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Es sind noch 11 Tage, das Quorum noch nicht erreicht. epetitionen.bundestag.de/petitionen/_...

“Let’s not call it deregistration, let’s call it a death sentence  —  that is exactly what it would be for the Palestinian people,” says @sana.msf.ca, MSF Executive Director, as Israel moves to bar nearly 40 aid groups under new registration rules. montrealgazette.com/news/local-n...

I'm trying to get a sense of how many (other) people were invited and then disinvited from US campuses last year. If you have a story to share, please dm. I will keep it confidential – just trying to figure out the scale of this.

This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

Sie haben erfolgreich die Petition Meldewesen - Keine Führung eigener Register zur Erfassung von trans* und nichtbinärer Personen mitgezeichnet. Dauert keine 2 Minuten. Bitte unterschreibt das!

1,157 people have just been announced as receiving honours in the New Year Honours list. Here’s why Benjamin Zephaniah turned down his OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2003.

For 2026, can we please get the people who just want to run a car dealership out of university management? Good for you if you want to be a CEO of car stuff. Cool. Have fun. Stop pretending that EVERYTHING is like a car dealership and destroying other ways of doing things through your imposition.

There were 4 unfair dismissal judgements during the last round if redundancies, costing the university nearly a quarter of a million just in compensation, let alone the amount they must have spent in attempting to defend the claims.

Leicester VC Prof Nishan Canagarajah gets a knighthood. A tribunal ruled three academics were unfairly dismissed during the same period and redundancies loom. Universities need investment and government intervention, not gongs.

#AcademicFreedom #HigherEd www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Defenders of high Vice Chancellor pay say it’s irrelevant to the poor state of university finances At Cambridge University, senior management pay rose from £7m to £32m in 5 years. It's not only the VC whose pay has soared! This is a surge comparable to university’s annual deficit

Or do as my university does and have a franchise there, claiming taking massive fees from rich students during a civil war and paying taxes to a dictatorship is some form of charitable enterprise. Seriously.

"In some way, LLM-providers are poisoning the pond they are drinking from", sagte Mathias Schindler auf dem #39C3. Er durchsuchte die Wikipedia nach fehlerhaften ISBNs - und fand von LLMs halluzinierte Inhalte. Das wichtigste dazu in meinem Artikel: netzpolitik.org/2025/erfunde...

Seems like decimating subject areas across your institution and losing multiple employment tribunals can get you a knighthood if you are a vice chancellor…

Guter Tag um an @hateaid.org zu spenden, habe das auch gerade schnell erledigt. hateaid.org

If you’re wondering why your friends in academia are a little on edge right now, it’s because an eighteen-year-old who hasn’t done the reading, doesn’t look at the assignment, and has does no critical thinking skills more complex than “because I think it’s in the Bible” can literally end your career

The cease-fire in Gaza is more than two months old. But the killing of Palestinians has not yet stopped for more than a day or two at a time.

With Bertrand Russell's reply to Oswald Mosley's invitation to debate in 1962 doing the rounds on social media again, I thought I'd mention this book extract on how Mosley was keen to debate at universities in the postwar period and the activists who fought him. hatfulofhistory.com/2021/06/06/w...

"We will not be intimidated by a government that exploits accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and freedom of expression," the statement said. #HateAid sanctioned by the US government #Germany

Still think these minutes from @qmul.bsky.social's Remuneration Committee about the (non?) existence of a Deputy Principal are a piece of art: www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/docu.... You'd think that some transparency about the second in command in a massive institution *should* be transparent?

Christmas reading: The junkification of research - Rhodes & Linnenluecke (Organization, 2025) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... #academicsky Pictured: the downward spiral of junkification ⬇️

'The bullishness of the tech fraternity is a heady mix of old-fashioned hucksterism, plutocratic megalomania and utopian ideology. Since the prize in that race is global supremacy, there are few incentives for either side to fret about risks, or sign up to international protocols'.

'The institution currently has between 15 and 16 students for every staff member but wants to increase this to between 18 and 22 students, according to a “case for change” document recently shared with employees.' 5 faculties mooted to become 3 colleges.' 1/3

Fwiw I think the “apologize for being white” thing is very clearly about making sure white people don’t feel an obligation to alleviate past injustices or make society fairer. Ultimately to do that you have to raise taxes and the billionaires holding Vance’s leash don’t want that.

Michael Mann and Bob Ward don't mince their words here, and unfortunately they are right about the Trump administration's "Soviet-style campaign to prevent Americans and the rest of the world from knowing the truth about climate change." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Regulator ‘asleep at the wheel’ over University of Greater Manchester investigation, MP says

It looks like it's been scrubbed from every official 60 Minutes page now. It's only a 30-second promo but here it is if you didn't get a chance to see it.

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

"education is, by necessity, inefficient" #HigherEd

"We envision a resistance that is...a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction." "How to Resist AI in Education" by me & @cnygren.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

In two letters, a University of Arkansas dean outlined his reasons for recommending the professors firing, including social media posts, the signing of letters, and testimony submitted in a legal proceeding. https://chroni.cl/3Y46zoI

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Sheffield management have withdrawn their threat of a lockout for w/c 5 Jan to facilitate further discussions with our excellent @sheffielducu.bsky.social negotiators. Massive thanks to the ucu team, and to everyone for having our backs. It’s not over yet, but maybe there’s a path to get there!

Ich freue mich sehr: Ich habe gestern einen Rechtsstreit mit Ahmad Mansour gewonnen. Ich hatte auf X in Zusammenhang mit einem Kommentar von ihm in der Welt mit der Überschrift „Menschen, die vor Unfreiheit flüchten, importieren Unfreiheit nach Europa“ (siehe Screenshot) geschrieben, dass 1/

Some really (and qualifiedly) good news from Cardiff UCU @cardiffucu.bsky.social : No redundancies next year, no downgrading of professional services staff. And all without the need for disruptive industrial action, which nobody at all wants. nation.cymru/news/cardiff...

This man’s ego is a Black Hole. It has to absorb every particle surrounding it. His narcissism is insatiable. Every attempt to satisfy it only fuels his overwhelming need for yet more flattery. Kennedy Center to be renamed Trump-Kennedy Center, White House says www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"Discarding the convenient falsehood that as academics we are merely unwilling victims of neoliberalism and all-powerful managers, we instead embrace the inconvenient truth that we have co-created the current state of academia." (Sathish/Harzing) #HigherEd journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

It's not just social media. Looks like visitors to the US from Europe and other countries that are part of the visa waiver program will have to submit an enormous amount of data about themselves and their families, including DNA, if proposed new rules are accepted

while i am not an academic i did see this coming and post about it on bluesky, which is why i am quoted in this article

These are our most impressive institutions and crucial for our survival as a people and a species.

Not only in the American academy, I suspect.

Things are grim in the American academy. Even if a program is in the black, universities only want the study of: 1 AI 2 AI 3 AI 4 Finance 5 AI 6 AI 7 AI 8. PR (w an AI minor) 9 Roman history (as a MOOC co-taught by JD Vance and Joe Rogan) 10 AI dailytarheel.com/article/univ...

Another indication of a narrowly instrumental view of the value of education & research. The things most easily measured in quantitative terms will get all the funding, stuff that challenges existing orders or produces different kinds of benefits will not. Centralised research, yet more AI bullshit.

"If we only have one job it may be this: critical thinking at universities cannot ebb away on our watch". The fabulous Stephen Cummings reviews Shaping for Mediocrity. #HigherEd link.springer.com/article/10.1...

'An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that the Russell Group university “does not have appropriate arrangements in place” for managing workplace stress and was unable to demonstrate that it is managing the risks associated with excessive workloads.' 1/2