"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

“You didn’t get a high paying job right after graduation because you got a Humanities degree instead of learning to code” Same people: “too bad, so sad, AI can do your job and no one cares about cultivating future leadership in the field.” Same people: www.yahoo.com/news/article...

I went to the Worcester Art Museum a few years ago when I was in town to give a lecture at Holy Cross. While I was primarily interested in seeing the Antioch mosaics there, I was pleasantly surprised that the collection is geographically and chronologically very broad. Definitely worth a visit.

My sister got me a building set of Anubis and I spent about 8 hours straight on it to complete him. Look how cool he is!! I’ve placed him beside my senet set and he will probably get destroyed by cats

Super interesting article on the archaeology jobs wiki and trends in archaeology job ads

Almost every major news story this week is about how the entire economy is now gambling, scams, bribes and theft.

This is much more comprehensive than my own list, and reassuringly familiar from my experience of marking. I’ll be sharing the list with my students, both to think about writing for different audiences (encyclopaedia articles) and being aware of the weakness of LLM generated text.

I participated in this excellent conference a few years ago and I encourage anyone interested to submit an abstract!

companies make it difficult or impossible to disable ai in their products because it is an authoritarian project made from a stack of consent violations in a trenchcoat they don't give you a checkbox for "i don't want this and will never use it" because they know many people would check that box

the person behind this unhinged, anti-factual editorial is set to decide coverage at one of the nation’s major news networks

There are so many unforgivable actions of capitulation being taken by the institutions most well-positioned to stand up to Trump’s authoritarianism if they wished to do so. A must-read from @samtlevin.bsky.social:

"The president's laws"...they really aren't sending their best!

Academics love to pretend to be busy as an excuse not to respond to emails but will constantly be posting on Instagram, Facebook, and the like. Get serious!

The University of Chicago “lost tens of millions investing in crypto around 2021” Hahahahahahaha

When unis say “we won’t fire you humanities professors, we’ll just take your majors away and merge your department with two others and rename it all,” what they’re doing is they’re making humanities expertise increasingly invisible and inaccessible…

An R1 without languages programs isn't a research university, it's a joke.

Wake up babe, people are posting on the Liverpool Classics Listserv that the destruction of the Humanities in the age of the neoliberal university has nothing to do with politics

Others have more robust comments, but UChicago deciding to forgo language education—the literal thing they’re known for—and hoping that GenAI can teach grad students Akkadian and Homeric Greek is horrifying

The kids are alright! www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...

The core role of the university in society is the generational transmission of knowledge and rare skills. This has been already long forgotten by administrators who have prioritised rebranding universities as publicly-funded job-training centres in recent decades.

3 crucial roles for the university: to preserve, transmit, and create knowledge.

fwiw, Virginia Tech isn't an impoverished school either and yet here they are, the dean of the college, cutting a signature interdisciplinary PhD program without giving a reason other than "bad vibes"

U Chicago "has undertaken extraordinary quantities of leveraged spending in ways that benefit select units, while others, who have achieved high international ranking with little aid, have instead suffered from a withdrawal of operational in order to finance those endeavors"

Announcing our new forum, RHEA RECEPTIONS! “We live in an Odyssey time.” —Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian, 12 April 2025 Rhea Classical Reviews could not agree more with Ms. Higgins.

"The Mellon Foundation is no longer a source of funding for our applicants; neither is the Ford Foundation. The U.S. Fulbright program, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and other grantors are facing draconian cuts, restrictions or elimination."

Reposting to add that off the top of my head, other museums with public domain image collections include the Met, the Getty, Cleveland Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Princeton University Art Museum. There's also a longer list here: apollo-magazine.com/open-access-...

Going to keep saying: a society that wants to keep functioning needs to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

I can’t say it enough: U.S. culture is scam culture. It pervades everything we do. We don’t notice it because it’s the water we swim in. A party would do well to remind everybody how awful this is and propose to fix it.

We used to be a proper country

the trump administration is selling its war on higher education as a strike against the elites who have disadvantaged ordinary americans. in actuality, the administration is destroying advanced education for *everyone* in pursuit of its effort to deskill the american public

The other thing about it is IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THE BEST USE CASE SCENARIOS ARE. STUDENTS ARE USING IT TO CHEAT AND NOT LEARN ANYTHING. HOW YOU INTEND FOR A PRODUCT TO BE USE DOESN'T ALWAYS MATTER

I know there’s a lot going on at once but Jesus it’s wild how this administration is just going from one campus to another doing massive shakedowns like the mob thugs that they are

The basic thing I think is that in the corporatized university, bovs are conservative and the job of the prez is pretty much just fundraising and getting new cv lines so the idea of standing up for a principle or the institution in a way that costs it $ doesn’t even make sense to many of them

I actually think it’s a good thing that there are people who devote their working lives to studying something that may only be of interest to a small number of people, who get on here with great excitement and say “I nerded the heck out of this for three years, I’m proud of me, read my article!”

the voting rights act is, in its entirety, obviously constitutional under the 15th amendment, which gives congress broad and proactive authority to stop racial discrimination in voting. and you know it is obviously constitutional because roberts has had to invent entire new doctrines to gut it.

it is absolutely critical that the first priority of the new Virginia state legislature that will sit next January is to drastically reform the UVA Board of Visitors in both membership and organization, or they will be dismantling UVA next.

Picking them off one by one. Hang together or hang separately.

IMPORTANT: “‘At many public universities, syllabi are considered intellectual property. As such, professors are not required to share their syllabi in response to public records requests. Check your university policy prior to complying advance.’" www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

I gave an in-depth interview with my hometown Chicago Tribune about what’s going to happen to NPR and PBS, and how cutting public media is part of a broader anti-democratic ideological project.

My wonderful partner got me this bumper sticker and I’m obsessed 🏛️

I assure you, you have not seen capitulation until you see whatever the UVA Board of Visitors is going to come up with.

Course evaluations have been a ticking time bomb for years. An absolute Trojan horse of an institutional feature that offers zero helpful data points for improving education and the research on its downsides *before this* latest manipulation is a mile wide.

the idea that “DEI” is to blame for racist assumptions about the ability of nonwhite people and not actual racism is such a perfect example of racecraft www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/...

This is very bad. Although entirely predictable. Once more the humanities are being cut back to prop up STEM and, increasingly, AI investment (including at the expense of bench science). In the past, cuts to humanities were promoted on two separate logic streams that do not hold true: /1

If you work in higher ed, you need to get your folks together and end the use of course evals or at least bar their consideration in evaluation, promotion, and hiring. This needed to happen yesterday because they don't measure learning, they measure instructor gender, but now it's a snitch pool.

The attack on US academia is ideological and destructive, yes. They’re not trying to improve higher ed, reform it, or do any of their flimsy excuses (uphold free speech on campus, combat antisemitism, etc). They’re trying to break it to satisfy a mix of cultural, political, and personal grievances.

I love getting my biannual letter from the St. Olaf Classics department. AND It’s heartbreaking to learn that their intermediate and advanced Greek courses (6 of the 8 I took there!) are now done *unpaid* by the 3 remaining faculty, and that St. Olaf refuses to add a TT line.

"resolve dispute" is a bizarre way to describe extortion.