I recently realized that I have reached the age where I have clothes that are older than my students.

It would be nice if, at a moment when academia is under brutal assault from outside forces that are opposed to the very core of its mission, academics weren't so obsessed with self-flagellation.

👇🎯 Your regular reminder that <no one> knows the right amount viewpoint diversity on college campuses, & there are <exactly zero> societal institutions in America with more respect for viewpoint diversity than universities. It's not even close. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

This feels like step 1 of an elaborate plan that ends with university presidents collectively agreeing to select future professors from a Leonard Leo-approved list.

College grads have been “prolentarianized": Universities minted too many knowledge workers, and now they're working at Starbucks in unprecedented numbers. This is a popular narrative. But the share of recent grads in low-wage jobs is tiny (and down since the mid-90s) www.vox.com/politics/485...

One thing I’ve learned in my years in higher ed is that depts established for the express purpose of promoting rightwing thought will always go over budget on alcohol, and when all of the other depts find out about it the response is, “we’re allowed to spend university money on alcohol?”

Also, writing is how you make the thoughts! It’s not just stenography of pre-formed thought

really can't be said enough that this case was decided by the same court that decided plessy v. ferguson. if they could have found a plausible rationale to limit birthright citizenship they would have done it. but there is none! the text is as clear as constitutional language can be.

Academic freedom or lack thereof: Decline of institutional autonomy in the United States compared to its decline in other prominent (former) democracies that have autocratized, namely Hungary, India, and Türkiye academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

US at one end, Canada at the other

Keep hearing commentators/Hegseth saying a version of "this is not Iraq, we are not doing nation-building, it's a decapitation, the people will handle it." That's what Iraq 2003 was supposed to be! Nation-building, de-Baathification, disbanding of Iraqi army, it all came *after* things went wrong.

This allows the Trump administration to literally condition citizenship on what it defines as acceptable speech

UK: Prince Andrew arrested. South Korea: Former President Yoon sentenced for life. Brazil: Former President Bolsonaro serving a 27-year sentence. USA: President Trump demands $10 billion payout from taxpayers.

Writing is thinking. It's not some marginal boring task you can skip. It's the heart of it.

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out. As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class. Here's what happened:

Full on constitutional crisis level stuff here.

Even the most apolitical members of my family groupchat living in Minneapolis are basically reporting, "Work and school have been canceled due to government tyranny; we've signed up for training in how to be Constitutional observers of the masked men terrorizing our community."

America is now at the heavily armed secret police doing warrantless door-to-door house raids in search of undesirable ethnicities and/or political dissenters stage. The difference from well known historical cases is down to scale.

Pretty obvious cover-up here.

I remember when an avowed white supremacist killed Heather Heyer like it was yesterday because it’s also today.

Universities looking for a new head football coach ought to shake things up by focusing on candidates with nontraditional backgrounds in business, finance, or government. If that sounds dumb, then you understand how faculty feel about how people are talking about our presidential search.

After what we're seeing at CBS, if today is not the perfect day for everyone to find some independent journalism & nonprofit newsrooms to support... what day could be better?

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

*desperately trying to pad my CV in advance of annual review* Winner, 2025 Department of Political Science Peace Prize

This year, universities are giving $228 million to football coaches who failed at coaching football so that they won't coach football anymore.

Look, y'all know I hate AI as much as the next passionate hater of AI, but ChatGPT has nothing on the University of Oklahoma deciding that based on the first amendment students can literally say anything in their papers as existential threat to the university.

*Such* a pit in my stomach about the Georgia case. Such a wasted possibility. It's hard to avoid simultaneously crediting Willis for a strong, convincing, aggressive, and important set of indictments, and blaming her for the catastrophic misjudgment that made it impossible to have a trial in 2024.

TRUMP [after spending 5 minutes with Zohran]: surplus value, it’s a very wonderful thing, very wonderful, and they’re stealing it. Can you believe that? We’re going to be looking very strongly at the bourgeoisie, what they’re up to

Watergate every day

the thing about this is that a) small states do not have any interests that are inherent to their size (no less than james madison understood this) b) the senate is organized along party lines which makes the small/big distinction almost irrelevant and c) the filibuster has never been used this way

The ease of suppressing votes by getting polling places temporarily closed on election day is a good reason to go to universal vote-by-mail...

The trend is real, but this NYT analysis at the Congressional district level has big ecological bias Poor *areas* vote Republican, but it's often the richer *individuals* within those poorer areas that are most Republican And many poor *individuals* rich blue urban *areas* vote Dem

I will teach Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" later today. Earlier today, fittingly, I got a couple of vaccinations.

Today I showed my class a YouTube video of Judith Butler explaining gender, which was interrupted by an ad that forcefully called upon the viewer to "JOIN ICE." The algorithms have gone haywire.

the president has destroyed the east wing of the white house without so much as a word of input from anyone else to build a royal ballroom paid for with bribes

“likely the largest single-day political demonstration since 1970” www.gelliottmorris.com/p/second-no-...

Just having a moment reflecting on what a ridiculous state we're in, where the president is making "deals" with private universities by personally meddling in federally allocated education and research funding and this is being treated as just ordinary politics.

The campus speech wars reflect a lot of misinformation about how higher education works and about how little of it touches on modern partisan debates.

I hear the President has decreed that it is possibly a crime to refer to Americans as "fascists," but "fascism" is a word that has a relatively clear meaning that's worth understanding. Here's how an official publication of the US Army defined "fascism" in 1945.

I know antifa isn't a real organization because I don't get 40 texts a week from them asking for donations.

so many dead canaries and we just keep on mining

Colleagues have backed up the point with data and infographics. The answer is no: political violence in the US is if anything declining, not rising. The far right commits more than the far left, but both are rare, and fewer than 10% of Americans endorse violence for political goals.

This is also a case of systems setting people up to fail. Public university systems often standardize course numbers/names/descriptions, to simplify transfer credits. But the approved descriptions end up being incredibly generic, because otherwise campuses/faculty fight about what to include. 1/

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

Faculty in red states are being punished for failing to signal in their course descriptions that their classes will include content on "gender ideology." Remind me again which party was appalled by idea of "trigger warnings"? www.kbtx.com/2025/09/09/a...

So much flows from this core mistake to not prosecute Trump for insurrection in spring 2021. By the time they changed course it was too late. Media and public attention had moved on from Jan 6. And Trump had begun to reassemble Republican support.

A 76% point gap between how satisfied Republicans are with the country versus how satisfied Democrats are. The largest partisan gap ever. news.gallup.com/poll/694370/...

It’s weird to live in a country where there are people who think we focus too much on how bad slavery was, and there are people who think we should focus more on how bad paper straws are, and those two groups are actually the same group.