When people ask me about restoring trust in higher ed, there's a reason I bring up presidents calling the police on their students and how I find it curious those students' trust is never a concern

OH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! 💚

This is correct and also this is true beyond US

I am about 40 minutes in and I recommend this to every student, faculty member, and person who cares about the future of higher ed

the girl guides in the UK just kicked out all their trans members specifically bc they were threatened with a lawsuit from a rowling-funded group

I am very proud to say that I worked for months as an expert witness on this case. I am very pleased by the outcome.

Ah

A thousand NYU contingent faculty went on strike Monday and today they have a real contract with real security in one of the most expensive places on earth

Wow—there are SO MANY good books in poetics coming out these days. Feels like a real high-water-mark moment!! Here are just 2: @keegancf.bsky.social’s Poetry In General from @columbiaup.bsky.social and Amy De’Ath’s Behind Our Backs from @stanfordpress.bsky.social Exciting times!

I wanted to take a moment to let folks know that Ted Martin's extraordinary book _American Literature's War on Crime_ is out! The book surveys almost 100 novels to explore how the War on Crime was waged on the page & how fiction made the policies & ideologies of crime control legible. It's amazing!

sharing the cover designed by Courtney Baker 😍 www.dukeupress.edu/content-mach...

Registration for Weird Modernisms in Loughborough is now open! You can find the registration link on our conference website, including hotel, travel, and events info. Please don't forget to first become a member of BAMS or MSA.

"it's not really just gambling online that has been legalized. What has been legalized is extraction, and the new methods of extraction that are possible using the internet and mobile devices"

Actually existing AI is making people's lives measurably worse: www.thestar.com/news/canada/...

Oh wow, yeah I want to get this.

Rankings are austerity

My review of Steve Malmude's "Red Carpet," edited by Miles Champion, out now. Click on "View PDF" to get the article with correct formatting. @nysnetwork.bsky.social @carcanet.bsky.social doi.org/10.1080/0039...

Back on strike today, big @ucunorthumbria.bsky.social @ucu.org.uk rally at Monument at 1pm. University management want to take £100k out of my pension or cut my pay by £7500! Fuck off quite frankly, especially as theyve walked out of talks.

This sounds amazing for anyone who's looking. In Utrecht.

Edinburgh staff urge university to ditch OpenAI deal: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/edinbur...

It's totally true that there is explicit demand for this from students! But it's also interesting that the actual content - statistics and computer science - are not appealing to the same applicants, because the foundations of AI are obscured behind a frictionless user experience

does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

Saw the numbers and thought “that can’t be right” but no, 498 schools hit by US/Israeli bombs in Iran. 281 hospitals. sourced to the Red Crescent by Al Jazeera. Unspeakable

>10,000 STEM PhDs have left federal service over the past year (including 30% of the federal colleagues with whom I’ve worked closely). Those still left are holding federal science together with duct tape. What an extraordinary act of sabotage against the American people.

The downfall of *Theory and Society* is a networked event. A nicely orchestrated campaign. Thread of some of the links. 1/

Adding this to the “AI is just the Hegelian master/slave dialectic” folder (i.e., the point of using AI is to perform the status of the master, whose frictionless existence is subtended by the friction-full labor of subordinates). AI ‘democratizes’ this position of mastery.

A common thread in our times. There's a way in which arguing for "classical" education, or using an AI tool with a cartoon Einstein on it, or Jordan Peterson's stupid suits, are all efforts to capture "the appearance of intellectualism without the substance."

obsessed with this article

I truly think that the best comparison for what Grammarly did--attributing fake writing advice to real writers without their consent--is deepfake pornography.

'Graduates who received free school meals will earn almost £3,000 a year less than their more affluent peers with similar qualifications working at the same companies, says a new report that suggests class influences pay disparities more than demographics or degree outcomes.' 1/2

Britain’s version of ICE… is even called the same thing

In the world’s worst conflict zones, gifted young women study in hiding, swerving militias, earthquakes, power cuts, internet outages and the threat of starvation. Ironically, they want to study in the UK...so they can develop skills to help strengthen the fragile infrastructure back home'.

This is your reminder that if you are a class member and have NOT yet filed a claim in Anthropic v. Bartz, the AI copyright lawsuit, you have 9 days to do so.

balance out your bubble tea plastic ingestion with this one neat trick

Non-tenure-track contract faculty at NYU went on strike this morning after over a year of bargaining (capped by a 24-hour+ marathon session). Big crowd of @uaw.org members and supporters, incl lots of students. They’re picketing over pay, workload, AI, a voice in faculty governance, & more.

Where on earth is the Office for Students. These courses have been advertised, applicants have been engaging with the advertised material. The Consumer Protection Law as applied to #UKHE (🤢) declares that universities have to be accurate in their information from the first contact with applicants.

NEW: For the first time, ProPublica has been able to quantify how many U.S. citizen children have been directly affected by Trump’s immigration crackdown: more than 11,000 kids had a parent detained — and that’s an undercount. 1/ 🧵 www.propublica.org/article/trum...

We're hiring! 🌿 The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger invites applications for a 3-year postdoc in Environmental History. See thread for more details. #envhist #envhum

"How do I make more dollars? If my 'taste and judgment are more valuable than ever,' where do the extra dollars come from?"

NOUS has a track record of cutting programmes which lead to cutting jobs & departments. Their Cookie Cutter University model means the only differentiation is the (superficial) prestige institutions have from simply being old. The strength of academic research&education is gone. #UKHE #SaveHE

It’s the last week to see Emergency Exits at the Imperial War Museum, which explores decolonisation in Kenya, Cyprus and Malaya and which I was lucky enough to consult on as a part of a team of imperial historians. Go and see it if you can — it’s really great!

nooooooooo

This is the logical extension of "I'm going to do my own research" culture. And I'm sorry to say that expertise actually matters. And some people have been bamboozled into believing that saying this makes you an "elitist" which once again shows that people don't know what words actually mean.

Most of what a university can offer that students can’t get elsewhere is stuff they don’t know to “demand” ahead of time precisely *because* it isn’t available elsewhere. Judging the value of a university program by how much it appeals to people who’ve by definition not encountered it is backwards.

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

The real theme of the modern age is "Nobody Wants This". AI, ICE in airports, ICE in general, the Iran War, data centers sending actual cities wiht people into blackouts -- "nobody" wants this. And yet here we are.

"the survival of the AI industry depends upon you, the generation coming of age right now, agreeing with them that you have essentially no say in your own future." On refusing powerlessness and seeing through the rhetoric of the 'inevitability' of the AI take-over: medium.com/center-on-pr...

The tech goons took everyone's hopes for an egalitarian future and squandered them all on weapons and surveillance so they could get richer and humiliate themselves by pretending to be 'intellectuals' Subpar writing on every level in this timeline

live footage