'Speaking at the British Academy’s Shape conference in London on 4 March, Tickell said that students who want to study modern foreign languages in the Midlands will only be able to start courses at two institutions: Birmingham and the University of Warwick.' 1/3

Well, this happens when you close down your language departments.

Great to see this story featured!

A poem for Winter Solstice: "The Shortest Day" by Susan Cooper, author The Dark is Rising and numerous other luminous books. The image is from www.thelostland.com. The poem is © Susan Cooper.

The University of Nottingham has announced the suspension of all Modern Languages and Cultures (MLC) programmes from September 2026. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

We all know the difficulty the HE sector is in. But let’s work together to come up with solutions. The nuclear option damages our students & the reputation of our institutions. @ucflangs.bsky.social & @artsandhums.bsky.social are supporting colleagues www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Well this is awful news: tinyurl.com/yr65mjkx 'All modern language and music courses are being suspended for new students at the University of Nottingham.' Nottingham friends: please be assured that we will join you in protesting against this decision in the strongest possible terms. Solidarity.

T o celebrate the forthcoming print publication of our Encyclopaedia and Palgrave’s 25th anniversary this year, four chapters are free-to-view throughout October. blogs.surrey.ac.uk/medievalwome...

Wow. The University of Chicago, a world-class institution whose humanities faculty in the past has included Homi Bhabha & Lauren Berlant & Ralph Ellison & Hannah freaking Arendt, is getting rid of basically every graduate department involving the acknowledgment that other cultures & languages exist.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

(Minute autopromo #2) Si vous vous demandez comment occuper votre ado politisé.e ou vous-même pendant les vacances, que lire à la plage ou ailleurs, (re)découvrez ces histoires de révolutionnairEs, de Théroigne de Méricourt pendant la Révolution française aux collectifs féministes contemporains.

Petition to stop cuts to Modern Languages at Bangor University. chng.it/pY54kCGbmD

I read the ill-informed opinion piece to which this responds with dismay (especially since the author works in a humanities discipline also impacted by severe cuts across the sector). This is a thoughtful and necessary rebuttal:

Hard-hitting and reflective piece. It would be a public service to higher education in the UK and internationally if @timeshighered.bsky.social made it free to read, even if only for 24 hours. Kudos to the authors: Anonymous, Martin Mills (Aberdeen), Nick Megoran (Newcastle) & Les Back (Glasgow).

Read now: Cardiff’s closure of modern languages will tongue-tie its humanities www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/card... @emmacayley.bsky.social

The Arts and Humanities Alliance have written an open letter to Bridget Philippson, Secretary of State for Education, on the recently announced cuts across the sector. We are concerned that these measures disproportionately affect our disciplines and call for an urgent government review.

Cardiff University has announced it will axe its teaching of modern languages and merge four of its schools, cutting staff numbers by 50%. Please sign and share this petition in support of the wonderful School of Modern Languages at Cardiff! www.change.org/p/save-mlang...

Please help us to save Modern Languages at Cardiff University: chng.it/Hmtvvdtptg

This is real. I just turned it off. They track you everywhere, because they can.

😕 Here we go again. timeshighereducation.com/news/deeply-... 📢 Follow us for updates about the ongoing situation at UEA. #SaveUEA #UCU 🦋 Please share this post with followers, to let them we're now also on Bluesky. 💪 UEA UCU Branch Meeting this morning at 10am. Check your inboxes for full details.

Sad news of more cuts in languages, this time at Northumbria.

Thought-provoking rebuttal, particularly the final words. It's always worth reminding students that they are creative & intelligent, that our job is to help them accentuate that, & that the "hype cycle" around "AI" will rob them of that opportunity (as well as, you know, boiling the oceans)

I love Quiet Posters — can be pretty easy to miss friends or other infrequent posters in the following firehose, this does a great job of plucking them out for you. bsky.app/profile/did:...

I really enjoyed the first episode of 'Wolf Hall: the Mirror and the Light', but thanks to watching too much Cbeebies these days, I can't hear Mark Rylance's voice without thinking of Flop. "The dissolution of the monasteries... it's a Bing thing!"

You guys, my kid just discovered a *whole book* of poems in French that, when read in French, sound like mother goose rhymes in English (but said with a heavy French accent). They are grammatical in French! 😵‍💫 The one below is Humpty Dumpty. This is depraved and wonderful. I love/hate it.

📢New report on Modern Languages Closures & Restructurings A recent survey conducted by Wendy Ayres Bennett, policy advisor for UCFL, provides evidence of worrying signs across the HE sector & the pressing need for support & curriculum innovation university-council-for-languages.org/2024/07/08/r...

I’ve come to abandon the use case for LLMs to summarize text because the summaries usually miss vital parts and are disappointing when I look closer. Australian government now has proof this is the case. Another proof that LLMs have more limitations we need to understand.

I just did, as an experiment, a google scholar search on an important well-covered topic. It put an undergrad honors thesis as the #1 response. It's fine thesis (on a quick skim), but there are hundreds, thousands, of peer reviewed books and articles on this topic.

‘The twenty year decline in French and German appears to have turned a corner’ www.thetimes.com/article/b183...

60% of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80% of children studying in French are in Africa. There are as many French speakers in Kinshasa as in Paris. “French flourishes every day in Africa,” said Souleymane Bachir Diagne, professor of philosophy & French at Columbia U. Gift link

"University drama, theatre, arts, adult learning, evening classes, school visits, walking clubs, discussion groups, sports facilities, museums, displays, galleries—they could all be gone. Everything, in fact, that makes life worth living. That would be the unkindest cut of all."

UCU have declared an academic boycott of Goldsmiths in response to job losses: Please do not— * apply for jobs * speak at/organise academic or other conferences * give lectures * accept positions as visiting prof/ researcher * accept new contracts as an external examiner for taught courses #UKUnis

GMS and SFMS have put out this joint statement about the chilling state of redundancies in UK universities, which pose an existential threat to arts and humanities IMO: medievalgender.co.uk/gms-and-smfs...

Universities have long been one of the things that the UK does really, really well. In a short span of just a few years, they have been utterly run into the ground. Absolutely grim. www.ft.com/content/8d85...

For context, in 2021-22 there were 285 higher educations providers in the UK who returned data to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. We're pretty much at the point where a fifth of them are making redundancies.

I took a look at 'Onward's' webpage and their intentions couldn't be clearer: 'Ending taxpayer subsidies for failing university degrees and changing low-quality universities into institutes focused on STEM, technical and vocational education.' This restricts opportunities. 1/

Very good colleagues across the UK are facing redundancy for having done everything right-- REF success, grant income, programme building on top of the everyday work of teaching and admin and service. We have the wrong business model, the wrong vision of what matters and we're going over a cliff.

I wish the headline wasn't true, but alas.... www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cca6...

Every research report: Humanities majors have great career prospects! Every research university: Here's why sadly we must restructure the humanities,

The UK is to open its first flying taxi centre. Meanwhile, it's 4x more expensive to take a train in Britain than it is to fly to your destination. These are policy choices.

I didn't expect to spend so much time today thinking about historical chickens, yet here we are, and there is still joy to be found online.

The University of Kent, self-styled Britain's 'European University ' is phasing out language teaching. Mais tu blagues!

Horrendous news from the University of Kent.

So happy to be a part of this. A prize for YA authors from both sides of the Channel, which celebrates the translators as well as creators... www.thebookseller.com/news/joanne-...

To give folks a bit of context: malaria kills half a million children a year, or just over 1300 kids PER DAY. For the visual learners, that's about 19 school busses, crowded with kids, lost to the world every day. This vaccine is literally disrupting death - a true game changer.

Digitally raising the dead so they can lecture in your 8 AM class. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

MY YEAR IN DIETS   Veganuary  Fibreuary   Starch  Cakepril  MaycaroniCheese  June&tonic  Julicecream  Augustickytoffeepudding  Septembeer  Octoblerone  Doughvember  Decemburger

Smudging the text in my Christmas cards no matter how carefully I try to write - signature of the hasty leftie.

Please sign and share this petition against the end of modern language degrees at the University of Aberdeen. This is a horrifying precedent for a pre 1500 university, & entails job losses Academicsky