So the Rosenbaum FUTURE OF TRUTH thing is appalling, but let’s not pretend this is an aberration: the over the fence talk I hear is that full on AI is now the norm in trade nonfiction.

I Was a University AI Czar. I'm Not Equipped to Teach in the Age of AI. jgellers.substack.com/p/i-was-a-un...

Please read and share this story. Grateful to @nbcnews.com for running this series on how cuts to Medicaid will dramatically alter how families care for disabled sons, daughters, and spouses. Great work, @mikehixenbaugh.com, and thank you for reporting. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

The best rational for getting off Canvas (or other PE-funded LMS) is forming solidarity with students. For years, several of my colleagues & I have opened each course emphasizing the surveillance & security risks of Canvas. Last week many students realized we weren't just a contingent of paranoids

Column three is toast, so they will revert to column two.

In the lawsuit by the MLA, @acls1919.bsky.social, & @historians.org, the court has ruled that termination by the NEH of grants to support scholars, research institutions, and humanities organizations was “unlawful, unconstitutional, ultra vires, and without legal effect.” www.mla.org/Resources/Ad...

The whole “restoring trust in higher ed” discussion falters in precisely the same way as Dems’ “if we listen, do good governance, and take the high road, we’ll win them over.” No you won’t. You can’t. You’ve misdiagnosed the nature of their “distrust.” 1/

Always heartening when my dear colleagues in the Law and Business schools oppose a union because they got theirs and what even is a university? Shouldn't we spin off the high-performing divisions and let the devil take the hindmost in Social Work and Arts & Sciences? docs.google.com/document/d/1...

The always excellent @404media.co is on the ASU/Atomic/Canvas story. www.404media.co/asu-atomic-a...

Coming soon to a campus near you.

Faculty in CA in the 1990s successfully protested mandatory online components of their classes largely on the grounds of IP and labor intensification. We don’t have to accept this. We can start with abandoning the LMS.

Perfect case of what we termed academic content assetization in a recent paper, where HE institutions use their learning platforms to gather teaching materials from staff to then repurpose as future revenue-generating derivative products

I'm in love with Alan.

This is a very interesting essay, and reminds me of a recent piece by Chris Newfield (link in next post). Newfield argues that humanists must articulate "a new cultural order" that includes economics. Thompson's piece (which I admire) and its facile theory of "facts" and "feelings" exemplifies (1/2)

This rant is GLORIOUS

i cannot stress enough how thoroughly stupid it is to let great books become right wing coded

Absolutely true, conservatives realized universal higher education was turning their children into independent thinkers and they *hated* it. Students were even protesting Democrats for not stopping the war! They started by charging tuition for the UC’s under Reagan…

This is a crucial thread on what's going on with ADA/Canvas and higher ed by @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social . Read/share, please!

For those hereabouts scrambling to remediate course materials in order to meet the end of the month deadline for compliance with new federal ADA Title II standards, here is the endgame as I see it: 🧵

Let's do this one time in good faith: Wealthy private universities in blue states should be bastions of humanistic education (including basic science), fully protected from the anti-education laws being passed in red states that afflict private and public schools alike. But instead .... /1

ICYMI earlier, I've written for the @financialtimes.com today about the boring, empty and unsuccessful 'strategies' being imposed on all our universities. If we go on like this, sooner or later we'll have 'reorganised' them all out of existence. www.ft.com/content/5032...

This is a really important thread on the Canvas/Instructure terms of service, which were quoted in a piece @mattseybold.bsky.social and I wrote, and then were removed from the web three days after the piece was published.

So, @ehayo1on9.bsky.social & I have been receiving a wave of questions about a passage from Canvas's terms of use that we quoted in this essay from January. We did get a few questions about it then, but this surge coming months later makes me think somebody is doing some damage control. 1/

This piece is well worth the read. AI means only more and more annoying work for faculty: sonja-drimmer.squarespace.com/blog-1/2026/...

The humanities: weak, contemptible, ineffective, populated mainly by losers, graduates incapable of doing anything but menial service work. Also the humanities: a dangerous, incomprehensibly powerful force whose total destruction is necessary if society is to continue, children are to be born, etc.

If it's so great, why do they keep giving it to you when you haven't asked for it, or forcing you to use it when you don't want to use it? Why are they so invested in creating the conditions in which you (and others) feel you have no choice but to use it, or to "fall behind"? Behind what?

Nice to see colleagues in college writing recognizing that gen AI in the classroom is neither inevitable nor necessarily beneficial--as the research increasingly shows, quite the reverse! www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

"A department generating high credit-hour production across the university but with few declared majors is not an inefficient department. It is a department whose students are not being counted in the metric being used against it."

Critical thinking is under serious threat from large language models/AI. Uni administrators are too prone to accept tech hype! (plus it can be wrong, steals IP, has devasting environment/energy impacts). @jessicacalarco.com made a great one-pager I share with students (plus effective model of comms)

GU Students:

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

Excellent piece in @theguardian.com featuring @mattseybold.bsky.social, @dorazhang.bsky.social and others (including a shoutout to against-a-i.com) on AI in the humanities classroom.

Goddamitalltohell 😡 I HATE THESE ASSHOLES

I really enjoyed _Information: A Reader_ ( edited by @ehayot.bsky.social , Lea Pao, & Anatoly Detwyler ). Particularly for those of us in library / information work, it offers an insightful set of perspectives into how information has been approached in humanistic ways, not just info "science".

This is really important (via @annamillsoer.bsky.social ): the effect of AI/LLM cheating on online teaching will have real effects on the opportunity that many working-class people have to study college material. If these degrees become worthless b/c of rampant cheating we lose a real resource.

The Price Lab’s Critical Approaches to AI Working Group has released a white paper in which we advocate for AI-free instruction in reading, writing, & research. These are fundamental skills in the humanities (& in general), & with decisive action we can keep teaching them well in the age of AI!

Whewww www.publicbooks.org/the-misuses-...

Omg yes! My thought was that every tenured faculty member on this website should take this exact paragraph to their administration and ask whether this would count as education at their institution— and devise an organizing strategy based on the answer

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle. It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

English Studies colleagues, I’m gathering examples of position statements on AI, as I’m working with a colleague on a draft for our department. The one from Rutgers rocks, and I’m wondering if any of y’all could share yours? The process is trickier than I had imagined !🙏✊

This article, in the new issue of @aaup.org’s magazine *Academe*, should be required reading for all university employees everywhere, especially administrators. +

@tim-stillman.bsky.social gauntlet thrown down.

"In every society fallen to authoritarianism, the state goes after the press first+ closes in on universities next. All of us who live, work,+learn within the university should think of our institution as part of the larger constitutional structure of the nation." www.chronicle.com/article/univ...

But the truth is, thanks in large part to my travels for Vandal Live, I feel much better about the profession than I did at this time last year, or even last Summer. What I have seen is a professional class neither resigned to getting bowled over, nor with their heads in the sand. Rather...

Come for the devastatingly accurate analysis, stay to clip the bits about how Instructure is monetizing your intellectual property (and share them with your STEM and business school colleagues, who may care somewhat about that blatant, personal theft), and then ORGANIZE

Just got back to the department and this was the center of the conversation-in-progress in the Asian Studies office; strongly considering de-Canvasifying my spring course (as well as other things I won't post about). Highly recommended, thanks Matt and @ehayot.bsky.social

and most importantly and most proudly this year, to the teachers, leaders, makers, and haters leading an organized critique and refusal of AI, especially my cohort @ehayot.bsky.social and Krista Muratore, against-a-i.com

"fear of an educated proletariat+ resistance to secular, integrated public schooling have been the central motive for defunding public education... public education, the closest thing to a lasting success amid the broader failure of Reconstruction, is in danger." www.chronicle.com/article/the-...