I hope everyone facing forced AI adoption knows about this wonderful set of resources from AAUP www.aaup.org/issues-highe...

good morning contingent faculty, aka 75% of faculty! the National Education Association has a new contingent caucus! you can join for the *suggested* fee of $5 DM / @ me to cover that via zelle etc everybody get in formation docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

We live in an era where testing, grades, writing, teaching conditions, and reading are all simultaneously in forms of crisis, and, to my mind, the common denominator is a complete lack of focus and intention on learning as the desired outcome of education.

I hope Mexico beats England today as revenge for Mexico week on the Great British Bake-off

every time I see this grifter I think about how good Matthew Rhys is gonna be in the biopic

Too many people have the idea that #surveillance is about the gathering and processing of information. But it's *never* just been about that. Often, the main purpose is Intimidation and internalization of control, reducing the ability and willingness to think, organize, act and fight back.

New theory about why mid-career academics stop going to conferences:

The Kennedy Center Tarp reminds me of the time they arrested the FIFA president for corruption in Zurich and hung giant bedsheets along the hotel exit so the press couldn’t get pics of him being perp walked.

What's so insidious about this is that it's cloaked in the language of reestablishing academic rigor and standards even as they do not feel beholden to these things. Is their report peer-reviewed? No. Is it rigorously factual? Also no. Are its methods clear and accessible? Haha. No.

I hate to say it, but the colleagues positioning themselves to be pro AI in teaching and curriculum, are probably also positioning themselves to be administrators, and probably aren’t thinking about or don’t care how it will affect teaching, learning, or the careers of those around them.

Unfortunate conference achievement unlocked: full conversation in French at the Apple Store in Lille to replace my European laptop adapter…

english isn't for cowards. if you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue. there's no Académie Française telling you what to do. if you try to type 'pallific' and freak out when you see a little red underline, maybe you're not ready to roll with the big dogs.

Who if anyone is tracking Civics Center monies across the country? Genuinely curious what’s out there.

[Stares in Arizonan]

Reading Wanda Coleman's American Sonnets and the final line of this one, "too soon to quit too late to cry," keeps bouncing around in my head like a refrain after the fact.

The use of facial recognition #surveillance at sporting and cultural events is ever-expanding, however, it is not getting much scholarly attention. I wrote about this specifically reflecting on acculturation and the impact on youth in this open access article : www.erdalreview.eu/pubblicazion...

It’s easier to blame private prisons and their corporations for cruelty and violence because facing just how much jails/policing/prisons serve as “public” profit centers might make people question who the government is for.

There is a rebuttal to AI crit that goes: “you are assuming there is some mysterious, unnameable essence that makes people human.” The argument is then that we must somehow show evidence; ideally, that evidence would be quantifiable

I am quite tired of how every goddamn thing with Trump and Republicans is shocking and horrible at first glance and then is always, upon closer inspection, even worse than you thought.

NEW: A group of activists have built an awesome new tool to help immigration attorneys and the general public know when an ICE flight is headed to their area. gillianbrockell.com/habeas-fligh...

New: Regretful cities are literally covering their Flock cameras with black trash bags because they cannot figure out how to immediately exit their surveillance contracts or get the cameras taken down: www.404media.co/cities-are-c...

Libraries are not just knowledge repositories, though it’d be enough if that’s all academic libraries did. We create the conditions for knowledge production across campus, and also create knowledge in our own right. A uni cannot function without a healthy, well funded, appropriately staffed library

This coming out on the same day as MIT announcing the closure of its libraries makes it hard to read it as anything other than yet another instance of the frankly exhausting story of sciences abandoning LIS/humanities/ed/social sciences. Posing as progressive 'resistance' makes it doubly gross.

related, this should maybe be corrected to FACULTY, bsky.app/profile/zine...

The National Science Foundation is terminating and suspending grants again, and at Grant Witness we need you to help to track them! 🧪 We can only identify research being suppressed by under-the-radar suspensions directly from researchers. Please report! grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF

Applications are due June 5!!!! This program provides funding up to $1000 for precariously employed early career scholars to attend our in-person annual meeting!

Only *barely* going to be in London this summer, but just bought at ticket to see Driftwood at the Kiln, so summer (finally!) feels real now. kilntheatre.com/whats-on/dri...

Coming back to this via Anthony Stagliano, who writes: “There is a great deal of unexamined, differential precariousness being produced by the health and well-being technologies that come to us with a whole discursive apparatus of cheerfulness, empowerment, and affirmation."

When I talk about the NYT being a provincial little rag, this is exactly what I mean. They cannot comprehend agriculture in higher education when it is ubiquitous in ag-heavy regions. Our local college is building a big ag center because it’s so popular

My public research university has a butchers called the “Meat Lab,” stocked by our ag programs.

none of the occupations are over

This looks like an amazing resource, created by people who definitely know what they are about

Harvard's faculty spending its time and limited power on this kind of flakey nonsense during a time when colleges are beset by reckless AI integration and attacks from the federal gov't should be a reason for journalists to STOP acting as if Harvard is some kind of shining exemplar of higher ed.

Which is to say, they fail even to rise to the level of Cool Runnings, remain stuck at the level of Awkawfina's "blaccent" or Lena Dunham's "cornrows."

Something I flagged in AI-assisted essays on Caribbean lit last year that also shows up in this story: probably bc of training data bias, it can't even start to produce a faux-Trinidadian (or Jamaican, or Bajan) idiom, and so drifts toward still implausible but Black-US-sounding phrasing instead.

Every meeting, admin failing the "don't open the meeting by telling faculty how much easier they have it than admin" challenge.

TIL!

NEW on the podcast: REI workers are calling for a national consumer boycott of the popular outdoor sports co-op during it’s annual anniversary sale from May 15-25. I sat down with Ashley, a worker in Greensboro, NC to talk about what’s been happening at the table, boycotts as a tactic, and more.

This seems likely to be pretty effective? Thinking specifically about 17-author papers and the thing that happens to your career/networks if you're the person who drafts the section that gets your 16 co-authors banned.

The current energy crisis is all about artificial scarcity manipulated for short-term geopolitical and economic gain. In an age of transition to continuous and renewable energy, it's infuriating and absurd that we are still expected to consider this as some kind of inevitable or realistic situation.

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

If the answer is more surveillance and more punishment and incarceration of already disadvantaged youth then we are asking the wrong questions and considering an insufficient range of options. www.thestranger.com/news/how-fea...

The difficult part of any technological infrastructure that has been incorporated into an institution is that generally the institution has hollowed out whatever services and roles that technological was brought in to modify or replace, so uncoupling is an expensive and messy prospect.

So sick of this anti-intellectual bullshit from Democrats and it’s WILDLY irresponsible in the middle of a full-on GOP war against colleges and universities But also so typical for Democrats to actually help the GOP with their stupid ass wars

I’ve been thinking about this more and more. Even *if* there were a perfect detection tool teachers could use, the very act of shifting our dynamic w our students to one always involving surveillance and distrust is absolutely toxic to the trust necessary for effective learning environments.

Does your institution has a "kindness initiative"? That's all the same project as this coercive-tech-forward version for service workers.

Who is the "they" who are coming for PK Subban? I will fight them.

Their goal is to trap women in motherhood. To raise the birthrate, yes, but more importantly, to leave women in the kind of precarious position where they have no choice but to settle for less-than-ideal husbands and/or less-than-ideal jobs.

A critical supplement to this 🌟 list are those folks who help us imagine other political economies: Christina Dunbar Hester on community radio, Nathan Schneider on co-ops, Joy Lisi Rankin on the public history of computing, @hellobrittparis.bsky.social on other Internets... (plus me, too?)