Pretty clear illustration of "you may as well stand up for what you believe in, they're coming for you anyway."

In less jest - yes, it's good if universities can help students develop skills for the labour market. However, the pointless venom of the current government about one of the few world class sectors in the British economy is tiring, enervating and just plain sad. Get a grip lads.

An actual quote from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade Too often people go to university to ‘explore research and knowledge’ Look forward to Wes S saying 'too often people go to hospital to have operations' or Heidi Alexander saying 'too often people go to the station to catch a train'

TFW a) you were a working-class child in the 70s & 80s; and b) you've studied & taught about nationalism, identity & conflict for over 30 years; so c) you are not inclined under any circumstances to be a racist-whisperer.

This is genuinely (academically) dystopian — Kings featuring a lecturer who has to mark 100 scripts in a fortnight (!) and presenting AI as the approved workaround to that problem. This is why we can’t let this stuff into our working practice…

i have said this before but when “getting rid of race in admissions” for the administration means “you can’t even try to reach out to underrepresented communities and encourage them to apply and if you do it is illegal discrimination against white people” then the actual goal here is segregation

yeah, it necessarily ends in segregation, bc the metric for meritocracy is how segregated the schools are (bc they don’t believe that black people are qualified to go to elite institutions)

i will never not be amused by how the conservative world is governed by the kind of “affirmative action” they say happens in mainstream institutions. totally unqualified dipshits are handed the keys to institutions because they say the right thing and have the right look.

can't have bad numbers if there are no numbers

From the white supremacist book the official DHS account is referencing: "The point is to reveal organized Jewry as a world power entrenched in every country of the White man’s world, operating freely across every nation’s frontiers, and engaged in a ruthless war for the destruction of them all."

I once put this meme in some seminar slides and I regret nothing, in fact every day I regret it even less than nothing (by @janelleshane.com, previously posted on twitter: twitter.com/janellecshan...)

hoping that when they say the LLM talks like a Ph.D.-level expert, they mean "holds indecipherable decades-long academic grudges expressed largely in the form of questions that are actually more of a comment"

Oh so it does have phd level intelligence

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

"When the first of August came round, the Professor realized he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week." --Willa Cather, 1925 and timeless

Eye-catching story about civil service interns needing to come from a lower socio-economic background Some thoughts! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

1 in 4 of all UK Nobel Prize winners were born overseas.

Well, it's Colin Wright. Who put himself on the academic job market for exactly one year. He has spent the following five years trying to get great far-right mileage out of that one year's worth of application work. I see there's no end to it; he's now officially trying for racial discrimination. 1/

Also, in general, elite colleges already disproportionately recruit at wealthy schools. The idea that recruiting outreach functions as a backdoor affirmative action program is… not the case. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Agree with others that the Brown settlement is far uglier than when first presented The policing of professors' course evaluations will open up Brown faculty to meritless harassment, retaliation, and abuse And no doubt about it, policing professors' course evaluations will chill classroom speech

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump. Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt. Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

when i was younger conservatives used to call stuff like this an “entitlement” or “victim” mentality. the response, if this were a nonwhite person, would be “suck it up a d work harder.”

98% That's the decrease in the annual number of single-use plastic bags in the UK since a 5p charge started 10 years ago (it's now 10p) Not all environmental problems are that easy to tackle, but change is possible Resharing the Mail's 2015 splash, which has aged well www.gov.uk/government/p...

It's a bizarre and frankly alienating feeling realizing that if you know the basic fact that the murder rate has gone down significantly since 1990 you're in the ~90th+ percentile of fact-knowers

this reminds me of the time i got an email about my “vocal fry” in a guest lecture

A very cool technology that allows students to interact with John Maynard Keynes’ ideas as he develops them is called a book

The UK did have one standout product that was considered globally valuable- universities- and unilaterally decided to stop providing the product because it was more important to be xenophobic than successful

Here's a poem by one of the old Chinese scholar bureaucrats that I think captures a certain Vibe very well

In a stunning moment of erotic fervour, calculator demands BOOBS.

Non-econ stuff: reminder for UK followers that the deadline for the EHRC trans consultation is tonight, and this guidance is super helpful for prioritising your time/potential talking points against the proposed (and looking pretty likely, unfortunately) changes!

Some people think this is an exaggeration but I will say that if I were HHS Secretary and my goal were to kill as many children as possible, it would be difficult to distinguish the actions I would take from those that Kennedy has taken.

don’t blame me, I voted for chaos with Ed Miliband

Happy Birthday Alan Turing

not even limited to those domains either. "We asked 40 leading economists if tariffs were good, and they all just started crying"

everyone in the natsec and FP community increasingly just losing their minds as the topical questions in US FP and natsec these days increasingly devolve to the level of "should we lick this toaster while it is on? some experts weigh in"

“We treat smoke like weather. We build apps to manage it. We compare it to last year’s average. We forget that just a decade ago, this level of smoke wasn’t “summer.””

Why is the ‘familial connection’ of those of us with Scandinavian, Huguenot etc ancestry never what’s up for debate? Do not answer I know the reason

imdoingmypart.gif

When Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was disappeared off the streets of Massachusetts by a goon squad that looked just like this, she had no idea who they were or where they were taking her, and she thought they would torture her first and then kill her. She’s from Turkey, where that stuff happens.

Every day, another deliberate massacre of starving civilians. Silence speaks louder than words. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Everything that made her work on trans stuff so poor (basic laziness, inability to tell what is a conceptual and what is an empirical question, basic inability to engage honestly with opponents) is on full display here and her supporters should be asking why they were so gullible before

Kathleen Stock turning into a firebreathing anti-choice campaigner is one of those things that was in retrospect both entirely predictable but is also just so funny to witness

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays. Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

seen some people complaining that this is a political stunt and lemme say if this was the kind of political stunt more politicians were doing on a regular basis we wouldn't be where we are today dude is actually putting himself on the line here, fuck off with that shit

Former Conservative and UKIP MP and Boris Johnson government appointee here calling for the mass deportation of British Pakistanis Islamophobia is absolutely rampant in conservative politics now and almost nobody even acknowledges it

lol Nigeria? just straight giving up on the next century, huh