@warren.senate.gov @markey.senate.gov

It's a beautiful day! Let's go and see what's out there. #cats #springtime

Has anyone written a review of the restructuring going on across UK HE? Trying to understand what is common across institutions: large, team-taught courses, centralised workload models, limited to no research time, promotion directly tied to grant income. How many consultancy firms are pushing this?

As we note in 'Shaping for Mediocrity': "Framing resistance in terms of negative emotions ... undermines the validity of any critique and denies the legitimacy of any alternative vision for the university. Everyone must move on – to the stages of acceptance and integration." #HigherEd

Video Assistant Referees have been a total failure. If you dislike VAR as much as me (and every football fan I've come across), please have your say in this FSA survey! Someone might listen one day, you never know. #VAR thefsa.org.uk/news/var-sur...

Staff at Sheffield Hallam University joined an ‘All staff’ call & were told the university must save £26.6m by August after disastrous London property venture Blameworthy Vice Chancellor Chris Husbands has since moved into consultancy/advisory roles in HE www.sheffieldtribune.co.uk/sheffield-ha...

The consultancy Nous takes hundreds of thousands of pounds from universities, leaves the exact same path of destruction everywhere, and keeps trying to avoid transparent contracts. We’re urgently need control over consultancy spent in #UKHE, @bphillipsonmp.bsky.social

A stark reminder of the bureaucratic logic of work & how we're all just so much productive efficiency ... until we're not. Nice to know that he was good on his time-keeping though. Presumably until he was dead. From an LNWR employment record, 1920s.

www.timeshighereducation.com/uk-universit... Times Higher has not always been a friend of universities given the league tables, rankings, etc. But it might be worth completing this survey to help publicise the widespread redundancies and terrible standards of management and leadership in UK HE.

www.newscientist.com/article/2516... GenAI is a study buddy. A cutting-edge employability tool.

Very interesting blog from Cliff Bacon of University of Salford. Summarises and builds on the ethnographic work he did for his PhD. bscpolicingnetwork.wordpress.com/2026/02/18/u...

New blog post: How I'm teaching about Generative AI. catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

"When we ask what is at stake if academic freedom is not protected, the answer is not only vital knowledge and democracy itself. The untruthful language marking universities as we know them, might be a precursor to the demise of academia itself." Distressing but important piece by Susanne Taüber.

Now published! Universities Degraded, by @beccaeharrison.bsky.social & me, reveals the scale of job losses in UK universities, exposes employer practices & shares testimonies of those made redundant & their colleagues. Warning: some of the content is distressing. zenodo.org/records/1563...

"One of the defining qualities of contemporary academic research concerns its built-in obsolescence." (Marinetto, 2018) In contrast, Marinetto suggests to prioritise: - Being read over being published - Thinking over productivity - Broad over narrow reading onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

"The untruthful language marking universities as we know them, might be a precursor to the demise of academia itself." (Susanne Täuber, 2026) An important, powerful essay about attacks on academic freedom and the erasure of critical scholarship. #HigherEd journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Using X is not harmless. Just by logging in, you pad Elon’s metrics. He gets paid every time you scroll past an ad. And you normalize him just by staying. Because if what he’s done isn’t a dealbreaker for you, why should it be for anyone else?

Northumbria University attacking its staff's pensions. Please consider signing this petition: www.megaphone.org.uk/petitions/no...

www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uk-univ... Times Higher hasn't been such a good friend of HE, with all the rankings garbage. But this survey is surely worth completing

'The Goffman Nobody Knows.' Really enjoyed this book review from @jerolmack.bsky.social. The book sounds fabulous. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Airline bookings to the U.S. in advance of the World Cup are soft, calling into question whether the high-profile tournament will deliver the boon U.S. tourism officials are expecting.

"[V]iolating academic freedom becomes an essential requisite for entrenching and sustaining the specific illiberal mindset that the erosion agents pursue." Interesting new study about the erosion of #AcademicFreedom in Hungary and Poland. #HigherEd journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

An excellent video from @ucu.org.uk highlighting the continued destruction of higher education in this country. We need urgent change to how the entire sector is funded, led and governed. Please, @bphillipsonmp.bsky.social, can this Labour government do something?

Week zero of the semester and life is hectic. Looking forward to getting back in the classroom but the amount of things swirling around... Let's just say this fog feels appropriate. Hope everyone is well and feeling some sunshine soon! ☀️

The phrases used to avoid saying 'redundancy' and to sanitise the brutality of laying staff off are really something. "Adapting for continued success" here. What others have you heard?

'We likely require fewer academics with research in their remit, but those that do need greater time allocated, and must be subject to a strategic research management regime'. I remain very sceptical/negative about the medium- and long-turn impacts of separating research and teaching. 1/2

*hisses like a cat* BAD www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

France announced today it’s phasing out Teams, Zoom, etc. to be replaced with a French/European solution called Visio. The data is hosted on Outscale. Transcripts and subtitles are also handled by French providers. The target is set on 2027 for government agencies.

A boycott of the World Cup absolutely needs doing. But I very much doubt anyone else will suggest it. Few in sport or politics have the gumption or courage. www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

Please consider supporting striking staff at University of Sheffield. Please sign: www.megaphone.org.uk/petitions/no...

Kent, Essex and apparently Sussex all decline to be gouged by Elsevier Read & Publish deals. Others may well follow. 1/2

Trump claims world ‘richer, safer’ than year ago at launch of his ‘board of peace’. US president repeats claims to have stopped eight wars as he hosts signing ceremony at World Economic Forum. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

'To speak of the “demise” of the UK university is not to suggest its disappearance, but its transformation into something increasingly unrecognisable.' Wise words, these. 1/3

Brooklyn Park police chief Mark Bruley: "We're hearing people being stopped with no cause & being demanded to show paperwork to determine if they're here legally. We started hearing from our police officers the same complaints. Every one of these individuals is a person of color... it has to stop"

Genuine question: Does 'theft of railway signalling cables' actually happen in countries outside the UK, or is it just something we do really well here? vimeo.com/1155503192?f...

'this reflects on the media organisations too. Surely you shouldn’t splash about a report being published if (a) you’ve not seen the report and (b) don’t have a guarantee that the report will actually be published. Otherwise it might be that the report doesn’t exist'. 1/2

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

'Despite all their difficulties, universities remain an enormous and irreplaceable national asset. As well as educating millions of people, they generate about £24bn in export earnings, which is about 1% of GDP – more than aircraft manufacturing and legal services combined'. 1/2

'Moral evaluation' in the 'besieged fortress'. I really enjoyed Marius Wamsiedel's ethnography of emergency departments in Romania. See my review in 'Symbolic Interaction'. (If you hit a paywall, please get in touch!) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A "Labour" government awarded honours to a person who pushed through devastating redundancies of @ucu.org.uk members at his university, including redundancies that were found to be illegal at tribunal. This is a slap in the face for the labour movement. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/academi...

'Record numbers of Swedish retirees are enrolling in a university run “by pensioners for pensioners” amid increased loneliness and a growing appetite for learning and in-person interactions.' 1/2

www.chronicle.com/article/were... Does academic tenure still exist in the States? I was under the impression it was quite widespread, but I guess I'm wrong?

'An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that the Russell Group university “does not have appropriate arrangements in place” for managing workplace stress and was unable to demonstrate that it is managing the risks associated with excessive workloads.' 1/2

"What is emerging about Nigel Farage is not a single stupid comment or heated moment. Former classmates are describing a pattern of behaviour. Not just a bully, but a racist bully of the ugliest kind, directing hatred at black and Jewish pupils as a kind of sport." bylinetimes.com/2025/12/10/n...

"I am up front, embarrassingly earnest probably, about the fact that I believe what we’re doing is very serious, and why I think that the use of LLMs is incompatible with that pursuit." you too can give an O Captain speech and then have a great class! against-a-i.com/first-day-sp...

Who wants to live in a world where we let the computers do all the reading? We write for a human readers not chips and algorithms. Football fans wouldn't put up with matches replaced with simulations, so why does the "republic of letters" for want of a better world have to put up with it?

What do The Matrix and educational AI have in common? Unfortunately way too much, as they promote very narrow ideas of what education should be. Instead, Alberto Romele and I highlight better sci-fi inspirations in this new paper in Educational Theory: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...