#ICE intends a round-the-clock social media monitoring program for “Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.,” that feed directly into ICE’s databases. www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/11/alwa...

Would UK HE be better able to defend itself against charges of irrelevance if its senior management hadn't spent the last decade pushing the narrative that a university is nothing more than an overpriced skills training facility with some modest probability of an income premium?

40 years ago we’d have congressional hearings falsely accusing metal bands of putting backwards messages in their songs that told kids to kill themselves & now we have a planet-killing chatbot that’s all like “bet you won’t commit suicide chickenshit bitch” & the government is like here’s $5 billion

Newcastle! This looks superb, having FOMO for not being in the region - go go go www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/defend-dis...

Did managers ruin the workplace?

What happened, @nytimes.com? Why not stand by your original headline? Because it’s absolutely an accurate representation of this trash conversation. To publish this at all should be a fireable offense - but to publish it as women’s rights are being decimated is deeply immoral, bordering on evil

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Closing vital programmes is not the answer to resolving the issues faced by Universities- senior management need to work with students and staff to find long term solutions.

This kind of announcement may help explain why so many people are using LLMs to flood preprints servers with papers about AI

'The oldest and best-known preprint repository, arXiv, has announced that it will no longer accept review or position papers in computer science. The website will make exceptions only for papers that have been previously accepted by a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or conference.'

Würde es noch mit rechten Dingen zugehen, wäre das ein veritabler Presse- und Wissenschaftsskandal: Susanne Schroeter verteidigt in einem Artikel Ahmad Mansour in der Fördergeldaffäre und verbirgt dabei, dass sie selbst an Mansours Projekt beteiligt war.

Thinking only of Rosalind Franklin today, and what was stolen from her (and so many other female scientists alongside her).

Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob Menschen, die nicht an Orten wohnen, in denen Rechtsextremismus Mainstream ist, verstehen, welche Gefahr die Normalisierung und Einbindung Rechtsextremer birgt, die eben gar nicht so selten selbst auch schon straffällig geworden sind oder ansonsten Kontakte in ein 1/8

160 employees might loose their jobs, but the VC is "deeply disappointed" about strike action.

The long-running ideological war on libraries, education, and government workers is not separate from AI boosterism. It is the same ideological war on human knowledge and expertise. In some cases AI is being used to directly supercharge this effort: www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...

Someone at a Russell Group university was moved to almost-poetry by their Faculty Meeting… Can anyone do better?

After squandering millions on Castle Meadows purchase, University of Nottingham is now axing modern languages & music It also plans to cut its nursing programme Leaders of the bungleocracy continue to draw handsome salaries www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

SAVE GEOGRAPHY at Leicester University (UK) - We call on the University of Leicester to urgently reconsider the proposal to dissolve Geography. This is direct attack on the discipline of Geography at Leicester with likely loss of Geography staff. Please sign + share www.change.org/p/save-geogr...

We're really staring at the abyss with how our employers in our sector are treating us.

Edinburgh University is closing the Institute for Academic Development. Download these student resources while you can. Making notes, reading strategies, time management, dissertations and so on. CC licenses. Pdf and text only versions. #HE 🗃️ institute-academic-development.ed.ac.uk/study-hub/le...

Three months ago

Northumbria University attempts to move employees to cheaper pension scheme to bring down sky-high contribution rates https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/northumbria-freeze-staff-pay-if-they-refuse-switch-pensions

Horrific, stupid news from @uniofnottingham.bsky.social — they are closing their music department. Apparently they all found out suddently in a meeting yesterday. It is one of the best music departments in the country — solidarity with my colleagues and their students www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

UK university news just this week: 163 jobs at risk + course closures at Leicester; 300 jobs at risk at Dundee; modern language & music courses being closed at Nottingham. Every week it‘s the same. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Shocking, but not surprising. #Nonprofits #McCarthyism "Right-wing pundit Michael Knowles, who in 2023 called for the “eradication of transgenderism,” painted a picture of progressive organizations as “organized left-wing crime,”". nonprofitquarterly.org/senate-gop-r...

'Music and modern foreign languages degrees are among courses being suspended at the University of Nottingham, with the institution saying it “cannot rely on additional income” from the coming tuition fee rises.' 1/3

I was once on a validation panel for a partnership degree with a uni in Malaysia. The documentation promised that staff / students in Malaysia would have the same rights & protections as in the UK. I asked how this was possible in a country where same sex relationships were illegal. Tumbleweed.

This.

Note the ‘British soil’ bit. My uni has plans to open a campus in China. The VC scoffed at me when I expressed concern that staff and students wouldn’t be able to speak freely, and that - as he said - the curriculum would be censored. It’s the price of doing business.

China-critical UK academics describe ‘extremely heavy’ pressure from Beijing

The New York Times quickly sending out Douthat to argue that Mamdani’s victory doesn’t really matter is so predictable it borders on self-parody. Remember, folks: Every time the Right wins an election, it’s an undeniable expression of the will of the people. If a lefty wins, it’s just a blip.

Very useful starting point: here's my slide for the Research Methods class:

Every time discover a new piece on the dangers of LLMs, particularly for research and teaching, I add it to a Zotero library. I figure that I might as well share it, so here's my library of Cautionary AI Tales: www.zotero.org/groups/62758...

Dozens of staff stood up and displayed these signs at the beginning of today’s address by the VC to demonstrate their lack of confidence in him and his ability to impose such devastating staff cuts across the university.

Our Vice Chancellor reassures us that planned redundancies won't decimate the university. Since the leadership is cutting 4% rather than 10% of staff he's technically correct, so that's fine 🤷‍♂️.

Deciphering the wreckage: Walter Benjamin’s organization in pieces - special issue of ephemera: theory & politics in organization. Deadline for submissions - 16th January 2026. ephemerajournal.org/node/5122

“Four years ago, we suffered an earlier redundancy programme that we were told would secure the future of the university. That clearly was not true." #UKHE www.leicester.news/university-o...

The lobbying has started!

"Red Pill ideology, an online ecosystem that frames men as victims of feminist progress, has moved well beyond fringe forums to shape leadership norms in corporate and political arenas." (Erbil/Özbilgin, 2025) [open access] 👇 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

„Zwar befand die Verwaltung, dass keiner der Anträge vollständig sei, doch Wedl-Wilson hielt an dem Vorhaben fest. Zu einem besonders in der Kritik stehenden Projekt schrieb sie: ‚Es besteht der politische Wille, das Projekt zu fördern.‘“ taz.de/Projekte-geg...

There goes my son's favourite discipline... We have to look for Loughborough, then. www.leicester.news/university-o...

It still confuses me that a meeting about prospective redundancies is framed as an invitation to join the Vice Chancellor “as he shares his vision for the year ahead”.

Nothing says “university in perfect health” quite like power struggles, toxic culture & intimidating senior management Don’t worry -- external consultants advise that a few “clarified roles” & “shift away from blame culture” should fix things at University of Aberdeen www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

'The report added: "Within senate meetings, some of the consultees reported cases of 'intimidating behaviour', 'a toxic culture' and 'overstretched remit' which has led some members to disengage from senate entirely, as this culture and behaviours have become normalised."' 1/2

"[M]anagerial blah is too dull even to poke fun at. It offers no purchase or ingress for the satirist or ironist. It just sleepwalks from one big noun to the next, sucking us into its vortex and boring us into submission.“ (Joe Moran)

Coming to a university near you: "By aligning our employing entity structure, we're taking another important step towards fully integrating into the broader business, which will enable us to leverage greater synergies and opportunities across the organisation."

Sheffield Hallam decided slavery research was less important to its mission as a university than Chinese cash, so it folded to authoritarianism. In doing so, a UK university put the interests of Chinese intelligence agents above those of its own staff. There ought to be sackings.

Ah, yes, the weaponised-ignorance management style. I'm very familiar. IT IS SO EXHAUSTING AND TRANSPARENT. (see also: declaring that topics aren't for that committee and thereby constantly kicking the can down the road; not being on top of your brief or else the higher-up yells at you)

'[t]he present-day fetishism of numbers in higher education is neither rational nor practical. Neither does it ensure fairness and accuracy. Instead, it stems from and fosters delusion, deception, inequity and irrationality, vanity and greed' (F. Wood) www.prometheusjournal.co.uk/prometheus/t...

"According to USAID’s Counter-Trafficking in Persons programme, 150,000 people are enslaved in scamming compounds across Cambodia. In Myanmar the figure may be as high as 120,000; there are tens of thousands more in Laos and Thailand." Pig Butchering www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...