Isn’t it funny how all the “reports” attacking the university as too woke and left-wing biased get all the media attention but the empirical research that shows college students don’t actually experience any of this never gets discussed?

This effort to replace peer review in scientific funding with political decision-making is exactly the same thing the center-right is doing in pushing civic centers on college campuses: undermining teaching based on peer-reviewed scholarship with right-wing beliefs

If you asked me, off the top of my head, to name a non-Oxbridge university in England synonymous with excellence in the Humanities - I would probably think of Exeter first. This feels like a very deliberate, targeted and ideological Bonfire of the Humanities

I don’t even think that is possible because the operating epistemic principle of civic centers is “viewpoint diversity“ and the operating epistemic principle of the university is peer review, and these are fundamentally incompatible approaches to knowledge. asheeshksi.substack.com/p/introducti...

I can only assume that the Iowa legislature intended to create a situation where only one faculty member was obligated to teach thousands of students—because of their innovative new ideas about higher ed. Good luck to them.

Interesting to see talking points 2 and 4 here. Having been in conversation with AEI fellows, they’re very on-message yet duplicitous. They know the administration’s attacks on universities are unpopular/illiberal, so maybe they’re testing ways to say “it’s bad, but actually good”…

My book currently discounted @bookshop.org! bookshop.org/p/books/whit...

There is a cruel irony in the fact that Johns Hopkins, America’s original research university, is partnering with the right-wing to undermine peer-reviewed academic research. open.substack.com/pub/asheeshk...

Lol - and JHU is completely unserious for participating in this bs and partnering with an evil institution like AEI. open.substack.com/pub/asheeshk...

Okay. Ai can go bankrupt then. This is not our problem, this sounds like a rich tech billionaire problem.

done c.org/Nhvqd6nygp

“Too little, too late." observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Let’s hope that Haiti or another country he has slandered wins.

I will be the 60th person on your timeline to post "Ghana wins 0-0"

Ghana needs to go for the win not the tie!

My book is coming out in October and will be available open access! However, for those who prefer physical copies, Barnes & Noble is currently running a preorder sale for members. Use code PREORDER25 to get 25% off the paperback! www.barnesandnoble.com/w/in-referee...

The potential of using AI to diagnose cancer and other diseases is exciting, but I simply do not understand what value AI adds to cultural experiences like this.

I told you last week that the excellent dean of the IU Bloomington College of Arts & Sciences had been sacked. This story illustrates the sort of action that upper administrators want from deans: www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/u...

one of the many all-timers from Stuart Hall

The secondary thesis of God and Man at Yale

If you want to argue that scholarship is but a latter addition to the core of humanistic study, which is (supposedly) pedagogy, you need to pretend like the history of scholarship, archives, government, theology, never happened. If humanists are supposed to back to their core, that core is research

There’s a lot of good in this piece. But there have been what I’d characterize as “hard” arguments against recentering research as the core of humanistic fields (Deresiewicz) and softer arguments (Gilman) and it will surprise nobody who follows me that I think this is utterly wrong.

anyway

time for this again

#America250 discourse, but it’s actually about how impossible it is to get a tenure track job in early American history and how hard it is to find research support because we defunded the humanities. 🗃️

Free speech, open debate, and viewpoint diversity, whee!

The right funds their agenda while the real Academy that operates on peer-reviewed and quality of work eviscerates its own talent pool (with a lot of help from the right). The salary range for this shit is $200-$450k.

when people say that there is an entire welfare network for far right cranks that are bankrolled by local car barons and billionaires, what that means is that every university is prone to opening a Center For Freedom Thoughts Studies that focuses on how to ban trans people and put migrants in camps.

tech capture of the NSF: “it allows NSF to make awards to nontraditional recipients such as a limited partnership or a venture capital firm, some of which might have been created solely for the purpose of receiving the NSF award.”

Should use the fact that I'm a white guy to lie my way into this bullshit post and then teach the kids the Immortal Science of Marxism-Leninism.

Wasting Iowa taxpayer dollars to try to indoctrinate students in non peer-reviewed “viewpoints” rather than hiring professors who do actual peer-reviewed research and teaching

Salary $200,000-$450,000

The civic center movement on American college campuses is an anti-democratic effort to undermine and ultimately destroy public higher education by targeting humanistic scholarship and teaching. Please read: www.uncivilcollective.org

There are some genuinely good ideas in this report, which is better than like 99% of its competing alternatives (Yale, Vanderbilt). However, it dangerously endorses “viewpoint diversity,” which is a mistake and destructive of peer review. asheeshksi.substack.com/p/introducti...

#America250 discourse, but it’s actually about how impossible it is to get a tenure track job in early American history and how hard it is to find research support because we defunded the humanities. 🗃️

academics need to leave academia on sabbatical to do focused work, yet anyway who cannot find employment for even 6 months is considered persona non grata, and there is no respect for independent scholars whatsoever

In the stone ages I went to a training session where we were told students could only concentrate for 15 mins and this new invention - PowerPoint - would allow us to put up a captivating image. Professor of Medieval Italian was outraged: part of our job, he said, was to accustom people to boredom.

Very excited that The Baffler has excerpted a section from one of my favourite chapters in THE ASSET CLASS. It asks: why does private equity, one of the richest industries on earth, suddenly want *your* money? thebaffler.com/latest/short...

They are on Threads saying that wanting people to look up unfamiliar words when they're reading books is ableist. We're never getting free

I cannot stress enough that young people on social media have been saying different versions of "Expecting me to read is ableist" for several years bsky.app/profile/leth...

"Expecting me to read books and look up words is discriminatory" is for sure a viewpoint that crops up online, and it's very important to make fun of it every time

What confuses me is why there is so much discussion about how to fund LLM-augmented research but so little discussion about how to fund people to go to archives for years to read and interpret documents.

Ever feel like history and humanities professors will fight like hell for the books but not for the people who select and describe them and build and maintain the systems that preserve them and make them discoverable?

I never want any new knowledge about astronomy!!!

Given the growing evidence on cognitive offloading and skills erosion, this may be very prudent policy. And it will make for an informative social experiment, with much of the US serving as an counterexample

Love the player poses when they’re announcing the team lineups at the World Cup

We are saddened by the news that Jeff Bezos has acquired the Chronicle -- wait, we're now hearing that he hasn't, it just that the Chronicle stinks more than usual

I’m saying this as someone who’s in a 90% teaching position. Teaching vs. research is a false choice. Robust public funding of higher ed that existed without controversy until Reagan is the answer. The answer to “solving” whatever “problems” exist in higher ed is literally “throw money at it.”

Again, the right wing (and, sadly, that's the voice we hear from the chronicle now) sees most subjects as a set of facts, largely discovered, that can be taught to or read by students (the article is slightly centristin that it thinks teachers are still needed). No further research necessary.