People shouldn’t just get to say whatever they want!” Well academics say what they say bc they’ve trained for decades & speak from positions of professional discernment & earned judgment. This does not mean they’re always correct! But the interaction of such perspectives is how you make knowledge

Academic Halloween Costume Idea: The 1915 Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure. 📝 🥵 💅

Hey! If we applied the same can do attitude to UNIVERSITIES as we do to late night, we could get them back to their mission of serving the public good too!

My head hurts.

In one of my classrooms someone left a whiteboard marker meant to smell of “choco mint,” and it was such a uncanny gross smell it eventually made me mildly ill.

Last night kitten Cory (being a kitten) chased cat ceaselessly while she hissed and growled and swatted. Kept me up for hours. I get home to this. I am endlessly baffled by cat psychology.

🔦Ohio Republican candidates have received an average of 56% support in the last 10 years of statewide elections, but after refusing to draw fair maps, Republican politicians control: -66% of the state’s U.S. Congressional seats -67% of the Ohio House -79% of the Ohio Senate.

Months ago I thought MSA was NEXT weekend so I built in a remote day, which I’m quite allowed to do. But the most embarrassing part is I literally JUST NOW noticed it was for the wrong week. Thank goodness that, ironically the university made itself a holiday for MSA week too, so I’m fine!

Never forget who is making good things happen and never let your administrators forget.

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered the University of South Dakota to reinstate a professor who posted criticism of Charlie Kirk on his Facebook page the day of the shooting, finding the action likely violated the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

They've lost the 9yos

Do teachers and professors have free speech rights? A question that we're literally honestly asking in 2025. It baffles.

The most common language amongst the academics today is the laugh-cry.

I am snek.

“You also now must fear one another. Under the new normal, a single student can record a class discussion, fail to protect your identity, and post it online in violation of the safeguards provided by Student Rule 24 and FERPA, dragging you & your classmates into a national scandal without consent.”

Oh it’s been a minute since I skated so hard I thought I might be sick. Also, I can’t believe I’m 15 years in the sport and this year still learned two kinds of jumps I’d never done. I love learning what the body can do with enough training (and abuse). 🛼 🥵

if the rapture could happen before the zoom webinar that'd be great thanks

Some of us do.

We should give him the Nobel for pronouncing acetaminophen correctly.

Okay Disney people - now try the universities.

Listen to Pete.

NEW: A former Ball State University staff member is suing the university president after she was fired for a private Facebook post about the death of Charlie Kirk. She is being represented by ACLU of Indiana @acluindiana.bsky.social. READ THE COMPLAINT: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

On the chilling of speech in higher education across Ohio by legislative fiat. We are all beginning to feel it, but just listen to the student voices www.salon.com/2025/09/22/g...

The kitten has developed an elaborate pre-eating routine of purring and flopping herself on the floor dramatically for a good 2-3 minutes before getting down with lunch. And you must watch her do it all, or it’s not lunch time.

Can this be a lawsuit already? My god.

Education is more than job training.

“This is the environment into which DeWine now says: Go recruit. Recruit to what, exactly? … A state where students are invited to turn in their professors for failing to welcome even the most fringe or discredited ideas, chilling classroom debate and making every lecture a potential minefield?”

Oh, and in their infinite wisdom, the legislative metrics are the same for a 50k institution as for a 2k student institution.

Step up the campus tours!! Sure, that’ll get academic freedom back. What clownish foolishness. www.cleveland.com/opinion/2025...

Exciting news! The CFP for the joint MSA/ BAMS conference in Loughborough next July is out now. Because this is a joint conference in the UK, there are a number of changes to note for MSA members, including the earlier deadline (Dec. 1) for papers, panels, workshops, etc. More details at the link!

A fee days ago @aaup.org published an advisory for academic workers in this time of intensive repression and censorship. Please read *before* a crisis hits, if possible, whether you’ve been targeted before or not. www.aaup.org/news/advisor...

This chaos also speaks to the growing awareness of the profound corruption of the Supreme Court. The excessive H1B fee is clearly illegal according to the text of the applicable statute. But no one can have any confidence anymore that it will ultimately be thrown out.

The resignation of a president at one of the nation’s largest universities is the latest example of the immense pressure educators are facing — from elementary schools through to college — over lessons and speech.

You’ll be shocked to hear that their recommendation is not limiting the circumstances in which AI is deployed, but rather accepting the inevitability it will occasionally have catastrophic effects.

This is a tougher question than you might think. What are your strategies for tracking new & forthcoming books in your field and/or discipline?

And now evaluations are even more important in Ohio, so here we go.

Actually, seriously, it’s clear to me academic unions in red states are more up against it than usual. Ohio is not right to work. We have SOME bargaining power. But it’s being stripped daily. It’s bad in TX, FL, IN. Others too. $$$ them, maybe? www.aaup.org/chapters/sta...

I am literally running out of mental space for all the things I need to ask labor attorneys on behalf of my union colleagues as it all rains down like a torrent every day, from state and federal level. I am proud of the mission, and I wouldn’t do anything else. But wow. 🤯

As I teach comp primarily now, it’s the comp classroom that is the staging ground for this.

Such good news.

How was the first McCarthy appreciation week for all my faculty colleagues? Spectacularly catastrophic? Merely horrifying?

Once I thought The Chair was at least an effort to describe the work. Now I find China, IL more appropriate. And I recommend.

Somewhere some unserious person screamed at scientists for brethalyzing monkeys, but in the process we learned something incredible about our past!

There were conservatives hoping a non-crazy football coach would save Ohio from Vivek’s extremism. Sadly, no off-ramp now. It’s Ohio and the choice of whether to let that man ride Ohio into oblivion.

After months of smearing this guy as a possible terrorist or terrorist supporter who they needed to eject as soon as possible back to Egypt, the trump administration today filed a motion in court basically going, eh nvm Glorious taxpayer funded use of time www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

I made my first completely anti-union faculty friend, finding common cause with the belief “this is all some real disrespectful bullcrap, isn’t it?”