"The chapter grew from just over 40 members at the beginning of last year to 122 by April 2025. By February, the group had amassed 312 members, drawing faculty from across Harvard’s schools — tenured professors, non-tenure-track instructors, researchers, and a small number of graduate students."

Rep Young’s new HB on Ohio higher ed seems to continue the MacCarthy purges and force an extreme retrenchment policy on all universities that kills tenure.

Bovino advanced all the way to within eyesight of Paisley Park, but his supply lines were stretched too thin and ultimately his frozen troops were encircled by Will Stancil and wine moms with whistles

OSU student paper, The Lantern, has been doing great reporting on state government overreach into OSU and public higher education in general, see www.thelantern.com/2026/02/ohio...

Ohio State University faculty fought the creation of the conservative Chase Center because an ideologically-biased center is antithetical to the purpose of a university. They also fought when the center was granted autonomy by the state legislature. The OSU faculty were right on both counts.

Our local NPR station WOSU did a much better job with the headline. Of course, this is a professor at the Chase Center, which was established by state law & is supposed to be the anchor for "viewpoint diversity" and "civility." The stories write themselves...

Homan announces "end" of Operation Metro Surge here in MPLS.

Mkay then

I have friends that have cool parties.

Yes. They are scabbing actual faculty with weird folks. Pass it on.

A "professor of civics education" at OSU's much ballyhooed intellectual diversity center (funded by McCarthyites, of course) punches documentarian who deigns to ask Gordon Gee a single question. The ironist who coded this simulation has no sense of subtlety.

The gallup presidential approval poll is an institution in American politics that predates world war 2. With Trump’s approval in the 30s, they’re ending it. thehill.com/homenews/med...

Oh, I see the plan to scab all Ohio faculty through the fraudulent standing up of alternative collegiate units with unvetted, ununionized faculty is going SWIMMINGLY! Glad to see the higher ed innovators are innovating so well! Your tax money paid for this farce.

Put yourself in my lit prof shoes this morning: Up all night with a tooth infection. I’m mid root canal at 9am on a Wednesday and the techs are talking about how they wanna see Withering Heights but just can’t make it through the book. Unable to speak for Bronte, I started to shake.

Problem 1: Olympians don’t really make a living. And they’re out there being so courageous in 2026. Problem 2: University administrators have given up in 2026. Solution: Olympic medal comes with your choice of university board spot or presidencies. Four year roles! I’d take that deal.

NEW BOOK! I'm very happy to say that my new book, Utopia, co-written with Douglas Mao, has been published on-line academic.oup.com/book/62279

Everything else aside, I would urge folks not to just assume we will see a return to traditional departments and majors. The critical and creative disciplines will be rebranded as “innovation” as institutions pump money into new units and programs in the scramble to remain relevant.

“I don’t understand why so many people have conceded that the university is a left space. Can someone show me a Marxist university president?”

It’s constantly happening. Again today.

I am no longer stoked on listing bad dudes.

Just a remember that the entirety of Ohio higher education transformation is bound up in this thing.

It’s wild to me how we’re having a hard connecting dots about why higher education affordability has plummeted. Totally unrelated note: hm, it seems these rich donor board members running these are the apex of corruption and constantly grifting?

You really would think AI, which you know they use for everything because they’re dumb and lazy, would stop this kind of stuff.

There is some hope some of this will melt tomorrow. Again, my neighbors abandoned a whole car under there.

All the states with academic freedom are advertising intensely in Ohio right now. Michigan and Pennsylvania specifically.

CALL FOR PITCHES @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not. Details below!

Every time I see a post by Bill Kristol in 2026 that I could have written I just realize how deep we are in this well.

This was the most cogent historical and cultural narratives in a musical performance I can imagine? Perhaps moreso because of the keen awareness some of the audience wouldn’t have any of the requisite knowledge. Brilliant.

Macbeth: SHIT

And roller derby athlete! In this house we root for EJ.

The roller derby community when our skater friend is a flag holder.

Riding into another another weekend beginning with a snow emergency….

AAUP President Todd Wolfson issued the following statement in response to Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt's Executive Order issued today immediately eliminating academic tenure at the state’s public regional universities and community colleges.

For anyone who knows/is a prospective PhD student seeking funding... My lovely colleagues Prof Gill Plain & James Purdon have a fully-funded scholarship in English, on fiction/film 1945-65 imagining outbound UK-Commonwealth migration: www.st-andrews.ac.uk/study/fees-a... Deadline 27 Feb.

I’m supposedly going skiing and maybe snowboarding for the first time this month, and I imagine I’ll be skijoeing. I always think I’m on skates when I’m in a sporting boot, and it doesn’t go well.

They’re doing the quiet part out loud in Oklahoma, where they’re making a distinction between R1 faculty and all the other faculty in the system. I bet plenty of R1ers would be perfectly fine with that. Hope I’m wrong!

I very much wanted to go HWCU, but I couldn’t. Funny to think instead I had the experience being oggled and surreptitiously filmed on Palm Walk for users of hot or not and Zuckerberg’s upstart competitor. In a way, everything that’s happened since is a natural outgrowth of that experience.

"It's just this trend where we've seen a lot of where decisions are made for us and not with us. And that pattern is very troubling, and it looks like it's leading towards shutting down faculty voice, even student voice and perspective." — Sara McDaniel, AAUP University of Alabama President

The local shops who took donations for Springfield are posting photos of being totally slammed with incoming. Ohio cares about neighbors.

I’d love an institutional temp check: are your institutions responding to and acknowledging the challenges of these times on faculty? How do they do this well? Anyone not doing it at all?

So glad these new government ads on television. Always great to be reminded of the lawless hoards my tax dollars subsidize to assault people. Before coffee!

Ok antiques road show: this is George Washington’s signed first edition of the first printing of Common Sense. How much do you think it would be appraised for? Anyone on here from Christie’s????? (It’s safely vaulted at the Boston Athenaeum, don’t worry)

I love how they’re actively making professors easier to find and dox but not people with guns. The whole public must know where I be at all times. Priorities right?

One forgets that when the epic snowfall finally starts to melt the hundreds of pounds of it on your roof will fall to the ground. At some point. Quite violently. Just stay indoors.

“Good luck!”

me finally owning a home in a walkable neighborhood when im too old to walk

The tv is now awash with adverts about how great federal immigration force is, like that will wash out our brains of all memory and pattern recognition…