Every decade, university administrators excite themselves over the prospects of firing all the faculty and 95% of the staff. Early 2020s: LLMs Early 2010s: MOOCs Early 2000s: Wikis

We’re on our way to Dickens Day 🎉

Awake and at the train station stupidly early? Ah, it must be Dickens Day. I'm off to London to hear a range of speakers talk all about "Dickens and Art". I'm especially looking forward to the coffee! #DickensDay

The basic structure of so much commentary, some in the guise of academic study, reduces to: (1) generative AI products are detrimental to the goals of education (2) therefore, the goals of education must change. Without the tacit axiom that AI has authority behind it, that just doesn’t follow.

Just to say that teachers do an incredibly difficult job, with all the right intentions, and can be the defining influence on a young person's life. They are the exact opposite of poisoners because good teaching provides the antidote to so many dangers

Honestly? If Badenoch is condemning something, that's pretty much the highest endorsement for doing it.

A meme for the modern university...

*cough* Higher Education *cough*

Academia can be demoralising at times. But today I read the first draft of my book (and liked it a lot more than I thought I would), examined a very good phd viva (which passed) and am now reading with a pint while I wait for the train back. So yeah, academia-wise, it's a good day.

Victorianists - a little bit of silly joy in all the gloom: take a moment today to vote for this gorgeous Lego set idea of the Great Exhibition so we can all get it for Christmas! beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

Oof, this one hurts. And also means I have to update my Paradise Lost slide where I compare the devils at the Stygian Council to Gollum, Loki, Hulk and Iago the parrot from Aladdin (I long since abandoned the comparison of Adam and Eve to Peter Perfect and Penelope Pitstop)

One of the things that really grinds at the “elite” is that RAE/REF has shown for 30 years that research excellence really IS spread far beyond their narrow vision. They absolutely HATE it.

The last REF found that 98% of UK research was either "internationally recognised", "internationally excellent", or "world-leading". If you think low-quality research is the noteworthy challenge in UK higher ed right now, you are wilfully looking in the wrong direction

We want robust, enormous research that is SUCH good research, you already know how important and right and insightful it is before you even start it. We want research so predeterminedly world-changing that there is hardly any point actually doing the research at all.

Editing hack that's always helped me: 1. Go through your draft and number each paragraph on the document 2. Write the numbers and a short descriptive title of each paragraph on separate pieces of paper. 3. Move the papers round and test out better narrative flows for your argument 4. Now edit!

I’m reasonably confident that Starkey doesn’t even know what he means when he says “technical education”, except that he thinks it’s something good enough for oiks.

✨Call for reviewers ✨ There are lots of new Victorianist books this autumn, and we're looking for reviewers at the @bavs-uk.bsky.social newsletter. It’s the perfect opportunity for Victorian scholars to read the latest releases and publish a review. Full details here 👇 bavs.ac.uk/newsletters/

What day is it sir? Why it's DICKENS DAY sir! Join us in London on 11 October for a day of readings and papers on the theme of Dickens and Art. More details and booking form here: ies.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

Major university merger announced. The start of a wave?

Crisis at England universities created by successive govts. Freeze on student fees Real cuts in govt grants Harder to enrol foreign students Home student numbers falling £267bn student debt Real wage cuts 40% of universities in trouble. Local economies decline with university decline

"leaving what is taught in our universities solely up to market forces undermines resilient subject provision and economic strategy, with lasting consequences for students and for universities’ ability to serve a public good.” 2/2

A really fine summary of this important aspect of the 19th-c newspaper press. Thanks, too, to the always terrific Victorian Commons for the link to this splendid clip about Dickens's experience as a Parliamentary reporter: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AROf... #19thc #C19th @rs4vp.org

The ‘Showtime’ exhibition now on at the dickensmuseum.com/blogs/all-ev... has playbills, annotated copies of the scripts of Dickens’s reading texts and interviews with adaptors and performers of Dickens and his works and more.

Two exciting ego-boosts in the post this morning: the special issue of the Dickensian I contributed to, and my author copy of "Dickens and Decadence". Happy to be in illustrious company in both cases!

I’ve just written a brand new walking tour, from Dickens’s former home on Doughty St (now The Charles Dickens Museum) to 1 Devonshire Terrace - where he wrote “A Christmas Carol”. I’ll be leading it for the first time next month, on 24 September. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dickens-wa...

Rare sketches made of Dickens's plays in rehearsal are now on display at the Dickens Museum. I've been lucky enough to see these up close and really enjoyed studying these - a must see! www.msn.com/en-us/entert...

Teaching with Dickens’s working notes or about his compositional process? Consider submitting materials to the Dickens Notes Project!

Guess what you’re going to need for that, lads. Those language departments managers have been closing with gusto.

It is not news that those who hold university purse strings often turn out to be extremely susceptible to salesmanship, particularly when it's framed in terms of missing out on what everyone else is doing. Will they learn from this? If universities survive, will governance change? I'm not hopeful.

When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.

almost 200 signatures since the letter went live yesterday. thanks so much everyone. anyone can sign - you don't need to be an academic

Absolutely correct. It was always about killing the subjects, not the money. Because Humanities programs pay for themselves, unlike STEM etc. www.chronicle.com/article/they...

Waterstones opens 10 new stores a year as younger adults embrace reading

'Fewer graduates regret going to university than is widely assumed and the public have a more favourable view of universities than people imagine, according to new research.' 1/3

Nice to see a bit of positive press for English degrees for a change! This from the Telegraph on English at Buckingham: www.yahoo.com/news/article...

And people want to study reading too So, dear government, stop the demise of my discipline #EnglishCreates

1 in 3 doctors were born overseas. 1 in 5 university academics were born overseas. 1 in 7 UK business founders were born overseas. 1 in 2 builders were born overseas. 1 in 5 nurses were born overseas. 1 in 4 transport workers were born overseas. The media, their framing, IS the problem

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

I don't have a good answer for what the alternative looks like, but asking 18 years to bet their future on highly specified training for jobs based on which they think will be in high demand 5-10 years from now turned out to be a very bad way to structure higher education

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott

Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.

Road isochrone map comparison for 1830 versus 1680. In 1830 it took 'just' 25 hours to reach South Devon by road from London; a 75% reduction in comparison with the 100 hours (over 4 days) of the late 17th Century. #IsochroneMap #Map #UK #GeographyTeacher

And now time for the daily academic's curse against the genius who decided that when you download journal articles as PDFs, the PDF should have entirely new page numbers which are inconsistent with those in the print journal, making it effectively useless for citations.

Not one, but two early editions of Dombey and Son arrived in the post. Both published in Dickens's lifetime, they tell a story of his branding and marketing which contributed to his success. 1/

Fantastic programme of events at the Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London, this summer 🎉💕👏👏

I think I may actually have bought a fox, and the seller just painted it black like in a Pepe le Peu cartoon.

wonder if decades of mocking media studies as a Mickey Mouse subject has anything to do with this at all

So far this research leave I've written four chapters of the book: 1 is awesome, 2 requires work, 3 is an abomination that makes me question my self-worth as an academic, and 4 is good. I'm liking that average.

I'm way down a rabbit hole today, chasing leads that *might* confirm if Dickens read ETA Hoffman. I've been at it for two hours and I'm thiiiiiis close...

Yet another terrible error from the Office for Students (I have never met anyone in the sector who has even an atom of respect for OfS). Kicking away some more of the supports from some of those universities most in trouble isn't 'policy'. Just dumb. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/some-un...