Sighs in art historian…

someone should invent a thing that's like a university but it's goal is to facilitate learning

As I was just saying. They will scale up random “schools” based on market speculation and then close them down when demand wanes. Thats the plan.

REPEAT AFTER ME (but really, after Neil Kraus): Wage stagnation and underemployment are not problems that education can fix. We cannot "upskill" students into well-paying jobs that do. not. exist.

when i review an article charitably

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

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

One anthropomorphic evolutionary event I didn’t see coming was the rise of the public utility and service sector into metaphorical powerhouses on social media, and I’m here for it 💯%!

So rich to tell an indigenous artist that they're not taking up enough space... www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

by the end of this class students will gain insight into u.s. history while developing their skills as composers of rap interpretations of major historical events

This is not OK www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/how...

It would be good if these kinds of retrospectives, as well as cultural coverage in general, included a look at the institutions' records in the political economy. Lowry's tenure included multiple rounds of bitter union action, including a 134-day strike in 2000, over low wages and poor healthcare.

I’m giving a talk at e-flux on Thursday 9/25, 7:30pm, “The Fluxhouse Cooperatives and the Future of the City.” The program will also include a performance of Maciunas’s “Solo for Violin” by Laura Ortman. www.e-flux.com/events/67832...

If you have any lingering questions about how @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social could be both African and Asian, I talked to four artists whose backgrounds echo his; and whose work involves telling such stories. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/a...

it's related I think to how liberal funders and institutions are allergic to spending on progressive media (eg how CAP shuttered ThinkProgress). rather than invest in that kind of long-term project the money vanishes into the election consultant maw

Say it again for those in the back: HUMANITIES USUALLY SUBSIDIZE STEM at most R1s. Yes we have receipts.

If you work in higher ed, you need to get your folks together and end the use of course evals or at least bar their consideration in evaluation, promotion, and hiring. This needed to happen yesterday because they don't measure learning, they measure instructor gender, but now it's a snitch pool.

Second hand embarrassment causes me physical pain. Forgive my bluntness, but my pelvic floor sort of cramps when I see it. I watched 1/2 of Saved by the Bell with my eyes closed because Screech hurt my stomach. I’m basically bleeding out watching this ad.

We are in a weird space. Expertise has to yield to populism to preserve the institutions that confer expertise but the market is using fake populism to juice every bit of profitable expertise before it all goes boom. Shorter: the managerial class, yo.

No one is “replacing” teachers with AI. People are redistributing money to tech companies for AI and replacing permanent salaried workers with contingent, poorly paid ones whose labor is to patch together the system that is being broken by AI.

oh no the bad guys can’t imagine doing anything societally responsible and ethically competent with one’s privilege it’s almost as if the quiet part is loud like the point of privilege is to hoard it and lord it over others huh weird

crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their consultants

The average age of Apollo 11 Mission Control was 28 years old. The oldest was 36.

If a colleague had the reliability rate of an LLM, they would be fired. If ordinary* software did, it would be uninstalled. LLMs require the chat format, because chat makes us party to the conversation. We insert the meaning ourselves - and hold it to a different standard. It's the mirror effect.

Facts. But instead of creating a narrative pitting faculty v. staff in terms of pay/ equity, the better narrative is faculty & staff on the same side v. administrators who are paid vastly better than both. Oh, & the exhausted assistant in this example works for & was hired by… administrators.

I was fine with the protests against the king until they threw the tea into the ocean.

Got a first smile out of our newborn reading the Trump/Musk tweets out loud

63% of American adults had unfavorable views of Martin Luther King Jr in August 1966, per Gallup surveys 46% of Mississippi GOP voters said interracial marriage should be illegal in a 2011 PPP poll to push w/e is popular instead of trying to popularize justice is to admit you lack moral leadership

Do yourselves a favor and read this article. The best satirists of British culture quaintness couldn’t have come up with better: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Or let’s try a bigger idea: we give proper support public libraries doing their best to provide research access and databases to the *entire* reading public? Not just private institutions and the current/former academic class 🤷🏻‍♀️

We dismiss the fruits and labor of culture and care little for intellectual property, creativity and expertise.

After years of head-scratching, I think we all viscerally understand how (not necessarily why) the 1918 flu pandemic was memory holed.

Academics desperately searching for the country that's going to take advantage of the evisceration of US universities and coming up with nothing plausible really goes to show how Trump is symptomatic of a much wider malaise.

"We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English, and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology."

In honour of tonight’s celebrations #eurovision

The weaponization of therapy speak and accommodation is really going to tank the whole endeavor

You don’t have a “learning style” but between the evisceration of faculty governance and the personalization of learning done under the guise of access (when it’s just about admissions and marketing) everyone can claim that they have a sciencey sounding reason to cheat. 🤷🏾‍♀️

Nation of people who would rather choke themselves unconscious than catch the eye of someone they don’t know on public transport is worried they may become an island of strangers.

He's making it quite difficult for anyone with a conscience to vote Labour again while he remains leader of it.

Lovely to hear from the Prime Minister that the historical policies which allowed my Mum to remain in the UK after studying here, thus enabling my existence, was a “squalid experiment in open borders”.

Starmer echoing Powell on 'strangers', the references to Birmingham, to lack of 'integration' and speaking English. It's such a despicable mix of all the worst parts of racism over the last half century. Even the way they upload his script, a desperate media spectacle www.gov.uk/government/s...

Yet another Keir Starmer promise has been broken. What he is proposing is cruel and divisive and will only undermine our public services. You can't beat the far right by pandering to them or by throwing migrant workers and communities under the bus.

Even if Keir Starmer comes to his senses and changes course, nobody will buy it. The cynicism of that man is spectacular. Only way forward is to replace him.

Next season of The Bear right here.

You mean to tell me that Chicago gets to claim Michael Jordan, the first Black President AND the first American Pope? Good lord you ain't going to be able to tell them NOTHING.

Every time a student sends their art history professor an email saying, "I was in X museum and saw that work we discussed in class!" a puppy smiles, angels sing, and a double rainbow irradiates the horizon.

Apropos of nothing…