“Nobody has ever studied the harmful effects of hammers on learning and concluded that teachers must all hit their students with hammers ‘responsibly.’”

Concerned that we are losing the necessary ratio. 15% of teachers/faculty should be irretrievably strange eccentrics. Every learning experience should have some element where in later life you can reflect with former classmates about how bizarre at least one (1) class per year was.

International student decisions are sort of like business decisions: big multi-year investments that you become less likely to make under uncertain conditions in politically erratic places.

Awful: Trump just blamed foreign students for taking the slots of American kids. But the cuts in the House GOP bill he's pushing could cost hundreds of thousands of working class kids their route to college. Those two things are connected. 1/ (new piece) newrepublic.com/article/1957...

Agreed - not a single word of this is hyperbole.

In environmental security research, there’s an open empirical question of whether we’ve ever seen a war over water. I’m reading updates from India & Pakistan tonight and wondering if that question will be settled by tomorrow. www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

This feels like the defining image from this year’s Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting. The National Science Foundatipn paid for a booth in the exhibit hall. But the booth sits empty, because NSF has been DOGE’d, and there is no one left to send.

We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now

Not content to let the Trump admin attack higher ed from a federal level without jumping on the pile. This is dystopian. The goal is to destroy colleges & universities.

What people in every part of higher education need to understand is that Republicans now want to do to universities what they’ve tried to do to labor unions: erase them from the institutional landscape. The question is how much you want to collaborate in your own destruction.

Complying our way to the graveyard

I am working out of a public library and there are a good number of people who seem to be on hard times using the facilities for various reasons like job searching, entertainment, charging peripherals, using the bathroom, etc., and I am struck by how important it is that libraries continue to exist

How to support your library: -Use it -Talk about it positively to others, including social media -Show up to city council meetings -Show up to library board meetings -Run for library board seats -Become a friend of the library -contact your rep when a bill affects libraries -give to fundraisers

Time to (maybe, possibly) start getting fired up for the #bm100 & @keithdunn.bsky.social A conch, a cigarette, and then the weirdo superbowl of ultra trail running kicks off for 2.5 days of the most sporadic action you can imagine. I can’t wait.

Boosting a superb idea i just read: cancel your Amazon Prime / Kindle subscriptions and join your local library’s Friends group instead. (And get a library card if you don’t already have one!)

Here, I explain how the February 14 "Dear Colleague" letter is a widely expansive distortion of the court’s ruling in SFFA. Institutional responses should remain focused on areas that the Supreme Court addressed and not expand to those clearly outside its purview. www.chronicle.com/article/hitt...

Even if our institutions aren’t reading this analysis it feels valuable for us to do so. Thx to @raceip.bsky.social for sharing with me:

Stripping federal funds from any institution that has “race-conscious” activities or programming is dystopian. It’s hard to overstate what it feels like to be in higher ed right now.

If you've ever used the Polity data, read this from Monty Marshall. tl;dr Polity is coding recent US events as an executive self-coup and an adverse regime change.

is it woke to want to end cancer?

No more HHMI grants for inclusive excellence in STEM, and in-progress work has been terminated. Another capitulation to the segregationists.

Fuck every single person who whined about 'fairness' in sport and thus paved the way for the fundamental unfairness of denying people the right to exist in the spaces that align with who they are. www.espn.com/college-spor...

in less than eight years the NCAA went from banning North Carolina from hosting championships due to its bathroom bill to... this.

My friend @lizzyshack.bsky.social is spot-on here: time for members of Congress to start acting like they actually meant all that campaign rhetoric about looming authoritarianism, or their ability to check Trump's power may be permanently lost.

Hard to imagine that NSF won’t be far behind.

Just in time for the AI policies to go into my syllabi - I've cleared my brain of all of its frustrations regarding generative AI. I think it's important to resist the stuff. For all of us. And for no greater reason than preserving our humanity. I think the stakes are that high.

I’ll admit I don’t totally get the joke of releasing a special 20th anniversary edition of an album that only came out a few years ago, but Good News For People Who Love Bad News never lets me down.

I have colleagues who are optimistic - or at least curious (positive) - about AI in higher ed, but this is my reaction to all of it. When I say this is the endpoint we’re headed to, they make me feel like a Luddite. But also, read some labor history: the Luddites were right.

Oh good, MAGA leaders will go after “woke” universities & cut their funds! Dr Bhattacharya “weighs withholding massive research grants from universities that are too ‘woke’” Gotta end that woke research on LGBTQ health, structural racism, & climate science! www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

I need every ally to really sit on this for a minute Here we have a law professor in the US claiming that one of the largest anti-trans crusaders is "a leading voice for trans rights" People like this are in every news outlet/university lying to you abt trans people, spreading "polite" hatred

US higher education is a crown jewel, a pillar of American power. As @dandrezner.bsky.social explains, the incoming Trump admin aims to ruin it because of an insane theory—by which I mean crazy, nuts, largely in their own heads—of societal dominance by radical leftists, weakening the US with it.

Very much this, from Dan Drezner. He focuses a lot on universities, but rightly so. U.S. educational, scientific and technological preeminence are closely linked — and all have a lot to do with the past openness of our society 1/ open.substack.com/pub/danieldr...

the Chronicle could save column inches (though perhaps lose clicks) by simply publishing principal skinner memes

I can’t believe I took time away from brainwashing students to read this drivel.

Why does the American public think higher ed is only elite institutions, he said, reading yet another national media organization's litany-of-woe from people who've spent their lives at elite institutions.

“Ultimately, Rufo would like to see the number of Americans who enroll in four-year colleges slashed by more than half.” www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

This seems, sadly, wise. MIT & Boston U are sending similar messages, I see.

Everything is about creating fear, sowing chaos, and ratcheting up the cruelty. And just to be clear, these students are US citizens (undocumented students aren’t eligible for federal loans)

“They’re starving undergraduate enrollment in our courses,” said Dr. Rainwater, the sociology professor. “The worry is they’ll then be able to take away whole programs and justify it by saying courses aren’t filling up.”

Most of the folks interviewed are in my department. But what the piece doesn’t reveal is that this reactionary regime of censorship is working hand-in-hand with an assault on shared governance, fully enabled by each respective campus administration. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/u...

Anyone who thinks this attack on higher ed is going to stop with the humanities or courses on race and gender has another thing coming - Florida is already targeting classes on “Labor and Globalization” and “Introduction to East Asia” for removal from the curriculum

This op-ed is filled the wildest assumptions and Things That Never Happened that I can't believe the Chronicle published it. www.chronicle.com/article/we-a...

Dems happy to jump on the anti higher ed bus too, while signaling that they also want to throw marginalized & vulnerable folks under it.

One of my colleagues was essentially blacklisted from NSF grants during Trump I because of her work on climate change. I can't imagine the ideological war on climate research will be toned down in Trump II.

Including someone from the Manhattan Institute in this forum ("Just follow the law! Continue to eliminate DEI!") is akin to asking an arsonist to contribute to a forum on fire prevention. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Vance says universities are the enemy and they need to be attacked. This is what that'll look like, from funding to accreditation to targeting endowments (and this piece doesn't even get into visas or Title IX requirements for handling sexual harassment/gender discrimination cases) (Gift link)

Today's higher ed must-read. It's no coincidence that, as newly-emboldened Right-wing groups swagger around gleefully in the wake of Trump's election, FIRE is moving to displace the AAUP and subvert its role as defender of academic freedom. Joan Scott shows us why we shouldn't fall for it:

I’d like to see a statement like this one, from Wesleyan’s president, jointly signed & endorsed by hundreds of college presidents & chancellors. “The University will not voluntarily assist in any efforts by the federal government to deport our students, faculty or staff”

Post-election, Ohio’s immediate top priority is targeting trans adults & dual-enrollment HS students on college campuses “The bill declares that ‘no institution of higher education shall knowingly permit’ transgender people to use bathrooms aligned with their gender identity.”

Awful framing. Their goal is to demolish. “With Donald J. Trump’s victory to a second presidential term and a Congress potentially under unified G.O.P. control, Republicans are now poised to escalate their efforts to root out what they see as progressive ideology in higher education.” gift link: