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.

Is there anything more quintessentially millennial than claiming that the normal disappointments and vicissitudes of life are evidence of a systemic, structural bias against you personally?

I don't think DEI is the explanation for why people don't get jobs in academia. Also why are the examples of white men getting allegedly shut out of academic jobs "because of DEI" always about the humanities?

Humanities scholarship can move slowly - sometimes so slowly that it doesn't seem to be moving at all.

If, on the other hand, someone at Brown was teaching critical race theory, then Trump would consider it a federal government problem and a matter for the FBI.

I had some serious issues with decisions made while Claudine Gay was president, but I appreciate the very clear example of the normalization of pushing Black women out of their jobs and moving right along

For those working on next semester's syllabi: www.aaup.org/about/progra...

The fact that some Brown University students had to experience the horrors of mass shootings twice is as stark a condemnation of the status quo as one could make. https://bit.ly/4rWVPWT

My humanities dept was relevant. Majors were up. Courses were 100% enrolled. Revenue positive, GE serving, etc etc. We were still eliminated. The problem is ideological administrative destruction. Couldn’t write a report, a self study, or a spreadsheet against that.

It's a structural problem caused by standardized testing, large classes, and a refusal to pay educators. I can't speak for secondary education, but I can say that at a college level, it's amazing how enthusiastic even your colleagues can be about gaslighting you that many of these are just fine.

So, yes, this is horrifying. But there are two things the article does not address: 1. Back in the day, English teachers got two prep hours, not just one. The thinking then was that they had twice as much student writing to go through and grade and it took twice as much time (more, really).

“And some Penn alumni, I assume, are good people.”

An excellent way to destroy public higher education in your state.

Lol at every university trustee and law firm partner who concluded they had no choice but to play ball with this bumbling fool

“I considered transferring out of U.T., because if my professors are unable to teach me, and I’m not able to have candid conversations to get a proper education, what am I here for?” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/u...

when we speak of intellectual freedom, or academic freedom, what do we mean? typically freedom from restraint, right? No-one pretends that everyone has the same level of access to resources to pursue their work - right?

I don't think this is the best use of our finite time on earth.

My final manuscript in! And now I give you..... COVER REVEAL (US cover, UK is sooooo different but it's not public yet)

Much of the media in this country believes that the problem with higher education today isn't the attitude of college presidents like Albright's but instead . . . being 'too accommodating' to students with disabilities.

imagine if academics worked-to-rule. 40-40-20 on a 40 hour work week would mean 16 hours on teaching (lol), 16 hours on research (lmao), 8 hours on service (rofl)

Really important thread 👇, to which I would add that we need to consider overlap of 1.) endowment managers of the NYU model, 2.) owners of EdTech platforms for student surveillance discussed here, & 3.) private equity capture of NCAA football undergoing chaotic privatization.

Two articles that explain what weird vision the Chronicle class of higher ed executives is chasing everywhere all at once in the new dispensation. 1) Everyone wants to be the SEC, now that the NYU model of growth via real estate speculation, fed-funded research, grad-degree retail sales has failed

On Monday the FIFA Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be awarded to Larry Summers

At the same time, USC is paying a presumably large sum of money to OpenAI to give students access to ChatGPT we-are.usc.edu/2025/12/03/a...

The AHA, perpetually keeping its power dry for a battle it will never fight. Reupping this because the AHA will always disappoint in this regard. It's a country club, not a union, and when people accept this and opt for something else they'll be happier.

Immense scholarly integrity: www.tithibhattacharya.net/new-blog/202...

Certainly raises a big question for the American historical profession, given its noted emphasis in the Trump era on 'history as essential to the defense of democracy': hard to take this message seriously when the discipline itself is governed in such an undemocratic manner. 🗃️

Disappointing: "The [AHA] Council received two resolutions for consideration at the 2026 annual business meeting: the 'Resolution in Solidarity with Gaza' and the 'Resolution Opposing Attacks on Core Principles of Education.' but "the Council will not place the proposed resolutions on the agenda."

After the University…page proofs

this encapsulates the essential relationship between the people running universities, the people doing academic work in universities, and the people looking to smash and grab as much as possible from universities while we're on the way down

My employer, Dartmouth College, today boasts it's 1st Ivy "to launch AI at an institutional scale." It is doing this by partnering--"more than a collaboration"--with Anthropic, a company that stole the books of many faculty, me included, which many of us are suing.

Many universities including @umassamherst.bsky.social now claim that federal cuts mean that the institution has to defund scholarship & teaching. My colleague Kevin Young recently published a report showing that in the UMass case, at least, this is completely wrong: drive.proton.me/urls/VS9FJ3D...

Terrible things happening at the New School: www.newschoolfreepress.com/2025/11/27/a...

New School has been one of the most important humanities and social science universities in the world for the past 70 years. The humanities are collapsing at all of the pillars, and it won't be long until less prestigious institutions feel validated to call open season upon a number of departments.

Thinking of my New School friends whose programs have been closed (~30 of them), whose PhD programs have been indefinitely halted, and who are now receiving invitations to resign + accept severance payments — with the threat of 🪓 if not enough folks take the offer. A ✨-if-imperfect place ruined 😥

Hey can someone do a massive scale ed tech grift and then use the proceeds to fund the arts and humanities in this country?

IMLS announces "upon further review" that it is reinstating all federal grants to libraries. It leaves out that it's doing this because a federal court told them a few weeks ago that the Trump admin's decision to destroy libraries was not legal. www.imls.gov/news/stateme...

@theatlantic.com Writers Have a Bad-Article-Ideas Problem

“Hiding behind the push to temporarily slow rising tuition costs is a plan to abandon higher education as a public good in this country.”