Hoping this helps our colleagues across the industry

Someone at a Russell Group university was moved to almost-poetry by their Faculty Meeting… Can anyone do better?

Doing nothing is not an option, and something must be done. Here is something! So it stands to reason That this thing must be done.

The Russell Group VCs is just sharing scripts for "Town Halls" now as well, aren't they? Word for word copied here...

What an amazing essay from the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin. I'll share a few sections in the reply but seriously, read the whole thing. It's all insightful and beautifully written. lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Race was the issue that exposed the bankruptcy of Watson's genetic determinism. In the 20th century, he made his reputation by staunchly championing the power of DNA. In the 21st, he torpedoed that reputation the same way. That is the great tragedy of James Watson. 19/n #JDWxNC

Okay, here are some first reflections on Watson. Watson's life is a tragedy, really of Shakespearean proportions. He did not, as most bios will tell you, do one great thing when he was young and then collect laurels for it for the next 60 years. His career arc was unlike any in science.

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...

I've been waiting to comment publicly on this until the university made its announcement, but the Department of History at Princeton is devastated by the recent death of our wonderful colleague Alison Isenberg.

forever mood

We do not perform scripts, or give Ted Talks. We get to know students, build learning relationships, build knowledge over a semester, adjust our teaching to meet the needs of particular cohorts. This is how we are taught to teach and what makes teaching good 3/

Compulsory team teaching on every module is perhaps the biggest ever threat to the quality of teaching in UK universities. It causes chaos on the ground for timetabling, ruins course coherence and turns lecturers into permanent supply teachers. It is pedagogically incoherent… 1/

Stack of Jacquard loom cards, about two meters in length at Queen’s Street Mill, near Burnley By my calculation about 120kb of data

The 100th episode of American Vandal. Launching the 12th season. Live at UPenn English Faculty Lounge with @cnewf.bsky.social, @whitneytrettien.bsky.social, & an incredible assembly of faculty, students, visiting scholars, & friends of the pod.

yup. The deflection of decision-making to management-accounting (+ external consultants) has been disastrous in shaping the priorities of universities. Staff is now a problem, not an asset. And everything is short-term meeting of cash generation targets for each individual department. Mad.

I still think we should be allowed to make this list our REF Impact Casestudy. Used by the Department for Education, by Parliament, by every journalist, UUK acknowledges it is accurate & even conservative, + footnoted in academic articles. Ideally, we'd get government to change the system, but...

University of Edinburgh cutting its Institute for Academic Development which offers crucuial training and support for students, lecturers and researchers. I woked at the UNSW learning centre and know what a huge difference these services make. #AcademicSky thetab.com/2025/10/31/e...

Okay but it is very funny to make a LIVING EDITION of your academic zombie handbook

Ooh, Simon Schaffer reader coming down the pike. I blogged through a good chunk of his oeuvre back in the day, which was really illuminating. Too bad they didn't include "The Show That Never Ends" (on perpetual motion), which is probably my favorite: doi.org/10.1017/S000... #HPS

entire field of Science and Technology Studies jolts alert

So great that this is out in the world after years of hard work! My chapter, 'Contestations', is about the global history of home economics as a university subject, and what that tells us about institutional reform, gender, and empire at the turn of the 20th century.

actually worth asking (I don't know enough to say anything profound about it) how much the current fiscal vandalism of higher education is based on a private equity asset-stripping model

it's been amazing how far this consultant-driven playbook has gotten here given that we have been riding a run of big surpluses and still take in more than we spend

Good morning, faculty colleagues of all ranks and types of employment. By show of hands, comments, puke emoji, etc., how many of of you are experiencing claims that your institution is in a “budget crisis,” that is going under- or unexplained, yet has resulted in austerity?

New preprint alert! 🚨 “Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University”

philosophers are always

permit me to add 'and diverted additional shedloads of cash to "consultants" who advised them to do so' 😑

the opportunism of a university that has enough assets to avoid job cuts while other institutions are genuinely at the brink of collapse is so insulting to everyone and such an unnecessary threat to people’s careers

An LLM-produced essay is tangible proof that a student doesn’t care, and yet responding to it properly requires hour upon hour of careful work. It’s asymmetrical and overwhelming.

It’s always (tho increasingly) amazing to me that if you take out the care of individual professors, the university fall apart…

In other news (because life goes on): my third-year students have, entirely without prompting, achieved a 0% response rate to the "module evaluation" survey. I could not be prouder of them.

Aaaaarrrggh

ok I'll join everyone else in Edinburgh saying the Goldsworthy show at the National Galleries is *excellent*, took me until about halfway through to realise we were wandering just behind the artist himself

People on twitter are losing their minds over this, including several scientists who I have to assume have either brain poisoned themselves or were always like this. People don't always cite what's best; they cite what they know & researchers from historically excluded communities get the short end.

so disappointed this mac is planning to give up when it gets to 100

This whole article is fabulously smart, but this line, in particular, is its crowning glory.

This is the context in which I and all my colleagues are being told that we must bring in a minimum of £25k in external funding per year. We get 100 hours of research time per year. The bid-writing process will take up most of it.

I've a systems librarian nerd level paper here co-authored by a friend and colleague. They discuss AI bots scraping the online catalogue, bringing it down by creating thousands of complex faceted searches. AI takes and takes and does so multiple times per second journal.code4lib.org/articles/18489

Very meta MA class this evening. We discussed Foucault’s piece What Is An Author? (which also discusses what a ‘work’ is) by comparing the variant versions (3 translations, 2 French texts) all slightly different but all claiming to be in some way the definitive one.

Only one issue among many, but when a point in a White Paper opens with "We will seek to better understand concerns..." it does not bode well. You're the sodding UK Government. You _employ_ people to understand things and then explain them to you, in crayon if necessary. Please stop playing dumb.

"some folks really need to look up what the word ‘university’ is supposed to mean" Quite.

Tired: 69 Wired: six-seveeeeen Inspired: 0.693

Harvard just making the case for an endowment tax stronger

Harvard's bizarre slashing of doctoral education does major cuts to the educational core. This piece has good data and suggests an (unconscious?) link to Trump's trade school vision. www.chrisbrunet.com/p/harvards-p...

In the immortal words of John Maynard Keynes "Anything we can actually do, we can afford." Bonus: he was literally talking about building new universities. www.reddit.com/r/economy/co...

whenever i lived in cities, without a car, i was painfully reminded how having a car changes my brain. whenever i got rid of my car, it was like it went back to normal, and i could just go do stuff without worrying about where i'd park, or my belongings, or renewing my registration, or whatever else

Feeling super old as I remember that the entire reason the internet was invented was to create a distributed network that could resist single points of failure.

I think an alternative take on this is that students are being pushed towards business courses by government and societal rhetoric on employability, when they'd rather be doing other things they're more interested in...

now more than ever, read up from the world’s leading historian of shitty situations:

how many of the things we attribute to nature or external reality are just excuses for our failure to appreciate the limits of our own capacities to explain and intervene in the world?