It’s remarkable in this day and age to hear a politician anywhere say the following: “Support for a diverse, rigorous and accessible body of historical scholarship should be a much greater priority for democratic governments even at a time of stretched budgets.“

All over the place leaders of humanities departments have had to justify our existence to central administrators as if the university AS SUCH does not owe its very origins to humanistic disciplines.

I want to preface this by saying that I’m very lucky and proud to be a member of my faculty union here at UMass and profoundly grateful for what it does. That said, that we have a great union yet humanists on our campus still suffer from inferior working conditions compared with STEM colleague.

The details of this plan sound wild.

Yes, you see, what he meant to say is that he is driven by curiosity about what it would be like to have more money.

A bleak report but matched by admin encounters I've had recently too. It's always situation-specific, but for many of us I fear it may be time to pull back from dealing w these ppl, our enemies, head-on, & marshal existing resources to protect what little space we still have that's not yet captured+

I like to tell the story of how, as my first postdoc ended, I asked a dean about an ongoing job. "We don't hire traditional scholars any more," he said, "we hire people who can bring in external grants around which we can build [cash-cow] master's programs." Proud, then, to be a traditional scholar.

Was in a meeting earlier today trying to explain to the provost the value of the humanities & history. Completely uninterested & dismissive. I guess this is to be expected but nevertheless it's depressing how impervious university administration can be to all of our evidence and arguments.

personally I think it's a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com — certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country — asked an unspecified "AI tool" what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.

Ok, but the point of college education, whether in humanities or STEM, is not job training for corporate America.

I guess I don't trust university admin to make a good case for the university in the age of AI.

Statehouse subsidization of Canvas in places dominated by reactionaries tells you a great deal about what Canvas IS now: an enclosure of educational practices serving the ambition of automation & indoctrination.

save the classics from the classics savers

"In sum, every aspect of the termination process – the NEH DEI ratings, DOGE’s DEI-based ChatGPT filter, & the spreadsheet sorting grants by “DEI Rationale” – reflects a single, unconstitutional purpose: to drive a particular disfavored viewpoint from the marketplace of humanistic inquiry" (104)

now thats an anecdote with a punch, from Gillian Tett www.ft.com/content/c0ae...

NYT story 🎁 Proud & grateful for @historians.org and the collective. @acls1919.bsky.social's Joy Connolly: "Today’s decision is a step toward honoring the will of Congress and our mission as a nation—to... know ourselves and build a better future on that knowledge.." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/a...

universities have the brainpower, resources,+ community obligation to develop on-site secure NON PROFIT learning management systems + ed tech overseen by actual educators, not data-extraction censorious surveillance profiteers! VOID THE CONTRACTS theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/mamdani-wi...

Always a good time to read McClanahan and McCune’s “Ed Tech” keyword, but now seems even better www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Education advocates should start framing “using public higher ed for workforce training” as a “subsidy.” It’s a subsidy, we’re taking the costs of training off company books and making the public pay for it. College is for learning how to inquire. You want a specific employee, YOU train them

Steve Job’s favorite course was calligraphy, and although he dropped out of Reed college after 1 semester, he audited courses there for 18 months. Students learn in weird ways. My favorite course in Undergrad was about Paracelus, and I became a patent lawyer because I loved it so much.

This is a real post from the U.S. Department of Education for Teacher Appreciation Week. The Trump administration are not serious people, but they are very dangerous people.

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

ACLS / MLA / AHA / Authors Guild won the NEH case against the mass termination of grants.

Books, paper, pencils, and pens cannot be hacked so easily. But of course, why would we invest in those things /s

This is both a correct description of the current situation and also very clearly the thing that needs to change. Higher education cannot survive without public support and that will never be forthcoming until we convince a critical mass of the public to support knowledge for its own sake.

I’ve got some thoughts in today’s Chronicle. www.chronicle.com/article/dont... (Sans paywall:) archive.ph/Blzzk

Conversations about the future of higher education in the US need to start from the unfortunate, basic fact that both Democrats and Republicans agree with Reagan that government should not subsidize curiosity driven learning and inquiry.

Grateful to reporter Matt Hartman for telling this story about changes in leadership at NEH. The firing of 22 out of 26 board members, including all members appointed by past presidents, is nothing short of a coup at an agency where the board reviews and votes on every single grant application.

Among my obsessions, the critical importance of government documents. As a historical subject as well as source. IOW, it's *always* been a data state. My new piece for Smithsonian on chasing paperwork around the American Revolution. Owes to work by: www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ever...

18thc trunks for paper. Just two of many in my files. One of these I'd been waiting decades to see. It's in the VMHC exhibit Un/bound and belongs to the Madden family. An 18th c ancestor of this free black family kept her freedom papers +more. Wasn't discovered in an attic until the 20thc.

As many know, Hampshire College, one of the most innovative liberal arts colleges in the country, is facing shutdown due to debt. If you have a few $ to spare, there are a couple efforts to help the college workers & potentially save the institution. Worker relief fund: www.helphampshireworkers.com

Nobody thinks scientists should drop their technical language while they are doing lab work, these comments are almost always directed at scholars in the liberal arts whose research is derided as not real (even when it’s often the most real)

People can speak in multiple ways depending on the audience. There is a strong case for the necessity of technical, specialized vocabulary when communicating with other researchers. It’s not a choice between public engagement OR specialized research. It’s that we need BOTH / AND.

On May 3, 2026, the AAR Board of Directors sent a letter to the leaders at the University of Denver, urging them to reconsider their plans to eliminate the Department of Religious Studies. Read the letter here: aarweb.org/news/letter-...

As bad as they were, Andrew Mellon and Andrew Carnegie used their wealth to build libraries, museums, and universities that benefitted the public. What cultural institutions have today’s wealthy elites built? Almost nothing.

Very provocative: "Independence would shift the question from 'How do we gain entry?' to 'What forms of knowledge become possible when we are not organizing ourselves around entry?' This all requires what the imperial center covets and hoards from the margin: resources."

Is there anything more redolent of the university seminar than the pathological fixation on semantics?

Sorry, but no. Mamdani doesn't invoke James Carville faculty lounge BS, & he just gave a St. Patrick's Day message rich in college seminar-level detail of history. The big takeaway is that Obama should be ashamed for saying this while universities/faculty are under assault from authoritarian GOP.

What’s frustrating about Obama using the “college seminar” as a foil is that he very obviously means the humanities. Yet ”college seminars” in math or physics are actually completely unintelligible to the layperson and that’s a good thing. Complex ideas and specialized vocabulary are good.

It does sometimes seem that the self-loathing of American intellectuals is deeper than the actual distrust of them by the general public

Higher ed is under authoritarian attack. Joining the fiction that all college is a sociology class you don’t like, and that Dem politicians are beholden to it, doesn’t help. Around 40% of Americans went to or are in college. No other group that big gets cast by so many national figures as abnormal.

@barackobama.bsky.social at a time when all of higher ed is under assault by the reactionary right, you gave them another talking point. Over my 21 year career exclusively at teaching colleges, what do you think I've been doing except breaking down complex concepts/ideas for smart laypersons?

How do Democrats "talk" like they're "in a college seminar"? What does @barackobama.bsky.social think goes on in a college seminar? Why do Democrats hate higher education so much?

I hate this bad faith James Carville faculty lounge bullshit with the intensity of a thousand suns, & Barack Obama, former law professor & former President, now watching the far right authoritarians lie about & dismantle the very jewel of 🇺🇸 society - our universities - should damn well know better.

it's a pattern b/c even the apology (2014) presumed that engaging intensively w/ ideas from the past is a kind of luxurious hobby. it's workforce ideology 101 & just as bad as fascist know-nothingism since it has the same aim while adding that poor kids don't deserve knowledge but others can have it

the anti-intellectualism is coming from inside the house folks, and always has been —a fully bipartisan war on universities taking place for decades, a consensus position against learning, and we're living inside the results

We are never going to improve education in this country while Democrats take part in culturally trashing higher ed for no reason