“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

If women are underrepresented in STEM, it's at least partly because men like this offer mentoring, then embarrass themselves by assuming their mentees must be into them, then decide the best solution is to cut ties, which sends the signal to other faculty that the mentee must not be good enough.

Message to all faculty: your expertise is no longer trusted or valued at this so-called “university.”

I was a faculty member at IU in 2016, and after the election that year, I had to change the way I taught my 200+ student Intro Sociology class, because a handful of students started flooding the class whiteboard app by posting "MAGA" over and over again.

If you have to get permission to teach in your area of expertise from people who are definitionally not qualified to adjudicate your expertise then you are no longer working at a university. You’re working at a state propaganda factory.

"In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups."

So Tylenol (acetaminophen) is bad. Ibuprofen is bad. For a guy who got his start talking about rural suffering and addiction (opioids), he sure seems hell bent on attacking all the non-addictive pain medications.

i mean it's nonsense. the problem with all these poli sci/ IR dudes is that they don't know anything about history - how to actually understand its sources, how to think about context, etc. they think it's just raw data that can by systemitized and that's just not how people work

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have party I could vote for that wouldn't be a near constant disappointment.

Our department is hiring! Assistant Professor and Ruby Heap Professorship in Women’s History universityaffairs.ca/search-job/?...

I have always wondered about this and this story is incredible.

“We’re losing billions of dollars a year, but at least we’re telling teens to kill themselves”

I absolutely fucking refuse to allow this monstrosity into my classroom. And will not be changing my mind until it is not merrily aiding people into psychotic breaks and death by suicide, and is not administered by technofascists willing to let the world burn

“Ignorance is Strength”

AP is garbage. It does not indicate a student's achievement of or preparedness for higher ed accomplishment. It is, in fact, inimical to higher ed because it serves only to reduce the time students spend in college, to their detriment. Only people served are selling the product or gaming rankings.

Someone should pitch: From Sleepy Joe to Drowsy Donny: A History of the Soporific Presidency

UT Austin is discussing eliminating or consolidating our departments of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican/American and Latino/Latina Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Here is what AAADS alumni have to say. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

Grading papers on the penitential of Theodore, a fascinating text that I love putting in front of students. As often happens, reading several papers and thinking about them in the aggregate is leading to a lot of thoughts, this time relating to teaching about religion in a history class.

For those who are interested in intellectual history and early modern Ottoman world: Don't miss this extraordinary book by Marinos Sariyannis! Published open access today!🎉 #OttomanHistory #EarlyModern

Thrilled to have this piece by Omar Muhammed & @fancynahyan.bsky.social out now. I'll be using it tomorrow in a talk at UC-Merced on "Where Do Pandemics Come From? Using Black Death Narratives to Rethink the Origin of Pandemics." Or the question we really need to ask: when are pandemics? A quick 🧵.

Once you start thinking of AI as a war on humanity, on human thought, on human inquiry, on human labor, on nuance and critical thinking, it slots in pretty seamlessly with the right wing ideological project, oligarchical political projects, big tech's political projects, etc

I hope this pattern is becoming clearer: Billionaires target & destroy assets that serve the public interest so that their profits & power go uncontested. From news to tech to finance & space, billionaires are not interested in "innovation" or "job creation" or any of that bullshit. They plunder.

Honestly of all the many many reasons we need incredibly strong guardrails around AI asap, I think it is going to be the engine that allows for perfect price discrimination should be close to the top of the list. The price-setting power of increasingly monopolistic companies is already gouging us.

1. So, Andrew Torba, head of the website Gab, has been a self-described Christian nationalist for years, and even co-wrote a book about it. He's also a big AI booster. Which I guess is how one ends up insisting that Christian… :: zooms in on book :: …"nationalsiam" is ascendant?

Uninstall Grammarly NOW. They've partnered with an AI company and actively scrape your writing to train its models.

“Trump’s higher education policies have been catastrophic for our communities & democracy...We’re excited to build a coalition of students & workers united in fighting back for a higher education system that is accessible & affordable for all & serves the common good.” —Todd Wolfson, AAUP President

I cannot recommend enough Michael Gorup's new book, The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People. Gorup was one of many pushed out of New College in Florida. The code COUNTERSHADOW gets you 30% off and free US shipping. kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700639748/

The #1 lesson from yesterday’s blowout: Humanities majors killed on the job market 1) Mamdani- Africana Studies 2) Spanberger -French 3) Sherill - Global History

Does anybody know if the American Historical Association has any childcare stuff folded in? Our household is just realizing that both parents have panels at the same time, and we'll have our kids with us (3 and 5).

Disturbing news out of Auburn University, where the admin is pressuring professors to sign a statement saying they're complying with an "anti-DEI" law and TPUSA is holding a rally and trying to record classes. I hear faculty are terrified to sign, worried this is a pretense for mass firings.

Ah yes, one of those little reminders that we operate alongside people that have been quite literally ignoring the reality they live in for years, sometimes decades. How, in the year of our lord 2025, can anyone have missed what is happening?

Exciting news from Cambridge, where a donation has funded a permanent lectureship (sorry, “Assistant Professorship”) in the History of Knowledge Pre-1400. The only explicit restriction is “not medicine”, but it is in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/53305/

I cannot believe there are still people in my mentions arguing that boycotting an election because the candidates aren’t addressing your issue is a way to get them to pay attention.

HOW CAN ANY EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION PAY FOR THIS???

Do people listen to academic books and articles, rather than reading them? Text to speech apps or something?

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Universities across the world seeing this: "its only wrong 45% of the time!! Lets buy free licenses for our students, staff and faculty!! Lets lock into contracts with rapacious predatory AI companies with shitty technofascist politics, sucking up water and jacking up electricity prices!!"

Our state colleges are not owned by Trump and they aren’t for sale. UVA is a world renowned public university. Our principles should guide our actions, not politically motivated guidance and illegal threats from the DOJ. The letter @creighdeeds.bsky.social and I sent to Pres. Mahoney & the BOV:

So the US media has just decided not to cover the virulently racist Cuomo AI ad? Wow.

absolutely shameful that the university has embraced the administration’s demand that it discriminate against its students. this is the board of visitors telling UVA students that if they aren’t white and cisgendered then they don’t belong.

I have just encountered the word "highfalutin" in an academic publication for the first time and I don't know what to do with myself.

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

heartbroken to learn the pope sympathizes with the poor. how can i continue to believe in god

Treating the Declaration of Independence’s list of grievances like a to do list. "He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing … his invasions on the rights of the people." "For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate …".

Tech companies want us to outsource all cognitive labor to their models. Instead, academics must defend universities by barring toxic, addictive AI technologies from classrooms, argue @olivia.science and @irisvanrooij.bsky.social . bit.ly/48FNcJj

Really enjoyed doing a deep dive for @transformernews.ai on what an AI collapse might look like – how much bigger than the dotcom boom would it be? Would it leave infrastructure behind to build upon? Could we get a 2008-style chain reaction? www.transformernews.ai/p/what-happe...

this is absolutely searing and entirely correct. also yet another example of huge financial decisions about the future of universities being made by people who have zero connection to the real work of teaching and researching www.thenation.com/article/cult...

David Brooks on the "astonishing" Rahm Emanuel: "Completely reinvent high schools, which haven’t changed in a century...Bring college into high school with dual credit programs so they can gain confidence and do advanced work." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/o...

not enough public arguments out there about why this specific thing is a problem

This looks against every conceivable code of research integrity worthy of the name... what are they thinking?? New depths reached