Private equity has been fantasizing about the capture of education for decades. This is the deepest they’ve ever gotten their tendrils into it.

Just in time for the reopening of the Santa Barbara Channel for oil drilling I have a piece out on difficult social questions when it comes to oil drilling exceptional places and what, if anything, is the future of environmentalism.

Book two coming soon!

You asked for it.

Suggest checking out my Q&A with @mattseybold.bsky.social for more details on Canvas the people who own them and how they (not the institutions themselves) aim to be the "core infrastructure of higher education" academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/the-techno...

Solidarity with NYU workers on strike

As of 11:00AM, I am on strike. Along with my colleagues in the NYU Contract Faculty Union. We've been pretty transparent about issues being negotiated. See docs.google.com/spreadsheets... . Interesting set of documents. I happen to be out of city but will be on a picket line tomorrow. 🪧✊ #Solidarity

I'm delighted to be returning to UMass Amherst tomorrow, my alma mater, to give the distinguished annual history lecture in association with the Five College Grad Program in history.

A "research" university that eliminates or "re-envisions" majors based on supposedly low enrollment should have to relinquish its title of "research" university

In line with discussion about the job market, the latest majors being closed at Syracuse University:

Solidarity with Emily Tucker and her open letter to students. Tucker writes, "But the great thing is, you don’t have to go along with this, and I urge you not to. You can refuse to use the chatbot. You can tell your professors that you don’t want them to use it or to require you to use it."

At some point, we have to think about what it means to do peer review in disciplines where an ever growing number of scholars are being shut out of the security of tenure-line faculty appointments

appalling mismanagement of public resources "chop from the top" means no gazillionaire salaries for upper admin, who should be educators, and it means no $15M fees to grifter consultants and oafing marketers

Or the National Endowment for the Humanities for 1,000 years.

I will never accept the “Capital One Guy” as a staple of popular culture and every year that you try and make me there is a white hot resistance that only grows more and more irrepressible within me.

“in front of Zendaya“

This looks 🔥 www.ucpress.edu/books/influe...

An important thing to know about these civics/ western civ centers. They have faculty lines and are hiring historians - regularly without any input from or even knowledge of their history departments.

"A department generating high credit-hour production across the university but with few declared majors is not an inefficient department. It is a department whose students are not being counted in the metric being used against it."

An excellent analysis of the war on Black studies that also includes a deeply perceptive critique of the neoliberal logic of valuing disciplines based on # of undergrad majors: www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

I think in my lifetime, the two most damaging mainstream media articles published about higher ed were (1) David Brooks’ “The Organization Kid” (2001 in The Atlantic) and (2) Nate Heller’s “The End of the English Major“ (2023 in The New Yorker).

Arguably this is the most insidious part of what Trump tried at the Kennedy Center - an uncomfortable one because it was a neoliberal restructuring that follows what has happened in higher ed: the need to justify disciplines in terms of $, enrollments, majors - ROI www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

One $16k NEH grant at a research library can change the life of a scholar forever while adding to our shared knowledge of history and culture. These depositions will drive me mad

A great recap of how "smirking little shit" tech bros destroyed the National Endowment for the Humanities, by @lizdye.bsky.social www.lawandchaospod.com/p/doge-bros-...

As the Ohio State University Board of Trustees meeting begins and makes the news official, here’s @osuaaup.bsky.social’s statement on the selection of Provost Ravi Ballamkonda as the new permanent president of OSU

When a country is *too* Protestant.

Most people don’t know this but this is actually what they gave Socrates to drink

Maybe we as a species should go extinct sooner rather than later.

You ever write something and there are so many parts you hope people engage with that you can't figure out which ones to quote? I'll do a wee thread on the 3rd, and final, essay from my Red Scares series www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

“Vladimir” symposium in the Chronicle when

Meanwhile these cretins are spending well over a billion dollars a day on a pointless war with Iran. You could fund the NEH like 10 times over with 1 day of war.

I’ve had to listen to world’s dumbest people complain about teachers unions and their salaries my entire life, and these assholes have never even been able to complete an audit of their expenses, let alone have to defend the billions they waste every second.

When academic employers claim in job ads to offer a "competitive salary and benefits," who do they think they're competing with???

Last Friday, faculty and academic staff at the University of Kansas, represented by United Academics of the University of Kansas, announced a tentative first contract agreement that ensures due process, job security, academic freedom and dignified compensation for all. www.aft.org/press-releas...

If Democrats ever get back in power, they need to reconstruct the NEH from Trump’s massacre. Two things they could do would be to (1) make the NEH into an actual endowment; (2) bring the annual NEH operating budget up to at least $1 billion.

I feel like none of our elites have had a new idea since “fire everyone“

Harvard pays McKinsey to tell it who to fire. The amount of money that universities waste on consultants to give them the veneer of objectivity to do what they were going to do anyway is likely shocking and would fund several tenure lines in the humanities: www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

🧵 up and down if you want to understand what happened to the civil servants at the National Endowment for the Humanities who worked every day to uphold the Constitution (hint: it's the same thing that happened to your grants). #NEH

And all 60 years' worth of NEH grants will be outspent in a week of attacks on Iran

As someone who watched the careful stewardship of grants over many years, the lack of care and the dismissal of the hard work of scholars and NEH program staff described here is devastating and shameful. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

The MLA, @acls1919.bsky.social, and @historians.org have filed a motion for summary judgment in our lawsuit to restore the NEH. Discovery documents reveal that DOGE rather than the acting chair led grant terminations and targeted grants using ChatGPT. More at mla.org/NEH-Lawsuit

These asshole twerps with no brains or education from DOGE really did use ChatGPT to find NEH grants to terminate ILLEGALLY - ruining hundreds lives and destroying hundreds of the greatest humanities projects and partnerships of our time. I’m overwhelmed with rage and anger all over again.

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below