Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

It's always cool to see amazing people get attention for their awesome books (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/s...

The Rosen Group at Princeton University is accepting applications for a postdoctoral researcher interested in developing and applying machine learning interatomic potentials to model the dynamics of inorganic, solid-state materials. Apply at apply.interfolio.com/186022 if interested!

“Someone who cannot criticise the actions of the Israeli government without suggesting that British Jews should be punished for those actions is, at a basic level, incompetent.” Hear, hear @stephenkb.bsky.social as.ft.com/r/a0177a88-e...

We know, but I'm typing anyways: Doing well in the REF will not save our programmes. Being good at teaching students will not save our programmes. Being diligent and agile employees will not save our programmes. Merging into the intellectual equivalent of hospice care will merely delay matters.

I'm not getting any less convinced that the main current driver of British politics, showing up in various ways and to various extents across the spectrum, is people's desire to be told "Here is a category of human beings whom it is legitimate for you to hate".

[email protected] has just published polling done by @moreincommonuk.bsky.social. While it's important to focus on the (relatively) positive, as the headline does, I would urge readers not to miss this deeply, deeply disturbing statistic in the polling. www.jewishnews.co.uk/uk-voters-mo...

'Rather than a lack of effort from individual universities, the report identifies a “structural gap” – there is no effective system to coordinate action across a region, leaving institutions to tackle shared problems in isolation.' Well, marketise the system and it will try to work like a market.

'In a social media post on 27 April, UKRI said that from 2028 to 2029, “funding will focus on fully open-access publishing and will no longer be available for hybrid open access”.' If releasing such major changes on LinkedIn is @ukri.org 's new comms policy, we need to talk about 'open' comms.

How To Live A Good Life #oldknees

mind boggling response from a Labour MP. She either: does not have a clue how important universities are to the local economy; knows but doesn’t care because of some sort of ‘anti-elitist’ brainworm; or knows but is too worried to admit it lest it upset Reform voters. none reflect very well on her!

(1) An entire generation of HE leaders are drenched in the language of markets and competition. They will destroy everything else to protect their own bottom line. That can't be changed overnight. (2/4) observer.co.uk/news/columni...

It's remarkable how most of the world's English-speaking democracies seemed to have gotten together and decided "let's destroy the main thing that led us to unprecedented prosperity: our systems of higher education."

I grew up in this community and I have a few thoughts I want to share. A short thread. www.jewishnews.co.uk/breaking-hat...

Use of the word "ethical" - e.g. "the ethical use of genAI" - does not magically make the use of genAI ethical. See also: adding the word "strategic" to every sentence does not magically turn your document into a strategy. #CommsLife

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions. It does not. It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed. 🧵 1/

Bridget Phillipson on Kuenssberg is saying she wants student finance to be fairer, which is odd given Labour has just made it much less fair. She also says she wants to improve access for people from poor backgrounds, which sits badly with bankrupting the universities those students typically go to.

This is causing despair in academe. (1) We were forced to close during Covid. We had no choice! (2) We're not service providers like a restaurant, we are institutions of state. (3) We did everything we could. (4) This will cripple current students' education. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

When people talk about the idea that some universities must go under, there’s a certain tendency to behave as if these smaller local campuses are negligible- regrettable casualties perhaps but not ‘real’ universities. This report does a great job of illustrating why that’s wrong.

In which we learn what happens when you combine the effectiveness of online learning with the efficiency of UK government, the academic rigour of management consultancy, and the fundamental honesty of purpose of ChatGPT.

Despite frequent remonstrations from digital archivists, Persephone never accepted that she could not photocopy a whole book in one go.

In my case, this painstaking labor in the process through which the science gets done. Science isn't measuring stuff in a lab. It's thinking deeply, extracting the heart of idea from the soup of thoughts running through my mind, molding it, and finding a way to communicate that idea to others.

And to me, the question here isn't how Jews feel about this, but how do you feel about it? As a British person, how does it make you feel that one of the smallest minorities in your country needs armed guards to celebrate its holidays? Are you aware of this? Are you comfortable with it?

Bondi attacks show old hatreds are flourishing again on.ft.com/4s2YVsE | opinion

The first blessing on the first night of Hannukah is for the mitzvah of candle lighting; the second is for God's miracles; but the third is שהחיינו - "blessed be God for saving our lives, and for keeping us, and for letting us come to this time." 2,000 years of that, motherfuckers.

all academic applications should have consolation prizes. doesn’t have to be much, like a mug that says “i applied for leverhulme 2020” or a t-shirt “UKRI reject 2023”

🔴 NEW: The University of Edinburgh has quietly paid more than £750,000 to a controversial consulting firm amid job cuts - staff say bosses ignored "repeated" questions about its role. Read more about 'Nousferatu' 👉 www.theferret.scot/p...

A human-rights researcher on why she pushed back when China bullied her university Kudos @lauratmurphy.bsky.social An important lesson for our times for all economist.com/by-invitatio...

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

📢PhD available in our group focusing on "Synthesis & optimisation of stimuli responsive MOFs in flow" Based in Sch Chemistry & iPRD @UniLeeds. Start date: 1st Oct 2026. ⏰️App deadline 30th Jan. Please repost to spread the word 🙏 #chemsky #phdjobs Come join us! www.linkedin.com/posts/andrea...

I’d love to see UUK, UCU, UCEA, the Russell group, the funding councils, research charities, hell pretty much every university stakeholder to stand together and say to the Govt in one voice - Stop fucking around with our universities. You are destroying us, and you will miss us when we’re gone.

To be clear, this is a tariff on our own exports. Yes, it will raise money - tariffs do. The question is whether it will also cut exports from one of our core economic strengths- HE.

As @glenpeters.bsky.social says, we're way off target for any 1.5°C scenario. To see how far off, each of the red/green bars represents the decrease in CO₂ emissions during COVID. Even if we achieved that from now until the end of 2030, we would still miss our 1.5°C target by a significant margin.

Wishing you all a happy International Day of LGBTQIA+ People in STEM #LGBTQSTEMDAY #LGBTSTEMDAY 🏳️‍🌈⚛️🔭 Visibility is very important for our colleagues who cannot be out :D ... Very happy to join the @cern.bsky.social celebration this afternoon. prideinstem.org/lgbtstemday/

I've got a post-doctoral research position available at Curtin University (Western Australia) starting 2026. The project involves computational prediction of crystal structures, their growth, and their properties for organic minerals on Titan (moon of Saturn). staff.curtin.edu.au/job-vacancie...

You might imagine that an event celebrating 75 years of the Turing Test would be all "Wasn't he prescient, and look, now we really do have machines that think!" Mercifully, this event yesterday was close to the opposite. /1 royalsociety.org/science-even...

Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...

1. What does a Cold War-era game theory problem known as the silent duel have to do with high-risk research strategies, publication in Cell/Nature/Science glamor journals, and the academic job market? Kevin Gross and I tackle these questions in our latest arXiv preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.06718

📣 PhD position now open for Oct 2026 start based at @imperialchemistry.bsky.social: tinyurl.com/PhDFDF. An interdisciplinary project combining experimental & computational materials discovery in a collaborative Royal Society-funded team. Co-supervised by @beckylgreenaway.bsky.social.

Two very different opportunities are currently open for postdoctoral researchers to join my group in London. First, I’m looking for a materials chemist or physicist to come work with us on materials for environmentally friendly cooling and refrigeration: qmul-jobs.tal.net/vx/appcentre...

New PostDoc opportunity in #CompChem at @uclchemistry.bsky.social Join our exciting research to develop novel wavefunction theory for open-shell ground and excited states in molecules. Find out more about our group at www.hughburton.com Please share widely! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOE518/r...

PLEASE REPOST: We have a 4-year, fully funded PhD studentship focussed on using computational chemistry to find new and improved oxides for X-ray detection, to start in October 2025. findaphd.com/phds/project.... This is open only to UK nationals.

New from The Strain Team: 🎊 Springer Nature Discovers MDPI 🎊 Springer Nature has spawned a copycat journal series called "Discover" mimicking #MDPI journal titles and citation behaviours. We even made a browser game to prove it (see 🔗). Gross! 😀 1/n #ResearchIntegrity #SciPub #AcademicSky

The rout of UK universities threatens the entire economy, including the web of spinouts that have been so successful, along with high-end talent and recruitment. Nothing will be done. sifted.eu/articles/uk-...

We're hiring!🚨Our lab is looking for two new postdocs for our drug discovery program: 1) Synthetic/Med Chem (small molecule hit-to-lead)🧪 usyd.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/USYD_E... 2) Chemical Biology (peptide inhibitors)🦠 usyd.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/USYD_E... Pls spread the word!🙏

We've got to tell the truth: British Higher Education is experiencing a rapid unscheduled disassembly, streaking across the sky like a rocket smashing into the atmosphere. www.historyworkshop.org.uk/education/a-...

NEW from me in the FT today... The UK's university 'system' is now in freefall. How on Earth did the disaster unfold? Read all about it: www.ft.com/content/0ec7...

Just spent day reading about the collapse of the British car industry. The lack of vision, the managerial incompetence, the strategic insularity, the complacent reliance on ‘world-class’ marques, the constant short-termism, bad labour relations. And I thought: yup, there go our universities too.

Our statement on the ICE arrest of Palestinian activist and Columbia University student protest leader, Mahmoud Khalil:

You also geek out on disordered & defective materials? I and @hannabostroem.bsky.social are organizing a dedicated session at the coming 35th European #crystallography meeting: we'd love to see and showcase your research ✨ Submissions are open at ecm35.org until 30th April, consider joining us!