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.

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-...

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.