I was pleased to be involved in this conversation about the Central and East European Diaspora Feminisms reading group and bibliography: www.feministduration.com/writingsandr...

"SpaceX, a stock that has been emblematic of the fervour for AI companies since its record $86bn initial public offering last month, continued to pull back, with its shares down 3.1% to $131.11." But IPO conditions stipulated that investors cannot leave until at least August.The fall's gonna come.

Decided to look at the classes taught at West Virginia University ’s Washington Center for Civics, Culture and Statesmanship (the one with one enrolled student) and it turns out it’s teaching classes on the wonders of fascism

This is crucial because in the current climate, academic selection committees are making decisions not just about who they want to hire for the particular role, but *who gets to stay in academia*, and therefore what kind of research continues to be carried out. This affects *the whole discipline*.

I’ve gotta say, when I hear the word “hacking”, I think about someone spending hours writing complicated code and not, um, “call[ing] the TfL help desk and pretend[ing] to be an employee struggling to access the network remotely.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Another excellent example of just how incurious and limited the UK press has been about this crisis. Not one mention of the cuts to humanities that Bristol’s own VC is trying to push through at the moment in this article about her position on the cuts 🤔🙄. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

‘A decade ago the firm was largely unknown here. It now holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government.’ @petergeoghegan.bsky.social and @lucasamin.bsky.social on Palantir and the NHS: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

it’s amazing how often the solution to endlessly multiplying pedagogical problems turns out to be restoring an actual pedagogical relationship between instructors and students

In response to the third restructure (ie more redundancies) Goldsmiths colleagues have been on full and indefinite strike since June. Support them here, and with a chance to win art: www.gucu-raffle.com

In perhaps our most devastating briefing we find early career staff in the humanities as a whole have declined by 20% since 2016/17. Between 23/24 and 24/25 early career staff across all SHAPE subject areas fell by 6%, (from 52,795 to 49,410 FPE). That is the pipeline for our disciplines

I mean, this is why you should send experts to interview artists. To most contemporary art historians, Annie Sprinkle is certainly not some obscure figure. She’s still very active on instagram and there is even a painting of her by Alice Neel, which was on show at the Barbican in 2023.

The @britishacademy.bsky.social resource also shows significant and v. concerning trends in recruitment of academic historians. The period 2018/19 to 2024/25 has seen a 25% fall (435 FPE) of staff with the contract type 'early career'. This compares to a 4% rise for senior staff #Skystorians 3/3

'The humanities saw the steepest declines in early career staff numbers, falling 20 per cent since 2016-17. In comparison, early career staff numbers in the social sciences grew 22 per cent between 2016-17 and 2023-24, before falling again in the most recent year.' See for yourself here. 3/3

“Smaller but strategically important languages, such as Russian and Eastern European Studies, have also seen substantial reductions, declining by 32% since 2012/13, including a 25% drop since 2022/23 and the start of the war in Ukraine.” www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/policy-and-r...

This is crucial because in the current climate, academic selection committees are making decisions not just about who they want to hire for the particular role, but *who gets to stay in academia*, and therefore what kind of research continues to be carried out. This affects *the whole discipline*.

So a key question now is whether the new @andyburnham.bsky.social led administration will take the higher education funding crisis seriously as a threat to his aspirations around regional growth and skills…

'Readers may wish to reflect that this amount is significantly higher than the £585,000 fine originally levied by OfS on Sussex.'

jesus christ

Landed at Heathrow an hour and a half ago and yet the bags still have not arrived. There are cancellations on the Elizabeth line because of a fire. This country is completely broken and I do sometimes question why I’m still here.

Farage adviser and Cambridge prof James Orr has housed students at his ‘right-wing mecca’ alongside race science advocates and hard-right political figures, in 'clear breach' of Cambridge University’s safeguarding rules bylinetimes.com/2026/07/09/p...

Detained Gaza doctor almost unrecognisable after injuries in Israeli jail, lawyer says

This is an actual screenshot from the syllabus for this class. Beyond parody

You've still got two weeks to enter the Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize, for £1,000 and publication in @burlingtoncontemp.bsky.social contemporary.burlington.org.uk/writing_priz...

Since Oct 7 2023, the Israeli military and settlers killed 240 Palestinian children and teenagers in the West Bank. Read the B'Tselem report. www.btselem.org/video/202606...

University of Nottingham, 2021: buy £40m set of HMRC buildings to try and create new campus. Spend £40m doing them up. Not enough students come. 2025/6: Err, we're selling this. Maybe get £15m??? Uni management to the naysayers: actually we've got #longtermstrategy to reduce our estate, so there!

And I have just been notified of this. What a way to make your research staff feel valued.

I guess this is good to see but: a) I wonder if they have actually spoken to any ECRs on research contracts who have taken parental leave (key issues unaddressed here) and b) the majority of early-career academics are on (inherently discriminatory) fixed-term teaching rather than research contracts…

*nodding solemnly with full comprehension* yes, I see. there’s a special kind of kid who can’t play sports or go to the bathroom

(2/) Some potential redundancies are apparently deserving of petitions and widespread horror on social media, and yet some certain redundancies are not at all - and yes, it's also, as colleagues have noted, clear that this applies to different institutions differently, but also apparently FTC staff

I think this quote really demonstrates for me something that is quite weird and hard about watching reactions to sector redundancies while precarious - because I am expected to do exactly this next year. And no one seems to find it a problem. (1/2)

Leaving aside that many teaching contracts are fixed-term and ppl aren’t around long enough for promotion, these are impossible metrics. What employers actually want is the ability to carry a heavy teaching load and to teach things outside your field without fuss. Hard to innovate in that context!

I'm getting so very tired of doing this every time these pundits do their whole 'I had a world class education, but maybe you shouldn't?' spiel: James Marriot studied English Literature at Oxford.

Millenials who speak English as a second language, I’m curious - did Muzzy make it to your country?

How children in West Bank are being killed by Israel ‘without accountability’

"UNESCO sees adjunctification as a systemic, global problem that undermines job security, academic freedom and career attractiveness." And yet UK uni leadership see it as 'an agile workforce dedicated to cutting edge teaching and research'. Funny.

I work there and I just want to note that at no point were members of academic staff meaningfully consulted about this. Last year I got an email from OpenAI to my work email address, inviting me to “collaborate using ChatGPT Edu”; I never consented to any of this.

Extraordinary detail in the new book on Trump's second term administration

Finally got my hands on a print copy of our edited collection: www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/1...

Well well well.

Finally got my hands on a print copy of our edited collection: www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/1...

'Reed is clear that university is not the right route for everyone...He believes too many young people currently go to university, and that more should consider apprenticeships, trades or going directly into work.' Reed graduated from Oxford/Harvard. Always YOU and YOURS and never THEM and THEIRS.

Letter in today's Times by climate scientist Sir Brian Hoskins: "The discourse around net-zero is increasingly decoupled from…science and our changing weather. "Net-zero is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics."

Buster Keaton didn't stand still while a two-ton housefront collapsed on top of him with a window cut out to barely clear his shoulders on each side so you could tell me that AI is "inevitable."

JOB POSTING 📜📚 The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University seeks a research (reference) librarian: yale.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/external_car...

The joys of British higher education:

I think if we ask where this stops, it stops when there are no humanities departments left in the UK, a calculated but senseless destruction of critical and creative thought by extremist business ideology

A statement from Exeter UCU branch @ucu.org.uk - please share far and wide.

"For the fellowship’s inaugural year, we ask applicants to explore French-language collections as part of their research, and are particularly but not exclusively interested in projects which focus on the artistic and visual aspects of our printed collections."

Looking forward to the free speech defenders coming out in support of Helen Cammock. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...