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Wild that there was an open lane called "what if we just explain things clearly to people?" and he's the first one to ever fill it

This semester's syllabus diatribe: And don’t even think about using AI to read, either! If you’re not going to read the sentences written by George Eliot, to struggle with them and to parse them with your own brain, then what even is the point of being in this class?

Who knew that Des Esseintes had a penthouse in Ann Arbor?

Standing on my desk right now.

And yet we can't afford to hire English professors, even though we have waitlisted classes.

Ready to start a movement that argues universities should spend money on their core functions, rather than flashy nonsense. Such as teaching and research for example.

But we can't hire more tenure-line faculty; we need to hire contingent faculty and pay them poorly.

every trans person i see post about the OU suspension knows that the suspended target is trans & a grad student, & has an innate awareness that this is about purging trans employees. every cis person i see thinks the target is a rando professor & that this is about giving conservatives good grades

Me: I can catch up on grading over Thanksgiving break Also me: I can catch up on writing over Thanksgiving break Also me: I can cook an ambitious thanksgiving meal Also me: (Forgets elementary school also takes off for Thanksgiving) Wednesday before Thanksgiving:

No neede for expensyve consultinge firmes. Heere ys a planne for excellent higher education: 1) Hire manye facultye 2) Small class syzes 3) Emphasyze engagemente & delighte 4) Sustayne & cultivate a varietye of fieldes and disciplines, even currentlye unfashionable ones -- thys ys ed, not retail

this is what will happen if mamdani makes bus rides free

OK, that model is our model press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

i teared up when i read these beautiful words from the CEOs of KKR investments, the current co-owners of Instructure/Canvas & therefore architects of the outage now making it so none of my students can access any learning materials

The bad scenario I see people talking about (MT Sweeney on here e.g.) is a real face to face liberal arts education for the children of the elite and intellectuals, religious/patriotic charter schools for the middle class, and basically kid jail/work programs for the poor kids

Picture how big the Hoover Dam is. An absolute unit. The Hoover Dam has a power capacity of 2 gigawatts (GW). The solar farm that the Admin just cancelled could have produces 6.2 GW of power. That's more than 3 Hoover Dams.

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

Found in a 1904 edition of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam on Hathi Trust. I like to think of Ethel and Maud that year, underneath a bough with a book of verses, a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and "thou."

Shut up and take my money

“The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” Samuel Johnson, born on this day in 1709

The pitchbot is 🔥 these days.

Shame on you, Polis.

I still want swords to be turned to plowshares, even when the guy who loved swords gets killed by one

A lot to say about this, but one thing is that the Professor in question was a lecturer, and thus did not have tenure. The destruction of academic freedom is inextricably linked to the loss of worker protection in the university.

everyone should read the distinguished Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt's great piece on Trump's senseless dismantling of American science; but it would be nice to see leading specialists in the hard sciences make comparable public defenses of the humanities www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/o...

So many adults have to fail a child before he ends up 10 years old telling CNN about the mass shooting he lived through this morning

love to live in 2025

An excellent bit of close reading on the way the Open AI CEO is wasteful even in his own kitchen:

The best tomato toast is, hands down, pan con tomate, with olive oil and garlic. I will not be taking questions at this time.

Not only is Chicago one of the most elite universities in the U.S., it's also known for its "Great Books" curriculum, which presumably still relies heavily on Classics and works written in other languages. I thought that approach was one that conservatives still liked!

I think we’re on the cusp of mass attempts to automate teaching, and I also think it is going to be a massive wasteful failure in ways that will make the “learning loss” of the pandemic look like a speed bump next to a mountain.

Just in case you were hoping (as I naively was) that your own airport was still functional and safe...

"Its only plagiarism if its a Black woman doing the writing, otherwise its just sparkling not-so-serious oopsies" Bill Ackman, 2024.

For the Monday morning crowd: a 🧵on how to appeal your NEH grant termination. Please share with NEH grantees. I also summarized in a shareable google doc, available here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

the learning objective is that you get smarter and think hard about how you want to be in the world based on the new knowledge you’ve gained

As promised here’s Pink Pony Club but it’s about encryption

M. Gessen hits the nail on the head, yet again www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/o...

"The work is what happens within you."

Kidnapping. Capturing a person against their will without due process is called kidnapping. Transporting them to another country without due process is called human trafficking. A squalid extrajudicial prison for people found guilty of no crime is called a concentration camp.

relatedly:

In 100 years we are going to get a definite explanation for how the dawn of The Information Age resulted in the dumbest people imaginable running the country

You may be fearing your 401k is no longer enough for you to retire. But with all the cuts to NIH and Medicare you also won't live as long. So the policies are integrated.

I'm going to post some of my fav humanities scholarship, in appreciation for the work that smart people do. The @ccp-org.bsky.social is one of my fav projects. It focuses on Black organizing in 19th century U.S. The websites and #DigBlk scholars are worth looking into. coloredconventions.org

The long tail of obscuring how much of our technological “innovation” was public research gifted to the private sector as a way of pretending the profit motive drives progress as opposed to socialist forms.

I’m old enough to remember when it was an Important Question why more faculty didn’t vote Republican

Besides Michael Roth and Christopher Eisgruber, no university presidents seem to have publicly stood up against the administration's attack on higher ed. Is that right?

Every day now, maybe multiple times, I think of Peter Coviello's words in the startling "Memos of Blood and Fire": "You will in all cases know what it is to feel something cherished wrenched & jolted into something less, & then less, & then less."