this destruction is so damaging

Other major differences between British Steel and a University: 1. government, not ‘the market’, sets the price of education, 2. gov determines who can buy the product (through visas and other access costs). 3. gov regulates how the product should be delivered (OFS). Stalin would be proud.

Yesterday Kier Starmer announced Labour will nationalise British Steel, and save 2700 jobs. Today, the Uni of Nottingham put 2700 staff at risk of redundancy. This is just one university. Across the UK 15,000 higher education jobs need saving. Where is the rescue package for our universities?

Palantir “shamelessly used mock-MoMA branding for the logo + as a leitmotif for the entire [AIPcon] event… The conference employed, as a projected stage backdrop for Karp, Abstract Expressionish painting simulations… Flashing above their heads was the tagline THERE IS ONLY THE ARTIST AND THE WORK.”

We proposed this before the Canvas outage, but we’d like to thank the Canvas hackers for driving home the need for this language: "Provided instructors are meeting accessibility and pedagogical needs, faculty shall NOT be required to use ed-technologu." Full proposal here: https://loom.ly/rBZQFeA

Most medium-sized English cities are going to be left devastated by the HE crisis if government doesn’t do something soon.

The money they'll save by sacking the brilliant staff (~£80M) is completely unrelated to the money that senior management wasted buying - and then selling - a new campus (~£80M) 😔

Thousands of University of Nottingham staff told they are at risk of redundancy

Petition to save the Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire: c.org/9JLppW5tMS

This matters. Please co-sign. Managers like to pretend that petitions don't move them, but in reality cannot but answer questions about the numbers, and suddenly things that were deemed inevitable appear to be more-evitably-than-previously-declared.

Support staff at Cambridge University start three more days of strike action tomorrow

"Most of the enslaved people identified in the research so far were enslaved by Harvard presidents, treasurers, deans, and academics and made to work in Boston, Cambridge, the American South, and abroad..." Whew. Also, the redress ideas are...lacking.

Mayor Mamdani restores library funding after public outcry gothamist.com/news/mayor-m...

My friend who used to say the final stage of corporate greed was demanding to be loved is never, ever proved wrong.

Please sign to try and save our department

Hey Bluesky folks. If you’re in education or just follow for my thirst traps, would you please sign this if you can, and share far and wide? c.org/dCKk9vjqxY It’s much appreciated. My university is cancelling all UG humanities degrees. We need support and love right now x

The report rightly calls for join up on policy with the Home Office around international students

2700 academic staff at @uniofnottingham.bsky.social received formal notice today that their job is at risk. Approximately 1-in-5 (22%) will lose their job. In an interview in today’s @timeshighered.bsky.social the university’s VC responded “it’s an exciting time for higher education”.

Tapping the sign.

Evergreen, but also of the moment: Sometimes ethical stewardship of data means not having it. Including deleting it. Even at personal cost.

V much this: a letter of support is lovely and sometimes it shames a university enough for it to reverse (at least temporarily) a terrible decision. But fundamentally the entire industry has had its foundations destroyed & unless we're workng to fix that across the country, this will keep happening.

Basically the whole country is a cold spot

Historian of abolition here, history tells us how we got here, to put it succinctly “John Brown was hanged for treason and Robert E. Lee was not.”

oh is Starmer banging on about steel again

In solidarity with the resignation of the entire 2026 Venice Biennale voting jury, fifty-four individual artists and twenty-two teams affiliated with national pavilions have now withdrawn from consideration for the Visitors’ Lion awards. www.artforum.com/news/venice-...

In every academic book there is a secret second book hiding in the footnotes. Sometimes it is the first draft that had migrated there to escape the revisions. Sometimes it is the author's tortured secret rebuttal of their own claims, and sometimes it is the incipient form of the their next book.

Tfw the VC announces that 44% of the Faculty of Arts will likely be made redundant (subject, of course, to consultation with the unions). @uonucu.bsky.social

And also how/when to speak truth to power. As Sir Peter Scott writes of Sasha Roseneil, the current vice-chancellor, and the University of Sussex council, 'Many, perhaps most, universities would not have displayed the same determination and courage,' in contesting OfS's investigation and fine. 3/3

🗃️ One thing the “AI will help you do research crowd” doesn’t understand about historical research is that we don’t (or shouldn’t!) rip documents out of their context in relation to other documents. 1/

Notes on the great 2026 Canvas-ocalypse: bryanalexander.org/education-an...

Oh neat, this will help historians do their work faster? Almost no one is getting a job doing this work anymore and those that have them face enormous political pressure over that work. And all of that is actually inseparable from the belief that this can "transform" historical research.

"This will transform historical research!" Cool but it's already being transformed out of existence by the same forces pushing these transformative technologies. Forgive us if we're skeptical of a moment that's telling us "This will help you do your work--which we despise--faster and better."

This is an interesting piece and connects to a convo i was having with friends yesterday, about how one of my challenges recently is persuading students that I want *their* thoughts and analysis about things, and that it coming *from them* is the entire point. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

The magnitude of the crime measured …. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

There was a paper years ago showing that it would be cheaper to give every lab in Canada a basic amount than to review all the grants and reject a large percentage of them. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19247851/

"You are told that this is good for your workload. It isn't." Every time!!!

The signs that your UK HE has entered the death spiral (may have started years ago) and is most probably getting advice from one of few HE consultants, such as Nous. 1. Losing your joint degrees if you had them, terrible for modern languages

Always a good time to read McClanahan and McCune’s “Ed Tech” keyword, but now seems even better www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Screaming crying carrying on

Bots are breaking the web. This sucks.

If poor people do this because they need water to live, they get fined into even more desperate poverty

Wow. Officials “discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.”

This is basically harassment of scholars willing to question the Trump administration’s targeting of Chinese colleagues. Innes already had the FBI investigate his lab and was given the all clear. Now USDA is shutting down the Lab, which focuses on making fungus-resistant plants.

This is awful news.

When you don't proofread, how do you avoid people seeing it?

Once you start seeing the eagerness with which some people want to cut others out of civil society, you can’t stop seeing it.

Applications are now invited for the Society's 2026 Funded Book Workshops - for historians currently writing a 2nd or 3rd monograph bit.ly/4uwep8C. Grants enable authors to hold a day workshop with upto 6 specialist readers to discuss a MS in detail before submission to a publisher #Skystorians

“You have the numbers. But you don’t have the courage.”