ok ambitious niche university theatre directors, this is your moment

Oh and there's a gag as people are getting seated in the audience. Someone on stage keeps shouting "Do we have a quorum yet?" and a head keeps poking out from behind the curtain to say "only 62 more needed!" etc as it gets closer to showtime.

Anyway, the motion carries with no significant amendments (a serial comma is struck but then replaced). Justice is done. "This meeting is adjourned" is the triumphant closing number.

I had a dream about a musical called "Faculty Meeting" and weirdly it was good? The first number is about someone objecting to approving the minutes without unanimous consent but not offering a correction. This is how we meet The Parliamentarian, our narrator.

Second-hand book find of the week is this 1895 biography of the Russian mathematician (and author and nihilist), Sophie Kowalevski by friend, fellow author and Swedish feminist activist Carlotta Leffler. It’s a curious and significant book…

pay attention

Some initial thoughts on @samuelmoore.org's book eve.gd/2025/12/26/a...

and also younger students, as long as we're fantasizing

‘Tis the season to read “Father Christmas Executed” by Claude Lévi-Strauss! varenne.tc.columbia.edu/texts/levstc...

Historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, technology and medicine are all very familiar with the near impossibility of teaching outside our narrow school/college in UK HE. I may even eventually be made redundant because I was put in a very narrow pigeonhole.

I think it’s really important we do *not* attribute this failure to “fossilized thinking” on the part of academics, but on the part of business studies-led management teams who value “internal markets” over education.

isolating us from communities of people who know things is a primary project of the chatbot

cool fact: any even year can be written as the sum of three or more prime numbers

Bring. Back. The. Index. Cards.

Professional societies keep beclowning themselves buying into a lie about what an LLM "summary" is. They are inherently counterfeit: not an epistemic product of the ideas in the source, but summary-shaped text linguistically based on *other* works (in the training corpus) that use related language.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

just rebuilt my teaching website as plain html5 with a stripped down css, and pretty happy with the result: study.histsci.scot

🚨 I’ve been keeping this under wraps until published and it’s out today. Do judges with background in law enforcement act differently at bail time? Our groundbreaking NYC study estimates that when they set bail, it is a full 32% higher on average compared to other judges. Check it out and share.

just rebuilt my teaching website as plain html5 with a stripped down css, and pretty happy with the result: study.histsci.scot

This highlights the absolute necessity of faculty, staff, and student mobilization. You need to confront your board directly. Don’t stand on the sidelines and watch them silently as they do this stuff.

more power to any Dean who makes the case that their discipline-specific standard for AI is refusal, and AI refusal will be what they integrate into the curriculum

One argument I used to make to my students about why it was important to learn history (and historical thinking) is that someone was always going to be trying to tell you things were natural or had always been this way and that you needed to be able to see that as an exercise of power.

So, about the ICM next year... #mathsky

I recently wrote up a description of the book and its argument, if you are curious about its extremely counter-intuitive argument — that Truman was perhaps the most anti-nuclear president of the 20th century: doomsdaymachines.net/p/the-most-a...

fun fact: if you create a big panic in your organisation and require everyone to attend 3 million meetings after sleepless nights — your employees will be less good at their jobs

my one very sincere piece of business advice to universities: it takes *a lot* of indignities to kill the goodwill of people who choose to work at universities but managing to do so is not something to be proud of

the reason its bad to run universities like businesses is that almost all businesses fail on any reasonable timeline of evaluation. hudson's bay made it the longest and even they only got to about half an oxford of longevity

honestly the most hurtful part of this announcement was the repeated supposed commitment to respecting everyone’s ‘dignity’ while announcing the closure of a campus on said campus in the middle of a teaching day

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

and here we are in an institution with no deficit having finished our second round of voluntary redundancies, something a majority of institutions with actual deficits haven't resorted to; they're not even trying to make it make sense

I would love to see a longread on universities paying huge sums to consultancies for work their own faculty could easily do at far lower costs These fees drive up the cost of tuition, reduce internal resources for research funding, and honestly are demoralizing to the bright minds employed by unis

Auckland Uni has responded to my OIA request re consultancy spending in 2024-2025 $600k to PWC and $500k to Nous Group for "strategic design, organisational change, transformation services" etc This is roughly what our whole faculty of science spent on internally funded postdocs in the same years

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into [gatekeeping, opportunity hoarding, anxiety & trauma, scarcity mindsets, ...]"

Oh, look: a bit of actual reporting about what is going on at my dear employer, the University of #Edinburgh: www.theferret.scot/consultancy-... (Tagging @ucu.org.uk @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social )

At last, some properly rigorous reporting on the vampiric management consulting behind proposed cuts at Edinburgh Uni. Grab some garlic, read and weep.

Consultants, a handsome fee and job cuts at a university - the consulting firm shouldn’t be a surprise.

Nous Group strikes again

On a more basic level I struggle with the justification for outsourcing to private firms given the existing expertise in schools of business & economics, & all the strategic planning directorates. It seems an insult to those academics than their skills & knowledge of HE are inadequate

🔴 NEW: The University of Edinburgh has quietly paid more than £750,000 to a controversial consulting firm amid job cuts - staff say bosses ignored "repeated" questions about its role. Read more about 'Nousferatu' 👉 www.theferret.scot/p...

Staff say university leaders have been "economical with the truth" about the role of consultants with an ominous reputation as hundreds face job cuts. Read the full story: www.theferret.scot/c...

You want me to fill out a fucking Likert scale survey too

the social stigma against projectors should return, it was doing something important

Look, you invite me to give the workshop kickoff talk, you're GONNA get some depressing homemade graphs.

What makes something data? Some thoughts on that question, and how answers to it help us understand AI hype: medium.com/@emilymenonb...

This was incredibly useful because it provided relevant, up-to-the-minute proactive advice

Yes Queen’s has a really good anti-austerity group. They were a hugely helpful resource to the grad student workers when we were on strike earlier this year. qcaa.ca

*how* did you beat them back? Because they've got their claws all over UK Higher Education now. They've already reduced Plymouth, destroyed Coventry, and they're now at QMUL & Edinburgh. Any tips on actually stopping them gratefully received, because our bosses just pretend they're not involved.