Under the proposed rules, peer review will be advisory only; proposals will be required to align with "Gold Standard Science" which is never explicitly defined. Peer review is the foundation of our entire federal funding system, dating back to the establishment of federal agencies after WWII. 6/n

🧵 Public science in the US has taken some heavy hits over the last year, but the White House OMB is proposing a series of changes that will result in a TKO for science as we know it unless we fight back. Here's what's happening, and why it matters. 1/n

At the start of my terrorism studies course, I ask students what most terrorists have in common. They always say: 1- Mental illness 2- Religion. They are, of course, wrong. The two most common traits of violent extremists are: 1- Gender 2- History of domestic violence and online mysogyny.

There is an appeal to make this conversation “sound” better With no actual desire to improve the praxis of masculinity

The way that i know that this is an inequitable conversation is because men get to say this makes me feel bad… and keep their lives Meanwhile i know of women that have lost their lives for doing the same

Great thread.

A fair amount of this conversation is not about how men can improve their abusive behaviors But rather how women can improve their response to abusive behaviors

🚨🚨”Texas Tech University faculty say restrictions on instruction about race, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation prompted changes or requests for changes in 277 courses.” Faculty teaching conditions are student learning conditions! www.texastribune.org/2026/05/29/t...

I don’t think too many people under 40 know that women couldn’t have their own credit card accounts in the 70s. Just one example of how much personal autonomy women didn’t have within my lifetime.

I'm also a heavy em-dash user, coincidentally. And why should I change when ai is the thing that sucks.

Hey, as a librarian I need to tell you: Our funding depends on usage. So go ahead and check out that book even if you don't think you'll finish it. No one will know. Check out that DVD even though you might not like it. Get ambitious in your quest for knowledge.

The MLA summer seminar has branded eyeglass cleaning cloths and they’re my favorite conference swag ever. Ever.

It’s the last Pasts Imperfect before a break! ☀️ The amazing @taramulder.bsky.social discusses her new book on Roman childbirth. Then, Qin era beer, ancient infants wrapped in Tyrian purple; attacks on faculty free speech; new ancient world journals from @yaleclassicslib.bsky.social; & much more.

I like what Sally Kornbluth has to say here and elsewhere. But I wish MIT leadership recognized that libraries, library collections and especially LIBRARIANS and library staff are INTEGRAL to the research infrastructure they’re mourning & remain one of the few research resources under their control.

Wow. But also in line with what is happening to university libraries. Ours has transformed more and more into various kinds of student spaces or offices. Reference works still mostly available on shelves. Books are increasingly stored off campus.

MIT (endowment: $27B) shuttering three of its four main libraries is one of those news items that just knocks you off balance, auguring, as it does, profound and permanent changes to the entire institutional apparatus of higher education in this country.

“I write with dismay, grief and sorrow for the permanent closure of MIT Libraries Barker, Dewey and Rotch, and termination of library staff in those libraries. For MIT to be closing three of its four major libraries..." fnl.mit.edu/may-june-202...

I just had a first: I went to see a new physician to get ahead of some family medical history potential issues. He saw on my chart that I’m faculty at Duke. He called me Dr. Ginsberg upon meeting me. I’ve never had this happen before. I kinda laughed awkwardly and he said ‘that’s your title!’

I really wish industry had a different word for this than higher ed. Sabbatical isn’t a break from the work that constitutes the majority of my job expectations (research). It’s when I get to devote most of my work hours to that work because I’ve been allowed to pause teaching & service.

"the principle that a general intellectual education should not be the preserve of a narrow elite" has been totally abandoned across the West, by the combined effects of neoliberal administration, antidemocratic populism, and the promise that automation and "access" by subscription obviate knowledge

ja fragt euch mal

When people’s very existence in a field has been framed as DEI by those in power, this bias becomes embedded in the ostensibly objective technologies people increasingly rely on to make sense of large amounts of data

I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.

Another demonstration that the LLMs regurgitate embedded bias; sexism, racism. Since they've been trained on unmoderated data, it reflects biases within society - at least within readily downloadable publications.

👀 (Certain sections are going to be extracted and repeated over and over but there are a lot of bits in here to make you say hmmmm)

Are they in my group chat? Because this is a good summary!

Films more likely to star an actor called Chris or a talking animal than a woman over 60, study finds

I will have soo much more to say about this but putting an apology for the Catholic Church permitting slavery in the context of how AI is changing work is a bold yet theologically boss move

I’ve started inviting my older kids to hang out as I’m editing. I try to narrate the decisions I’m making. How to recast a sentence, why I reject spell check suggestions, things I leave in place to honor the author’s voice. I badly want them to think of writing and editing as a human art…

We are actively looking for news & views (short pieces) that offer feminist perspectives about the current political moment: the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, Epstein and institutional complicity, AI, fake news and deepfakes, etc. More info on how to submit: www.feministstudies.org/home.html

Because this country likes to forget what it’s capable of, I take it as a duty to remind us. We sit at the brink of the largest decimation of Black political power since the fall of Reconstruction — a Second Redemption. And the end of Black political power means the end of democracy itself.

North Carolina in 2026 is doing crime innovation & the reviews are fantastic www.newsobserver.com/news/state/n...

Is there something like a canonical reference that people use to explain why university faculty should be both teachers *and* researchers?

This is bad.

ftr, iowa is shuttering half a dozen programs because of — *checks notes* — low enrollment. now.uiowa.edu/news/2026/02...

Colleen Doran had a thread on Twitter that I think about a lot, about how some people think of older art as being apolitical simply because they lack the context to recognize the references. This adds another dimension to that I hadn't thought about much. Thanks for the education!

Imagine being a Russian troll assigned to Bluesky: “Comrade, today you will destabilize Western democracy by arguing with poets, policy nerds, and a raccoon avatar with tenure.”

I’ve said it before and will say it a few more times. When Trump 2.0 came for accreditation I knew we had crossed into a different era of white reclamation. Precise, focused, stealth. Anyway, you probably don’t want these reforms.

The US Department of Education is currently overhauling federal accreditation rules for colleges & universities. The April 6, 2026, Proposed Changes to Initial Draft Regulations unacceptably seek to narrow & control what can be taught, learned, & researched on college & university campuses. 🧵 1

(For context, I am the lead instructional technologist at a large public R1. I take a lot of pride in the fact that me and my entire team are oriented towards technology **in service to evidence-based, high-quality pedagogy.** If a tool or an app doesn't support that, I don't support it.)

Super excited to have so many people interested in Roman royal portraiture from my last thread. While I have you, let’s keep talking about Nero’s portraits and modern people who want them to be Polaroids. /1

NYT: "no one has ever thought of teaching ranching at university" Every ag school: um, would you like to meet our cows NYT: "No, not like that. More romantic. More dilletante. Ugh, we're not /farmers/."

My Latin teacher told me I had potential.

The bar is really in hell.

There has been this steady stream of legacy media bs about higher ed in general and the humanities in particular that, while part of a long culture war against universities, really accelerated after 2020-2021. The New York Times became a genteel version of Dinesh D'Souza & David Horowitz.

As colleges and universities have made gestures toward anti-racism, the (white) upper middle class embraced the right's long standing sense of victimization in the face of demographic change - and the university is a central site where we project our fantasies & fears about demographic change.

None of the critiques are new, nor is the nostalgia for a 'pre-woke' college and university (as with the NYT's profile of Deep Springs). But what feels different over the past few years is the willingness of the center-left to fully embrace the right-wing fantasy of higher education.

Romanist here. Make it stop, please. Pretty please? With some gilded imperialism and a side of civil war monument on top?