I enjoy whenever an entire household is beholden to the whims of one cat This animal just standing in the living room, screaming, while the human adults explain "Sorry, Gibby likes it when we smack his ass with a cardboard tube for 10mins at 6pm every day, hold on". That is good to me.

merry xmas to everyone who doesn’t really like any of this, but who nevertheless tries to be a good sport for the sake of others, and only sometimes succeeds

And I want to know what the fuck the faculty have been doing about it.

I think it’s important to insist on recalling, at all available opportunities, that this was specifically an attack on a trans instructor over an assignment about gender. Neither of those details are incidental; they are the center of the story

It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

I think she knows

I do not love the "we've released rabid vermin into classrooms, so teachers need to figure out how to cope with rodents and even incorporate them into lessons" angle of the randi post.

Call me old fashioned or just plain old but I do think students need to learn to read, write, edit, and think without gAI BEFORE they ever use the technology. It’s incredibly disheartening to see unions working with tech companies, too, that makes anything you say suspect to me.

some interesting replies to the first post suggesting that the child has been “indoctrinated” and so is incapable of exercising judgment on this, and then implying that something magical happens when a person turns 18 to make social construction no longer a factor in choice situations

Absolutely stunning that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft were able to buy off an entire teachers’ union for just $23 million.

my real Bari Weiss theory, which I’ll never be able to substantiate, is that her villain origin story isn’t “suffered the offense of being subjected to the politics of Arab anti-Zionist professors,” so much as “suffered the offense of being told her work is mediocre by Arab anti-Zionist professors”

Notably Fulnecky’s essay failed spectacularly at both—what to think (the essay was not about psychology or the research she was supposed to read and respond to) and how to think (she did not mobilize credible evidence in defense of a defeasible claim). THE POINT OF COLLEGE IS TO TEACH BOTH

1. This is terrible. 2. This is such a BS claim from a university: “We are committed to teaching students how to think, not what to think.” No! We do, in fact, commit to teaching you what to think. You sign up for a psych course, you have to learn psychology. You can ignore it later if you choose.

My report from AmFest 2025

i’m sure giving bigoted students a dunce’s veto will work out just fine

I agree with the importance of maintaining the ability to make distinctions but “incorrigible skirt-chaser” and “possible low-grade sexual harasser” strike me as insane ways to describe bill clinton, a man credibly accused of rape and multiple sexual assaults

It’s deeply upsetting that a student’s attempt to fire a trans instructor … worked. As a theorist once famously said, power is knowledge

bari weiss saw this and decided that she had to hide it from the american public

iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent. Archivists have uploaded the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss spiked.

it’s been abundantly clear exactly who bari weiss is since at least 2004 people don’t fall for her schtick, they invest in it

Seems worth noting at this point that Weiss's internal critics at the Times were correct and her many apologists among elite pundits were wrong

literally just what scholarship is. Where do we cash in on that “more power” we are owed

It's like, how much more dark could this be? And the answer is none. None more dark.

It is not "attribution and sourcing" to generate post-hoc citations that have not been read and did not inform the student's writing. Those should be regarded as fraudulent: artifacts testifying to human actions and thought that did not occur. www.theverge.com/news/760508/...

Got some figures from the @lachlanmcnamee.bsky.social Salma Mousa & @kylepeyton.bsky.social DEI analysis from 4.67 million employment records at US public universities (1993-2024) Compact article gets it backwards. Unis diversified *leadership* not faculty.

BROKEN WHITE PENCIL

hey man, you ok? you've barely hugged your wire mother

Towers, who is not a social scientist, does not have a PhD, and has never been involved in “doctoral education”, wants to remake a storied center of graduate social research into a Silicon Valley Ideology trade school staffed with adjuncts and devoid of research or researchers

calling for the ban all travel from Europe because of a single murderous Voyager who crossed the Atlantic from Portugal is poetry

Hey let's have a big discussion about whether, in a handful of searches in a narrow field in a specific period of time, a few white men might NOT have gotten jobs that in another context who knows maybe they might have

There are narrowly true things you can say about how a real commitment to equity might occasionally disadvantage the odd white man or two, but to decide to massively overhype those things in a moment when The Existence of Academia In Ten Years is an open question, well, kudos Compact magazine

A good way to prevent AI cheating is to replace lectures with a grade school classroom experience

Further down thread it says 170 fac have been given offers (buyouts, retirements). If not enough take them there will be “involuntary separations.” 170! Think of the collective yrs of training, specialization, teaching, the number of students taught, advised, mentored, the wealth of KNOWLEDGE.

the thing about this is, people actually do say wild stuff in job searches. I have never had an interview in which at least one person didnt: 1) ask an illegal question, 2) say something offensive or discriminatory, or 3) say or do something so wierd & off-putting it is impossible to categorise

New School “administrators have started to implement a plan to close, overhaul or merge about 30 academic programs or majors; pause nearly all admissions to doctoral programs; and offer buyouts or early retirement to what professors say is about 40 percent of the full-time faculty.”

“I think students are really committed to their professors, professors to their students,” said Danielle Twiss, a doctoral student studying Marxist political economy who spoke to the crowd. “We’re able to fight for each other and actually protect each other.” in the @nytimes.com ❤️🖤

Whoever said “A job begun is a job half done” was so completely full of shit. Like, really, they should be ashamed of themselves

the thing is I do think some of these “they told me I couldn’t be hired. Because I am white” stories might be true in the sense that this is a thing an established white professional would tell a young aspiring white professional, with no basis for believing it other than their own racial grievance

tell me more about this “dean in the department”

had a dream we put my cat on salary (??) it included the line “pancakes won’t be the only thing this salaried boy is making” (???)

a great thing that social media gave the world is the ability to watch total strangers form wounded attachments in real time

this is completely delusional

If you are a white man in media and STILL whining about all the Black/poc/women who "took your jobs" after the absolute bloodbath/backlash and almost violent re-whitening of media, punditry and academia in the past year, you should go to therapy, find god/gods or take up knitting Just my two cents

It’s ultimately sad because the collapse of his faith in meritocracy for himself could have led to meaningful connections and collaborations with those who’ve known it’s a lie for much longer. He could look for connections and a different future for us all. But prefered to sulk in his own illusions.

But it never reaches out to that wider history or social context. And so it can never take its own concerns seriously. There is no future proposal. Just odd, decontextualized and weirdly presented stories and data to affirm his right to be sad. And to fuel the resentment being anti-DEI measures

So what is presented as this massive loss for white men is actually a university using growth to try to balance out previous injustices. That sounds…reasonable? And that’s the other interesting thing: he cites data that shows even a decade ago, white men were disproportionately favored / represented

Wow, I underestimated just how tortured the data was:

couldn’t finish that compact essay. Some hate-reads aren’t worth the juice. Only so many hours in the day

this is not a brag because it is honestly humiliating that it took me this long to figure it out, but I think I finally wrote a research paper assignment that actually teaches undergraduates how to produce political theory research. Or at least theory research of a certain identifiable kind