, they could suspend all Division 1 sports until federal funding for teaching/research is restored. That's (tens of) millions per football/basketball team that could be directed to teaching & research while notifying the public of the threat.

This is insane. In a law-abiding world, DOGE's seizure of USIP would result in criminal charges. Yet they can't even get an injunction to stop the ongoing destruction of records and property. USIP is a congressionally-chartered nonprofit. Its employees aren't gov't employees. Its building is its own

INCREDIBLE Ruling! Judge Reyes just ruled that transgender people have served honorably in the military, judges Trumps trans military ban - which states trans people are inherently dishonorable - as unconstitutional and motivated by animus. Trans military members may continue to serve.

US Dist Ct Judge Theodore Chung says the USAID shutdown likely violated the constitution. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Wow. Read this full letter from Mahmoud Khalil. "I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear." www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

Trump has fired 12 board members and the president of the USIP while Musk has seized its building. This is a congressionally chartered nonprofit, not part of the executive branch. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/u...

NYT [cont] -- Trump's "barrage of attacks on trans ppl can seem haphazard but as elements of a denationalization project they fall into place...The consistent & unrelenting message is trans ppl are a threat to the nation...The subtext is that we are not of this nation." [@rikiwilchins.bsky.social‬]

It is baffling that Colombia is not fighting this in the courts. Its capitulation will allow the admin to attack other colleges less able to withstand the financial onslaught. Higher ed is a bulwark against authoritarian rule. It needs to defend itself and democracy. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/n...

Really rather interesting that they're now going after curriculum in religiously affiliated institutions. Huh!

The @nytimes.com really has a headline problem. Based on the accompanying photo, this one should read: "Trump ejects 35 states from the union, adds two original colonies." Either that or "As leaders openly lie, so does AI. We've decided to join them."

People of faith suing the Trump administration for violating their religious freedom. Including UCC, PCUSA, TEC, UMC conferences...the list is long... Read the complaint. Lawyers are heroes. www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-cont...

1/9 Christians Nationalists are absolutely Christians (well, most of them; some are just white supremacists who see it as a cultural marker). Most are trying to live faithful lives. They've just fallen for one of the largest grifts of all time.

I can't tell you how many times I've been in a room full of people wishing grant money was going to urgent needs, or at least something useful, instead of wasting staff time on some harebrained project the funder wants. Can't speak as much to politics, but it's a staple of academic & church work.

This is an excellent longer read that shows the power of university boards and the way a few key people can change the direction of an entire institution and their local area www.teenvogue.com/story/north-...

Everyone—whether in higher education or not—should read this clear-eyed assessment of the state of higher education in the US. As the author notes, to protect democracy, universities must be run democratically.