The year is 2056, and the city of San Francisco is voting for the 30th time on whether to reopen the Great Highway to cars

The UNC system just released its final policy on mandatory syllabi disclosure, stating that syllabi are university (not faculty) IP and certain course info must be posted on new, publicly searchable databases before every semester. A thread about what's changed from the draft I reported on earlier:

In the wake of public-records requests from a right-wing group, the University of North Carolina system is considering creating a publicly searchable database with information from all class syllabi. Many faculty fear the information will be used to target them. www.chronicle.com/article/when...

NEW: Public universities in red states, from Texas to Florida, are increasingly required to make their syllabi public. The University of North Carolina may be next. Does "syllabi transparency" help combat distrust in higher ed, or feed ill-informed suspicions of it? www.chronicle.com/article/when...

Here's our reporting on the proposed dismantling of the jewel of US atmospheric science, @ncar-ucar.bsky.social. The plan is to break NCAR apart and disburse some parts to other locations (like the research aircraft fleet) and eliminate others. www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪 #AGU25 #climate

"(Memoli's) actions look like those of a leader who has been given broad discretion to shrink down the agencys infectious-disease work—an area where he may have a few personal grievances. “People are afraid of him,” one official said, pausing. “I’m afraid of him.” www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/...

NEW: Public universities in red states, from Texas to Florida, are increasingly required to make their syllabi public. The University of North Carolina may be next. Does "syllabi transparency" help combat distrust in higher ed, or feed ill-informed suspicions of it? www.chronicle.com/article/when...

SCOOP: The Trump administration is providing the names of all travelers passing through U.S. airports to immigration officials in search of people with deportation orders, a substantial expansion of government efforts to draw on data to hunt down immigrants. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/u...

Amazing reporting from @katiemangan.bsky.social and @peterelkind.bsky.social www.chronicle.com/article/the-... previously unreported documents and interviews... reveals the extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the institution

When should a paper be corrected? Last December, @elisabethbik.bsky.social and other sleuths began flagging papers by a prominent bioengineer, Ali Khademhosseini. They found over 80 with image issues. Khademhosseini and his colleagues have issued over 40 corrections, but avoided retractions.

Researchers using AI to write papers, review papers, read papers, design projects, etc. Pretty soon they’ll reach a closed loop where no one does anything but observes at a distance, a la Siri from Peter Watts’ Blindsight

NEW: An AI conference was bombarded with complaints about peer reviews sounding AI-generated. A startup jumped in with an outside analysis, estimating that as many 1 in 5 could have been ChatGPT-written. Chaos ensued. Now the reviews are being reviewed. www.chronicle.com/article/the-... #ICLR2026

NEW: An AI conference was bombarded with complaints about peer reviews sounding AI-generated. A startup jumped in with an outside analysis, estimating that as many 1 in 5 could have been ChatGPT-written. Chaos ensued. Now the reviews are being reviewed. www.chronicle.com/article/the-... #ICLR2026

Breaking: After contentious debates and three failed attempts at a vote, a federal vaccine committee decided on Friday to end the decades-long recommendation that all newborns be immunized at birth against hepatitis B. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/h...

This story took many months, and the expertise of many folks (thanks, @dberrett.bsky.social and @danbauman77.bsky.social). I hope you’ll give it a read and RT the first skeet in this thread. DMs/Signal are open for tips about what’s happening on your campus. (14/14) www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

🧵 A dean is abruptly removed. Her account goes viral. At first, it looks like a fight over the humanities. But the more I reported on the University of Tulsa, the clearer it became: this controversy was just the entry point for a far larger institutional unraveling. (1/14)

"Retractions have become more common in recent years, according to Retraction Watch, an organization that tracks corrections in scientific journals. But they are still rare, amounting to about one in 500 articles published."

IMLS announces "upon further review" that it is reinstating all federal grants to libraries. It leaves out that it's doing this because a federal court told them a few weeks ago that the Trump admin's decision to destroy libraries was not legal. www.imls.gov/news/stateme...

1. Transparency is necessary for credibility 2. Transparency is hard to change 3. Require transparency* 4. Transparency is not magic 5. Journals are part of problem 6. Expect more from journals 7. Peer review is not magic 8. A crisis can look a lot like „normal“ science 9. Meta-analysis is not magic

12 former commissioners of the FDA came together to write a Perspectives piece for the New England Journal of Medicine; raising our concerns about recent changes to vaccine approval policy at the FDA and its implications for patients and public health.

"As you can imagine it's a very sad day over here."

A Conservative Student Got a Zero on Her Paper about Gender. Did She Deserve It? @emmajanepettit.bsky.social reports www.chronicle.com/article/a-co...

During her latest clinical trial, Tatiana Schlossberg’s doctor had told her that he could keep her alive for a year, maybe. “My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she writes. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/2b77Sn

If you were interested in this NYT piece from a couple of days ago, read our coverage of Epstein's links with Krauss and other scientists at BuzzFeed News from 2018 and 2019: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/u... www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pete... www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pete...

exclusive: Rick Pazdur, the official just tapped by Trump administration to be FDA's top drug regulator has privately warned that some of the agency's new initiatives could be illegal and dangerous. w @rachelroubein.bsky.social

About that exclusive, "closed-to-press" MAHA summit last week with RFK and JD Vance: I got in. Here's what I saw. 🧵 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

NEW: The leading organization for music scholars — the American Musicological Society — is facing an uproar from hundreds of its members, who are threatening a boycott unless it meets a chorus of demands. www.chronicle.com/article/why-...

NEW: The leading organization for music scholars — the American Musicological Society — is facing an uproar from hundreds of its members, who are threatening a boycott unless it meets a chorus of demands. www.chronicle.com/article/why-...

Jeffrey Epstein’s close ties to researchers and higher education has long been well documented. Newly released documents reveal researchers Epstein supported long turned to Epstein for advice on research, personal relationships, and even sexual harassment allegations. https://chroni.cl/44kNSR4

#BREAKING: Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers will immediately leave his role as an instructor at Harvard while the University investigates his ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Dhruv T. Patel and Cam N. Srivastava report.

After a bird flu outbreak tore through Midwestern barns, killing millions of chickens and spiking egg prices, the federal government didn’t investigate if the virus was airborne. So ProPublica did. Absolutely terrifying reporting from @natlash.bsky.social: www.propublica.org/article/bird...

Former Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino has turned to podcasting to tell her story since losing tenure and leaving Harvard after being accused of manipulating data. Evan H.C. Epstein and Graham W. Lee report. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

So it seems Krauss forwarded an email from me to him asking for responses to allegations against him to Jeffrey Epstein, asking Epstein for advice on how to respond.

New from me: Are the deals to save research funding good for research? More and more scientists at Cornell, Columbia, and elsewhere are going back to work after their universities struck unprecedented—some say mistaken—arrangements with the Trump administration. www.chronicle.com/article/are-...

When former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers was pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee, he turned to a longtime associate for guidance: Jeffrey E. Epstein. Dhruv T. Patel and Cam N. Srivastava report.

New from me: Are the deals to save research funding good for research? More and more scientists at Cornell, Columbia, and elsewhere are going back to work after their universities struck unprecedented—some say mistaken—arrangements with the Trump administration. www.chronicle.com/article/are-...

"The report highlights a fundamental tension: If colleges that expand access to underserved students don’t have the capacity to adequately support them, are they setting up those students, and themselves, for failure?" www.chronicle.com/article/peop...

Amid an escalating debate over who exactly gets to decide who will lead Virginia's flagship, former president James E. Ryan -- who left amid DOJ scrutiny of UVA -- has decided now's the time to enter the fray. For @chronicle.com: www.chronicle.com/article/stun...

According to a source, Jenna Norton, who led a letter criticizing Trump's decimation of the NIH (see below), has been placed on administrative leave. She's the first at NIH to be put on leave, joining EPA officials who criticized Trump policies. www.pbs.org/newshour/nat...

After a bruising 42-day shutdown, the government has finally reopened. We took a look at what's next for federal science—how quickly things will get back up to speed and whether there will be long-term consequences. With Jeff Tollefson and @alexwitze.bsky.social:

RFK Jr. has said he does not want to take vaccines away from Americans. But at a closed-door meeting of vaccine scientists in September, a top official at the FDA suggested doing just that. Here's how Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Høeg are reshaping vaccine regulation: www.statnews.com/2025/11/12/f...

A new “California Foundation for Science and Health Research” would become the state-run equivalent of the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation.

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. " www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

I like how the caption on this photo reads as if he's making a claim that could not be independently verified.

I spoke to CNN about how demoralizing it was to watch Stanford leadership stay silent while contrarians on campus launched unscientific attacks to stifle Stanford researchers. Now, those attacks have gone nationwide and much of MAHA leadership have ties to Stanford. www.cnn.com/2025/11/08/p...

now they've done it www.wsj.com/world/europe...

James Watson has died. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/s...

"Cornell is the fourth institution to achieve an agreement with the Trump administration to restore federal money, following Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown University." www.chronicle.com/article/corn...

Denver Post confirms what we’ve been hearing: nearly all federal HSI agents with expertise on cultural property crimes have been reassigned to immigration duties in recent months. Major loss of law enforcement capabilities in the world’s largest art market. www.denverpost.com/2025/11/06/u...

Every faculty member should read this @bethmcmurtrie.bsky.social story on how faculty are and aren’t using AI www.chronicle.com/article/ai-h...