How many FTE is that, anyway? Asking for quite a few friends.

We can solve grade inflation by make As & Bs proportional to the gold & silver specie in each department’s vault. Or… We can recognize that grade inflation is economizing bullshit in service of anti-education culture wars & not a real problem.

Well this is a shame. There's a great track record of placements at NMS and going on to good careers.

So pleased to have been shortlisted for this, and to be in such excellent company (fyi you can read BF&F, as everyone is calling it, open access at uclpress.co.uk/book/between...)

Please help spread the news far and wide! We have a new, full-time, permanent Lecturer in Global History of Science job @stsucl.bsky.social Don't be fooled by the application of deadline of only 9 June 2026. This is an open search #histsci #skystorians www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Sir Tom Devine: "Edinburgh’s plight is mainly due to inept decisions taken by the current Principal and his senior management group" Scatching words from one of Scotland's preeminent historians on Edinbugh Uni's financial woes. @heraldscotland.bsky.social www.heraldscotland.com/news/2611944...

Today as we learn that our Humanities library is to be gutted for more teaching space and our new policy of everyone in shared offices allocates us "One Billy Bookcase" for our books ... I revisit this.

"but that's not cost effective, as way below their pay grade" yes I agree they should make pro rata what a junior lecturer makes for that fraction of their workload

ok but research wholicijorts

The situation at the University of Edinburgh is so grim right now. To deduct 100% salary for a marking boycott … is a likely illegal move from management.

ultrafinitist who doesn't trust their induction stove to work

paint this on every VC's door

is there a way to just search for blutweets (?) that you've previously seen on your feed?

Never forget:

How not to digitize, and then how not to use automated text recognition: an awful race to the low…

To be very clear, I'm not trying to use the AI — I'm just trying to read the court documents. It's clear that the AI is programmed to replace offensive language. But what does that mean when it's being used to summarize historical documents? What happens when people rely on the summary?

As the fog of the semester lifts, I am getting SO EXCITED to work on my next book!!!! Working title Why the Engineering School Needs Feminism, it reflects on the current possibilities of feminist science and considers "the lab" as a site of radical feminist possibility

I have a few words about Trust in Mathematics for a new theme issue on "trust" in the Royal Society of Edinburgh's magazine, flip to p. 8: rse.org.uk/wp-content/u...

at last meeting head of school kept talking about "closing the gap between income and expenditure" and we were like "so you want us to turn a smaller surplus?"

congrats to a genuinely really good newsletter filling a very necessary niche in Edinburgh's media ecosystem

anthropologists be like

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

And of course consultancies like Nous kill all joint honours because (a) they can’t read the take-up in the multiple module codes and (b) have “internal research” that students supposedly hate choice and the “complexity” that brings. 1/2

I really like this. I still have an urge to refine it, to say that such a "product" is somewhere in the synthesis of a researcher and their research (project). But it's about a human understanding something new and showing that they do. All about the person.

I'm even less of a fan of ppl saying "It was like working with a [mediocre/okay/good] graduate student" bro if all working with a grad student was to you was them helping you prove theorems then we've got bigger issues.

friends, this is a story about big name mathematicians getting bought for the low low cost of privileged model access to exploit their networks and credibility in service of predatory businesses; there is virtually nothing here about "mathematical capabilities" of LLMs

One of my first committee meetings ever was with a high up IT guy who was incredibly condescending when several of the academics present questioned the wisdom of going all in on big vendors. Fast forward five years, he failed upwards and the uni made national news for a botched IT upgrade.

The Canvas breakdown this week has once more shown how dependent universities are on "Big Edtech" firms. Lots to unpack on edtech platforms, data, and infrastructures from this case alone so this international multi-authored piece may help explain a few things... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The rough (and perhaps ironic?) part of this is that these conversations did happen, rather loudly, decades ago, through what was then known as the "open education" movement. Those of us in those spaces started a whole "domain of ones own" movement. We were mostly laughed at by administration.

Many of us have agued against the corporate LMS for decades (e.g. "Against Learning Management Systems" [2009] blog.mkgold.net/2009/03/30/a... ) And we've built alternatives, such as the CUNY Academic Commons (commons.gc.cuny.edu) and Commons In A Box (commonsinabox.org). Check them out!

Today is a good day to pitch your local outlet something about the canvas hack. Put TIMELY in the subject line. Describe yourself as an educator in a few lines (two sentence!). Then make an argument.

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

I already wrote what I'd write about Canvas and Instructure last year. The British Library; university cyberattacks; Canvas: it's all the same problem and we all already know a solution. blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Whether we mathematicians like it or not, our intellectual labor has long been subsidized by the teacher-education Leviathan (in mutually beneficial ways, even if often unwittingly). But that Leviathan is being brought low by poor working conditions & wages that have been fully swamped by inflation

I was external examiner for Hertfordshire history several years ago. It's an exceptional degree which I made clear repeatedly was most under threat from its own senior management. This closure of all humanities is absolute vandalism and the university will pay a heavy price if it goes through.

"spot the differences" puzzle pro-tip: you always get one free difference by spotting "overall"

this is, of course, embarrassing, but not nearly as embarrassing as the people who put incantations like this in the supporting info for scientific papers

2014 REF: 2026: closing UG History

If you are in/around Basel, you should join us for my inaugural lecture on the 12th of May, 2026 at 1815 CEST! Or you can watch the livestream. More details at contra.center !!

the state of copyediting at major presses these days... embarrassing

The more academic work in humanities is construed as Teaching+Research, and the more these are each construed as the inculcation or application of general "skills" to the production or consumption of formulaic "content," the less convincing arguments against either casualization or automation can be

Hello. Does anybody have access to the *cover* of the New York Times Book Review for April 15, 2001 ("Vandals in the stacks!")? Could you please post or send me a picture or pdf of it? The best I can find is the microscopic image here: archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.... Thanks!

I actually like my office except for that one summer when I kept reporting the smells and rats outside the window and nobody could figure it out until the culprit drain finally gave up entirely and the actual flowing river of poo forced me to work from home until it was sorted

ASU's new AI tool cannibalizes nuanced, thoughtful faculty lectures into sound bites and chatbot junk text: www.404media.co/asu-atomic-a...

Worth noting UK unis are almost all charities not allowed to send profit to overseas into dividends. Any surplus needs to be reinvested & the main charitable activity of UK unis is currently educating undergrads. You almost can't design a better money funnel into a local economy.

thinking for no reason about the time I was live tweeting a panel involving Peter Orszag (ex Obama budget maven) and corrected his flippant dismissal of Luddites and he replied showing what a debased caricature of Luddism he held and yikes have the intervening years vindicated my correction