Is academic research experiencing the same ‘enshittification’ that Cory Doctorow identifies in online platforms? Martina Linnenluecke and I say yes! A summary of our paper is out today in The Conversation Full paper at: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... theconversation.com/the-5-stages...

The ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing 💩✍️ theconversation.com/the-5-stages...

TAPPER: Can you rule out the US is going to take Greenland by force? MILLER: Greenland should be part of the US. By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? The US is the power of NATO T: So force is on the table? M: Nobody is gonna fight the US militarily over future of Greenland

The US is sanctioning judges among whose assignments is the legal reckoning with genocide. www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

One example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.

According to this reporting, Trump will keep the popular Venezuelan resistance leader Maria Machado from power in Venezuela because she not he won the Nobel Prize. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Via Euronews: Free civic space in France, Italy and Germany under increasing threat, new study finds www.euronews.com/my-europe/20...

Es ist hochnotpeinlich, was die Bundesregierung da gerade abliefert.

"These cycles of change leave casualties — redundancies, burnout, broken teams, lost careers — and yet the organisational narrative presents each wave of disruption as noble, necessary and progressive." 👇

BBC journalists have been banned from describing the kidnapped Venezuelan leader as having been kidnapped. The BBC News Editor has sent this to BBC journalists.

"complicated" (Starmer) „komplex“ (Merz) „außerordentlich komplex“ (Wadephul) 🤷‍♂️

holiday academic Bluesky (US version): here is a list of everything I accomplished this year plus I had some Thoughts about the humanities holiday academic Bluesky (UK version): I’m 80% brandy butter, 12% brussels sprouts, 8% brisk walk, what’s a university again, also I’ve forgotten how to write

"When fear takes hold of the system, critical voices disappear. It creates a contagion of silence, where those who thrive in that culture often end up in leadership roles." #HigherEd uniavisen.dk/en/130-resea...

I've learned that Edinburgh University is planning to cut 20% of academics in some departments To decide who gets the chop, they generated an academic contribution metric that is a raw count of *any type* of output, including book reviews. The management of UK Universities continues to amaze

ONLINE FIRST 'Content providers, distance learning, and the neoliberal university: Degrading resistance to the “most humiliating job in academic career”' authored by Fernando Vianna, Egon B Calderari, Francis K Meneghetti, and Sergio P Wanderley Read here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

'Staff at Strathclyde University are to weigh up strike action over cuts to 76 jobs at the Glasgow-based institution. In December, bosses at Scotland’s "university of the year” announced cost-cutting measures in a bid to save £35 million over the next two years.'

Academia is mostly just opening pdfs you swear you've never seen before, only to find your own highlights

Happy New Year everyone - we have one week to go until the launch event for States of Precarity in UK HE Geography! Join us to discuss the findings, their implications, and routes for action. Register: www.rgs.org/events/upcom...

🎬 🍿 Starting a ‘Now watching’ thread. Pin 📍 or bookmark this post to follow along. First up, 2016 talk by Prof. Susan Haack, titled: “Science, Yes; Scientism, No” www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Be6... 1/🧵

Was die EU nicht schafft, schaffen Brasilien, Chile, Kolumbien, Mexico, Spanien und Uruguay. Heute Abend haben sie eine Erklärung veröffentlicht, in der sie die Aggression gegen Venezuela als völkerrechtswidrig verurteilen & davor warnen das Land zu "führen", um seine Ressourcen auszubeuten.

“Predatory imperialism” describes it perfectly and 77,303,568 Americans voted for this. www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/a...

What a difference a year makes.

So clever of US, UK and European universities, with ample encouragement from their governments, to have been closing down Area Studies, History, Languages and Politics & International Relations programmes, so clearly irrelevant to the world in the second half of the 21st century.

Wenn Dir das Völkerrecht zu komplex ist, ist eine Kanzlerschaft vielleicht nicht das richtige für Dich.

Exzellentes Interview meines Kollegen @heinrichwefing.bsky.social mit dem Völkerrechtler Kai Ambos über die rechtlichen Voraussetzungen und Folgen der Entführung Maduros - und die Konsequenzen für Europa. Freebie. www.zeit.de/politik/ausl...

Just like the fetishisation that happened with Israel's pager attack in Lebanon. We are living in precedented times.

“We have to invent at the cutting edge, or apply at the cutting edge so that we are the makers and not the takers of the next technological revolution.” (Kapur) Are VCs really so incapable, amidst environmental and political omnishambles, of seeing any other role for 21st-century universities? 3/3

You don't have to listen to these professional liars who are barely trying. 9 months ago they were saying they were powerless to return a man they illegally sent to an El Salvador gulag because it would violate that country's national sovereignty

🤷🏻‍♂️

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 ⬇️