Tuition is flat, enrollment and graduation rates are stable or up, outcomes are generally good, most students feel comfortable expressing their views on campus. Political control is intense and science is under threat. The centrist account of higher ed doesn’t have the story right.

Two new facts stand out: 1. 85% of hallucinated citations in preprints are also in the subsequent journal version (thanks, peer review!) 2. Fake cites more likely to use the names of (male) scholars who are already highly cited, creating a fake-citation Matthew effect. arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

Tear gas and pepper spraying children is unacceptable. Period.    We cannot accept this level of barbaric cruelty as normal. The agents responsible for harming kids must be held accountable for these heinous actions.

Are you worried about hantavirus? Well research on this virus and other emerging infections is disappearing in real time, right now. My Yale colleague just lost $5 million, which the National Science Foundation (NSF) has refused to release to his group. It is so twisted and sick.

Universities Should Make Our Own Software, Please. I Know It Is Expensive. But Our Course Content Matters To Our Mission And Should Not Be Given To These Dingbats.

Is it bad that I found out from Bluesky and not my University that Canvas is down during the last week of classes? Looking forward to all the emails from students about this.

SURPRISE!

Greene: "AI is welcomed as a silver bullet precisely because there is no silver bullet for high-quality, accessible education, just the usual boring solutions: small classes, cheap or free tuition, well-resourced students."

horrible. this country’s turn away from science based medicine in the name of “wellness” is killing children and will kill a lot more. www.propublica.org/article/more...

University administrator challenge: actually find ways to support your researchers in these times rather than saying the same only tired meaningless words

After a great American Physiology Summit I have some time to explore Minneapolis before my flight. I enjoyed the sculpture garden and music during lunch. Last song got a lot of cheers telling ICE to ‘get the f right out of town, no MN nice’.

Happening soon @apsphysiology.bsky.social Summit: Amanda’s award talk about impaired proprioceptors in Angelman Syndrome. CNS Awad session starts at 1:45 on the Innovation Stage

Can't emphasize enough how alarming this is. Even if it doesn't come to fruition, think of the chilling effect on the exercise of democratic citizenship (voting, protesting, etc) when you are told that you can be stripped of your citizenship for political crimes.

If you are headed to the @apsphysiology.bsky.social Summit: Lab Postdoc Amanda Guevara won a CNS Section Research Recognition Award: S473: Impaired muscle proprioceptor function in an Angelman Syndrome mouse model Talk Fri 1:59-2:06 on the PhysioHub Innovation Stage & poster Sat evening.

Today, our #SCIMaP team released an impact analysis of the White House proposed FY 2027 NIH and NSF budgets. Bottom-line: if enacted, cuts to science and medical research would lead to $35B in economic losses and 150,000 lost jobs in communities all across the US. scienceimpacts.org 🧵

he (IW) and another woman (GL) with the same condition have been studied extensively and helped us learn a lot about somatosensory systems, c-tactile afferents, and pain. somewhere out there is a list of all the studies they have been in. here's on example www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ian Waterman was 19 when he caught a virus that robbed him of his proprioception. Over years he willed himself to learn how to deliberately move his body by focusing all his visual attention on it. This 1998 BBC documentary tells Ian's story: www.dailymotion.com/video/x12647t #neuroskyence

A key point: the admin has made things worse & less efficient. "American scientists already spend some 40 percent of their time on grant-related administrative tasks. Now they are being deluged by ever more paperwork, said Dr. Michael Lauer, who led external grantmaking at [NIH] until last year."

The first epidemic of the 1918 flu in the United States occurred at the military’s Camp Funston, Kansas (later Fort Riley). Infected soldiers headed to WWI battlefields carried the flu to Europe. Millions died It’s not *vaccination* that weakens force readiness.

Hey, it's not like the flu killed nearly 50,000 American soliders during World War 1 or anything www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article...

Absolutely gutting story of how measles kills years after ‘recovery’. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/o...

Today in Teaching in Higher Ed

This book is great BTW. And it's as close to exposing a "Moon-landing conspiracy" level lie as anything I've ever read. Because the truth is that the government has millions of loyal, hardworking, and not just competent but ELITE people working for the betterment of all of society.

Those of us doing research related to women’s health have been hit particularly hard by the govt’s sabotage of the NIH. I spoke to WaPo for this piece, as painful as it was to discuss the reality my lab is facing. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...

Celebrating the end of an era-we just upgraded to a Sutter P-1000 puller from the P-80 one a colleague handed me down when I started. I think that one may have been in use since the mid-90s and may hold a record!

NSF GRFP data, 2026. MIT (~4.5 undergrads): 88 awards. VERSUS The entire University of Texas system (~200K undergrads): ~63. Harvard (~7k undergrads): 51 awards. VERSUS The entire University of California system (~200K undergrads): ~300 awards.

Massive and important positive news... #NSF #GRFP awards are out. 2,599 awards! + 1,440 Honorable Mentions. A significant boost from last year. Congratulations to the winners (and HM-s)! & many thanks to the reviewers & program officers who made this possible. www.research.gov/grfp/Awardee...

I learned something new today. My daughter's name is Asha and husband has played her some of Asha Bhosle's songs. Never knew she was being referenced in that song (or that he was saying Asha or 'on the' instead of 'only' quite frankly)

This is why these forms of sexual harassment and abuse at scale work to reinforce men’s dominance. If the woman’s “best” option is to quit, then this pattern of behavior can and IS used to keep women out of certain industries and positions of power and spheres of influence.

The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed publication of a CDC report showing the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, @lenasun.bsky.social reports wapo.st/4ccudpF

I have a father and mother in law in Iran. I have a sister in law. A niece. She's 14. She likes silly pink headbands and purses and dresses, just like kids her age all over the world. There are 93 million people like her in Iran. People who do all the normal mundane life things as the rest of us.

Let's annotate. 1. Begins with a CLEAR statement laying out WHO the culprit is and what he is doing. 2. Specifically says what he thinks needs to happen next. 3. Calls out his own institution. THIS IS THE BASEMENT in terms of a response & his colleagues are underground. bsky.app/profile/fros...

I see my AI rant made it into the Times Higher Education--to be clear Im not worried about my students lazing in bed, Im worried about them losing out on learning because they're being lied to by their universities, by ed tech, and by too many profs www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/mass-c...

@lofgren.house.gov agrees with us: She is saying the president does not have the legal authority to make these changes to NSF. We — scientists and societies like @aaas.org — should say that until the lawlessness is covered that way.

Teaching students to ask a question, find and consider evidence, and craft and clearly articulate an argument is at the core of all teaching. It is a slow, messy, non-linear process, but a skill that can be taught. AI short circuits that learning. As Karamanis writes, failure is the curriculum.

One of the lessons from Vietnam is that when they start bombarding you with numbers like these -- ordinance used, targets struck, so many killed and wounded -- there's more we're not being told.

I think all parents need parental leave but many men get advantages from it. I was on a ‘work-life balance’ panel w a man who shared how much great writing he got done & how it can be positive. I barely concealed my rage when saying if you just pushed out a baby you need time to recover. 🤯

"men continued to publish the same number of papers after becoming fathers, women experienced a significant drop in research output (mothers had 31% fewer publications than did fathers 8 years after the birth of their first child)"

For #NSF and #NIH watchers, Grant Witness now has interactive data on numbers of grants and total funding obligations, broken down by institute and directorate, new awards and non-competitive renewals. The stranglehold on new awards is still a disaster. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

Biggest #NoKings yet in San Jose today. So big I didn’t realize @schiff.senate.gov was there. We also saw San Jose Batman and Chewbacca

$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025 Who were most affected? www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... Early career and women researchers

BREAKING: @delauro.house.gov announces at a House Oversight hearing with NIH director Jay Bhattacharya that OMB approved the agency's apportionment last night. That means the agency should have access to its appropriated funds — 42 days after its spending bill passed.

I've been getting quite a few questions from press, etc. and so wrote up something a little bit longer here: cooperativeoverlapping.substack.com/p/a-fuller-s...

We have lost so many potential scientists. That loss compounds geometrically over time. We have lost leading scientists who would have come to the US from their home country, & we are losing leading scientists born here who will not go into science because this admin has made it a public target.

we are losing so much talent, progress, and hope for no good reason www.vox.com/future-perfe...

I wish this quote wasn’t still so relevant

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

I remember when trying to forgive student loans was massive overreach of Presidential power.

When you hear the NIH Director's attempt to discredit recent PhD graduate @michaeldgreen.phd (whose career is in limbo due to NIH grant terminations), remember that Bhattacharya spent years complaining that the former NIH Director called his views fringe in a private email.