"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-...

I wasn’t sure they were going to publish this. So good for them.

Happy to see this, written with the excellent @mattseybold.bsky.social , out in the world. Solidarity to everyone fighting for education and civil society! www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

In the mid-1990s, at the time Jay Bolter and I were writing Remediation, articles like this began to appear in the media about the dangers of the Internet for children--not only discussion boards and forums and online predators, but also text-based games like MUDs and MOOs. 1/

Carnegie Mellon’s literature PhD is being liquidated in favor of “computation,” casualized labor, and AI. That has profound ramifications for, students, faculty, and program alums like myself. I wrote it about it (w/ Catherine Evans, a current PhD student). www.chronicle.com/article/a-co...

Look at this garbage... (from our Provost's office).

this essay tells one piece of my CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY origin story press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

these are my LLM guidelines for the course - grateful for everyone who’s shared their approaches on here and especially for the ideas shared on the against-a-i.com website by @annakornbluh.bsky.social @ehayot.bsky.social and Krista Muratore

“Instructure does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, you grant Instructure a fully paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right (including any moral rights) and license to ...

One of my favorite bailiwicks from Chris’s recent work, which he reiterated with tremendous force yesterday: Literary studies has an extensive record of producing knowledge that influences society, our research has always been generative, but is better now than it has ever been, despite austerity…

I wrote about the divide between high school and college English, and what we might do to bridge it, for @publicbooks.bsky.social—part of an excellent roundtable on higher ed under Trump organized by @dennismhogan.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/toward-the-h...

Very good summary of AI/education situation, from progressive educator Alfie Kohn, with lots of useful links: www.alfiekohn.org/article/ai/

Higher ed drives economic growth and innovation, and it’s under attack. Read the new op-ed from @paulakrebs.bsky.social‬ and @ehayot.bsky.social‬ and tell your legislators that research, teaching, and innovation are important to you and your community. www.post-gazette.com/opinion/gues...

This is a fabulous, useful piece of writing and thinking. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

Who benefits from attacks on higher ed? Certainly not the US economy. Certainly not the states where higher ed is the major employer. Certainly not the American people. excellent work @ehayot.bsky.social and @paulakrebs.bsky.social www.post-gazette.com/opinion/gues...

There's even great data on this, despite all the talking points & revealed preferences of everyone, including many university leaders, for participating in the collective societal push to convince parents & students that the liberal arts are bad choices for students' career & salary prospects.

Here’s my bottom line on the firehose of AI higher ed discourse: for the vast majority for us it’s over. “It” here is not “college” or “teaching”’per se; rather, “it” is the transactional underpinning of those endeavors. Let me explain: 🧵

The LLM was this bad at correcting my misinformed take on ancient writing systems. Now do a topic involving human rights or democracy. Why would I encourage the use of this? See the work of @annakornbluh.bsky.social and @ehayot.bsky.social at against-a-i.com (end of 🧵)

Playing around with some graphics.

thanks to everyone sharing and contributing! thousands of individual visitors this afternoon already suggests how much we need to work together, carry one another, take heart in solidarity. and the students want more too.

against-a-i.com Teachers! And everyone else struggling with course and assignment prep for the fall: a website with resources, readings, assignments, and background on Gen AI and its classroom use/implications. With the great @annakornbluh.bsky.social

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

Canvas just became one of the most powerful surveillance, IP theft, & data monetization tools in the world. OpenAI bought a user-base locked in to long-term contracts. But they can’t make us use their trashware. Boycott. Luddify. Open source. Don’t let them have your work or your students.

The author affiliations caught my eye... seven of the fourteen authors have a variant of information/library. #AI #skybrarians #academicsky

some of my best, most valuable, college classes were straight-up lectures sure, it depends on audience/context/material, but the wholesale valorization of "student-centered" classrooms (in the humanities at least) ceded the cultural capital of expertise in truly damaging ways

The emotional whirlwind of responding to spammers:

As CalState and Ohio St. say they're going to integrate AI into every aspect of the class experience to prepare students for the future, companies are telling applicants you can't use AI when you apply. Tell me how the lurch towards AI makes sense. fortune.com/2025/06/11/g...

FYC

This is so important. Please read. I have been doing blue book exams and in class writing in my 150 person intro to pol theory class for the last couple of years, and it has worked really well. However…

They plop their massive, polluting data centers into black neighborhoods They have to underpay, overwork, and exploit workers in Africa just to get it to function The “training data” is stolen work of creatives and academics That data is then used to steal opportunities from those same people

Urging everyone who can, and who cares about universities and the humanities, to donate to the MLA Paving the Way fund, which specifically supports lawsuits vs. the administration's policies.

much has been said about the NYT's framing of the growth of the government-university research complex as a story of higher ed "dependency" on government it's a silly and ahistorical way to characterize a carefully thought out national strategy, one imagined by 1/ www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/u...

Look, I love these sites & I get how politics works & why they're doing it, but every single one makes exactly the same error universities have been making for years: Research DOES NOT JUST MEAN STEM. Look around. If you think we also don't need social science & humanities research, look harder.

Pretty sure the real reason the Trump administration doesn't want to bring people back from El Salvador is that their return is subject to a 25 percent tariff.

Summer is here, which means that Season 1 of Humanities Seed Bank is a wrap! Our last post of the season details plans for season 2 (which may involve you!! read the post!) and a summary of this season's videos!

It's Monday: time for another seed from the Seed Bank! This time its @triciamatthew.bsky.social on "Interpretation." This marks the end of Season 1 of HSB. We'll announce season 2 sometime in the late summer. If you're interested in talking with us reach out via email (ehayot at psu dot edu).

It's Monday, which means another episode of Humanities Seed Bank!! This time it's Robert Tally from Texas State, talking about critique.

Time for another seed from the Humanities Seed Bank. This week it's Peter Galison, talking about the tension between the seen and the unseen.

Now Katelyn is talking about @ehayot.bsky.social’s Uneven U paragraph structure, and the participants are loving it!

Happy Monday, everyone! Time for another seed from the Humanities Seed Bank. This time it's Michael Jacobs, Acting Provost at Monroe Community College, talking about what we can learn about research when we think through that context. @jessifer.bsky.social some connection to your thread yesterday!

First I read the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Terrorism, and I became a Terrorist. Then I read the VSI to Catholicism, and I became a Catholic. Then it was the VSI to to Animal Behavior and, I couldn't help it, I started behaving like an animal. Then came the VSI on Ageing... I got older.

Good Monday morning, BlueSky! It's time for another seed from the Humanities Seed Bank. This is Josh Berson talking really interestingly and beautifully about trying to blur the epistemological gap between fiction and nonfiction.

And this is one of those “do I really sound like that?” moments. humanitiesseedbank.substack.com/p/paula-kreb... Thanks, @ehayot.bsky.social, for these cool little video snapshots for the humanities.

"maintaining our sense of loss — and our sense that this loss is not a force of nature but an injustice perpetrated by humans on humans — will deeply inform how we respond" to the reading crisis. More good stuff from @adamkotsko.bsky.social

Good morning BlueSky! It's Monday, which means it's time for another seed from the Humanities Seed Bank! This time it's MLA President Paula Krebs @paulakrebs.bsky.social @modernlanguage.bsky.social on why unreliable narrators are something everyone (and their cousin) should know about.

super grateful to @adamkotsko.bsky.social for writing this piece, which every teacher in the humanities should read and discuss.

It's Monday, which means it's time for another episode of Humanities Seed Bank! This time it's the fabulous @shannonmattern.bsky.social , talking about objects and all the ways our work not only makes them visible but valorizes them.

"We are a small part of a shrinking thing, tail to a dwindling dog, or that thing that, in Yeats, is fastened to the dying animal. The heart; the soul. The dying animal is the English department, perhaps the humanities as a whole." 🗃️ www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/ap...

Hi, do you know you know about the Humanities Seed Bank? Brief videos from scholars discussing a single good idea -- "method, practice, piece of research, way of thinking, collocation of meaningful facts" -- to save "against forgetfulness." Here's mine: