So I am keeping this general but let’s say I’ve had reason to see a middle schooler’s class assignments recently. A kid with no personal tech was being throughly exposed to ChatGPT in their class work. I tried really hard not to…be me about it. Suffice to say I failed. I was me about it.

Glencoe, Scotland, December 2024, photo by Ruth McIntosh.

Lecturers, technicians & support staff are expendable, while vice-chancellors & senior teams enjoy outsized salaries Strathclyde Uni say it's “reshaping finances". No It's protecting executive pay at expense of academic community & quality of education www.timeshighereducation.com/news/strike-...

once again, AI fetishists need to understand that most scholars I know do not lack for ideas--we lack money, resources, time and energy. Now, unless you'll are planning on creating LLMs that cough up dollar bills for my research, I don't see what the point is

Someone asked me to comment on the anniversary of Jan 6. I will consider having comments on it….should it ever end. We are very much still reaching for the nadir of this reclamation. No time yet for historicizing it. Still trying to survive it.

One of the most lopsided results you'll ever see in a poll, from our weekend Washington Post poll www.washingtonpost.com/politics/int...

Another post from a Venezuelan friend:

at least part of everything this government does is to impress a handful of psychos on twitter

It’s not about drugs. If it was, Trump wouldn’t have pardoned one of the largest narco traffickers in the world last month. It’s about oil and regime change. And they need a trial now to pretend that it isn’t. Especially to distract from his sinking under Epstein and skyrocketing healthcare costs.

We are a rogue state, run by a dictator, and the international community should treat us as such including all appropriate economic and diplomatic sanctions

Cardiff University students are demanding that the university authorities answer a series of searching questions following a traumatic year in which more than 1,800 academics were originally put ‘in scope’ for redundancy ✍️Martin Shipton

Top trolling A knighthood is given to Vice Chancellor Canagarajah for advancing "inclusivity" while Leicester University reels from soaring executive pay, successive scandals and governance chaos Medals for optics 🤮 www.timeshighereducation.com/news/new-yea...

18 years for having a stillbirth. Medical testing showed meth but a med examiner testified he couldnt say it was the cause of death. She’s 1 of at least 20 Alabama women who suffered miscarriage/stillbirth then faced sentencing as severe as for murder, rape or kidnapping. www.al.com/news/2022/09...

This is an act of war and illegal under both US and international law, let’s just be clear about that:

Their idea of ‘free speech’ is always interesting. Apparently it now means being given the room you want, the audience you want, the security you (erroneously) think you need, the free advertising you want. And, of course, freedom from anyone who disagrees with you expressing an opinion.

'Now the target is the [education] system itself. Its value as a public good is being redefined as a matter of parental choice... and its commitments to principles of equality and justice—to say nothing of truthful accounts of history—are being trashed.' www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

A cross-party review of the financial sustainability of Scotland’s universities will go ahead after months of initial talks between university leaders and politicians, reports @helenpacker.bsky.social www.timeshighereducation.com/news/scottis...

I vividly recall a conversation with a guy a year ahead of me in grad school who claimed that affirmative action for women was why he had had to “settle” for our school. I asked which of his or my female classmates was he so much better than that he was the he wildly obvious preferred choice.

Well done to @cardiffucu.bsky.social. This is huge progress from where things were not long ago.

We need a Russell Tribunal to investigate universities' complicity in AI-led crimes against education (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell...)

Our final newsletter of 2025: BDM report, UCU Congress timing survey, news from UCU, UK HE and Australian HE! See you all in 2026!

Edition 6 of our newsletter has dropped! Including BDM report, news from UCU, the UK HE sector and the Australian HE sector feat @markpendleton.bsky.social ! We're taking a break for the holidays but we will be back with our first newsletter of 2026 on 14th January. ucucommons.org/ucu-commons-...

Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.

The women of the Kenwood Ladies' Pond Association voted overwhelmingly to be inclusive. Another "listen to women, no, not these women" by Terfs

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

‘It’s surreal’: US sanctions lock International Criminal Court judge out of daily life. My interview with Canadian judge Kimberly Prost, who was sanctioned by the US for ruling to authorise an investigation into war crimes by US troops in Afghanistan www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

Learning management systems also of course lock in institutitions to multi-year budget-raiding subscription contracts, enforce templates that restrict pedagogic autonomy, and claim extra value from turning usage data into feature upgrades, *in addition* to being major time and labour drains

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

Reminder that the ECHR prevents people being expelled to face torture, inhuman treatment, slavery or death, and prevents splitting of families unless there's a strong enough public interest. European leaders are evidently comfortable with at least some of those things, at least for foreigners.

✊ It was an honour to join friends at Southampton Solent #UCU Branch (not on BSky) this pm to lobby their university's Board of Governors. The Governors were meeting to decide if to 'fire and rehire' staff using a subsidiary company, to deny staff a decent pension. #SouthamptonSolent @ucu.org.uk

It would appear that Baroness Falkner is somewhat flexible with her opinion of when it is or is not acceptable to question the judiciary. It could almost appear that she chooses depending on whether they align with her own gender critical beliefs.

When are we to expect newspaper front-page interview features with Dr. Beth Upton about her two-year ordeal of having her right to anonymity removed and her name dragged through the mud and being decried as a sexual predator only for a tribunal to clear her and find SHE was discriminated against?

Solidarity with our colleagues at Coventry! Their fight is our fight as we all push back against the collective and individual attacks on higher education. Please sign and share! #StopTheCuts #SaveHE speakout.web.ucu.org.uk/vote-of-no-c...

People should resign from the Royal Society.

Andrew Millar, www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-c...

Researcher produces 100+ papers on "AI" in a year and what's worse than the shonky vibe scholarship and "slop flood" this represents is that he's doing it all as boss of an edtech company called Algoverse charging students $$thousands to do the actual work www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

i think to understand the meaning of the birthright citizenship clause to the framers of the 14th amendment, you have to understand significance of dred scott to the civil war republican party. dred scott wasn't just a bad ruling, it was understood as a rejection of the declaration itself.

Universities: investing millions so students ”develop literacy in the language of AI” Also universities: defunding the humanities so students are illiterate in ordinary languages

🇵🇱 The Polish government announces to the US that it no longer gives a damn about them. And we admire their panache.

The persecution of huge numbers of brown people and even the mass deportations will not create the white country of far-right fantasy. It’s coupled with an attack on reproductive rights that is sometimes openly intended to make white women have more babies....

Speaking as a private citizen on a matter of public concern, yes leadership is apparently planning to cut 50% of the faculty at the New School for Social Research in order to eliminate social research and replace scholarship with a trendy MA degree mill For the 21st Century 1/

Irish Minister for Health calls the UK's descent into transphobia out for what it is.

This. We are many. The fact we are many does not suit the status quo/capitalism. So they try and erase us and force us to suffer.

Listening in horror to the issues in Prison Ed at a reps & members meetings today. Mass redundancies, brutal course cuts, loss of admin time, increasing workloads yet less valuable learning to the students. The MOJ needs to get a grip. We need everyone to raise awareness of these issues. #ucu 🧵

5yo: “…and then the next Friday we’ll be doing the Christmas play for the mums.” Me: “…and the dads?” 5yo: “Yes. And the nonbinaries. If there are any.”

⏰ Time is running out! Submit your 8–10k word essay for the Leah Leneman Prize by 22 Dec 2025. Open to students & independent scholars working on women’s or gender history. Share widely 🔗 womenshistoryscotland.org/projects-and...

Tree of the Day

I’ve been thinking about the intellectual and affective labor involved in reading AI Generated student papers. I’m forecasting a little of the proposal that @cnygren.bsky.social and I advance in a piece that’ll be out soon but here’s where I’ve personally landed (o speak for myself not for us both):

A little bit of history with your #BanjoAunti It’s essential to examine the roots of our culture so we can understand how we got here, and how we can move forward.