very weird “I am Spartacus” thing happening right now with the worst people on earth

Has anyone commented yet on the irony that Cloudfare, which seems to be the leading system that websites use to “verify your human,” heavily uses AI in its operations?

Recently the @historians.org Council vetoed member resolutions that would have committed AHA to defense of academic freedom. In doing so, the org relayed their stance that its federal underwriters-not historians themselves-determine our discipline's limits. 🔗⬇️ www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

“Obviously, the first advance was hers.” Gelernter should be fired.

In a Public Books virtual roundtable, editor Andy Hines + contributors of "University Keywords" reflect on how the book prepared them for today’s attacks on higher ed—and the better university that might be built. Check out the roundtable here:

The Jeffrey Epstein Fellowship in Nabokov Studies:

In their new book "Sex Isn't Real," Beans Velocci traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define sex and to create a world devoid of trans life. Read a Q&A about their bold argument on the blog today. buff.ly/hB1k4Cw

"As always, none of this is the fault of the overworked, beleaguered staff of the IMLS." 📚 buttondown.com/wellsourced/...

As promised earlier my Q&A with @mattseybold.bsky.social on technofeudalism and how edtech has steadily been eroding our freedoms and capturing the value of our labor (and student work) for themselves. academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/the-techno...

No surprise given the forum in which this article was published (one long hostile to serious reporting on the academic labor movement) but the article fails to note that the key goal of these conservative centers is to undermine departmental & faculty governance. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Trump's "war on woke" has put Indigenous arts and culture institutions in a challenging position. “Without being able to transmit our traditional knowledge and oral histories, unfortunately, it feels like we’re at the end of a long genocide," one culture worker told me. Read my reporting here:

Columbia looking foolish right now

Congrats, Cornell, and every other university that bowed down to the bully.

Feels like there's some fundamental disconnect when you have to verify you're human to access the websites of academic publishers advertising their 'AI assisted' search functions.

“Faced with austerity dressed up as innovation, overt political attacks, and technologies that challenge basic conditions of teaching and learning, students and faculty have begun to articulate [] what is lost when disciplines are dissolved.” www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Is this piece a parody? Every time I read an interview with one of these Fabergé martyrs who retreat to their Western Civ havens, I think — half-facetiously — does anyone want to interview *me* after leaving the academy + a presidential professorship bc of astronomical conservatism + dysfunction?

An extraordinary number of banger lines in this masterpiece of the genre of critical academic book review, but this in particular is straight up🔥: doi.org/10.1215/2834...

Harvard and Epstein were so deeply intertwined that I’m surprised they didn’t make him a University Professor

The British Library ends the week by taking us down a peg:

soon colleges will be generating AI students to generate opeds using AI to defend their contracts with AI firms (the contracts will also be generated by AI). A spiraling drain hole of fakeness.

The college at which I'm employed, which has signed a contract with the AI firm that stole books from 131 colleagues & me, paid a student to write an op-ed for the student paper promoting AI, guided the writing of it, and did not disclose this to the paper. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...

How has the History Workshop Journal collective sustained its commitment to radical history over fifty tumultuous years? Two HWJ veterans, Sally Alexander and Jeffrey Weeks, sat down to share their memories with @beckierutherford.bsky.social and @inoutofpractice.bsky.social🎙✊🏻

This list of people whom Yale is platforming to discuss the future of higher education encapsulates why the elite, private R1 American university is really the wrong institutional site to think about these questions. president.yale.edu/committees-p...

I don't we need to hear from people associated with the American Enterprise Institute's "Center for the Future of the American University"about the future of higher education. events.yale.edu/event/the-fu...

Wow - massive congrats @henrysnow.bsky.social, can't wait to read 🗃️

I really dislike the spread of 2FA into higher ed. Maybe you really should have to enter a code text messaged to you to check your bank account, but not your university email account.

I want to say a bit more about our initiative to hire scholars to 3yr Research Associate positions. None of us know what the twinning of humanities research support and employment will look like in another 5(?) years. But we do know that we need it. As a matter of social and cultural health. 1/

Someone should write a history of people at Harvard reviewing the books of other people at Harvard for prominent media outlets.

Philly-adjacent! On 1/27 at 4:15p ET I'll talk with Chris Newfield, Eleni Schirmer, and Jason Wozniak about the University Keywords book, but also how to approach the contemporary situation in US higher education. If you can't make it in person, you can join online. bit.ly/UniversityKeywords

The snow won’t stop us! Join us online or in person (if the latter travel safely!) tomorrow!

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

So much love for the @jckessler.bsky.social, @annakornbluh.bsky.social, & the whole UIC Faculty United, who collectively programmed this event, & then had the generosity & gumption to say, let’s share it with the world, because we are @higheredlabor.bsky.social United. + @bakerdphd.bsky.social is 🔥

THEORY AT THE BARGAINING TABLE UIC United Faculty hosts a roundtable on education technology, faculty autonomy, power mapping, board composition, lobbying state legislators, artificial intelligence, surveillance+ data-mining, Ponzi austerity, + more. theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/theory-at-...

Last, I was glad/ sad to see my post (from work w @asheeshksi.bsky.social and @rbtownsend.bsky.social) on the humanities as the leading indicator of research infrastructure collapse hit the top ten. 😣 scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/04/02/t...

Has anyone documented empirically the appearance of historians as guests on cable news channels such as MSNBC and CNN? (I'm aware that many have opinions about this - I'm just looking for any documentation of the phenomenon; did it really grow during the Trump years? Or is this just perception?) 🗃️

1989: what a time to be alive. www.nytimes.com/1989/09/13/u...

bell hooks on educator burnout and overwork (from “Teaching to Transgress”), www.hampshire.edu/sites/defaul...

"On Tuesday, 21 November, four days after being sacked, Altman was reinstated and the board members who wanted to sack him were forced out. A new chairman was appointed, the well-known ethical titan Larry Summers."

We’re living in an age of intense right-wing victimhood. Despite dominating political institutions, finance, and, yes, higher ed, the right is always complaining about being oppressed, silenced, & persecuted while they oppress, silence, & persecute everyone else.

A permanent ban on the phrase "heritage Americans."

I think that the "lost generation" argument about the alleged decline of white men in 'creative' industries can be seen as a corollary to the ideology of the "enrollment cliff" about the alleged decline of (white) people going to college.

I love it when the other side just comes out and says what all of us know to be true.

Is it fair to say that Bluesky triumphed over Mastodon as an alternative microblogging site to Twitter/X for historians? If so, why is that? 🗃️

Tell Compact Magazine that we're deliberately rooting against all of the people in this group, not just the white men among them.

Working on something about what Twitter meant to historians - what was good/not good about it for the profession, in relation to the general crisis of academic history / the profession, etc., the cratering of the university. What was #twitterhistory at its best? What were its failures? 🗃️

"Are white male millennials being systematically shut out of Barack Obama's annual lists of favorite books, movies, and music? My latest for Compact Magazine."

The same people who spent the last decade wagging their fingers at those of us who said our politics have been driven by race, who claimed actual victims of discrimination talking about that discrimination was identity politics, are now full on embracing the politics of aggrieved white racism. Wow.

Why blame DEI for that (like the collapse of the humanities job market) which capitalism bears responsibility?

This is 100% incorrect as the explanation for why someone obsessed with Roman *military* history is not being hired.