I can’t explain to you how much the concept of demigods is not a think in Ancient Greece. #subpost

Why is Labour set on destroying UKHE? It’s one of our biggest industries and where do they think all this ‘growth’ will come from if not education?

Fuck. This. They've been using that rise in tuition fees to claim they've stabilised the sector. They've used it to say it's ok to raise national insurance contributions. They're now using it to cut one of the few stable things. Logic and maths aren't big in the Department of Education, are they?

Wow who’d have thunk it, vaccines work 🤔 Great news to celebrate.

I’ve just been reminded that LinkedIn exists and allow me to tell you again how much better my life is now I have deleted my LinkedIn account: SO MUCH BETTER.

I think I’d be really good leading a dissertation module. That’s it. That’s the post.

Tomorrow I am going to meet the rest of the Altra She Runs Free team and then I am going to a running festival and I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to just being in Wales and running and talking about running and learning about running.

I am being made redundant this summer. Students want me to stay. Colleagues want me to stay. They are overworked with their fixed term colleagues, who are both going, or gone already. The university has said no. There are no petitions. Just quiet acceptance.

Kate makes a very important point. We should all have been fighting against casualisation for many years. For those of us in (relatively) safe jobs, we should avoid feeling suddenly sorry and outraged that our jobs have become more casualised.

And I say this having just sat down with my shortlisted ERC Consolidator to start planning my interview presentation and two weeks after a permanent job rejection because I came across as ‘too ambitious’ so I don’t even know what academia wants of me anymore.

Also: I’m not sure people realise how much work it is to be precarious academic as one is expected to do all the things our more securely employed colleagues do - in fact, often more - because we have to show excellence in every aspect of academic life in order to be noticed by hiring committees.

My redundancy is not potential, it is not a threat, it is currently certain. As it was two years ago, and 3 years before that. And absolutely cuts to the sector are terrible, but there are hundreds of us in this situation, watching other threats of redundancies being widely decried. Just not ours.

(2/) Some potential redundancies are apparently deserving of petitions and widespread horror on social media, and yet some certain redundancies are not at all - and yes, it's also, as colleagues have noted, clear that this applies to different institutions differently, but also apparently FTC staff

I think this quote really demonstrates for me something that is quite weird and hard about watching reactions to sector redundancies while precarious - because I am expected to do exactly this next year. And no one seems to find it a problem. (1/2)

The sub-head is seriously questionable: “how changing student preferences are fundamentally reshaping universities” buys into the university’s narrative that this is driven by falling recruitment leading to deficits. How can that be, when Exeter has been eating other people’s lunch for years?

Had a full Maximus Decimus Meridius moment on my run today.

CAN CONFIRM IS NOT DULL.

#WCCWiki just keeps trucking on! Now at 899 #Wikipedia pages created or edited for women and non-binary classicists (very broadly conceived)🩶💚💜Thank you to everyone who has contributed, big or small, it makes a huge difference @womeninclassicsuk.bsky.social

I was literally today years old when I realised that ultraviolet is called so because its waves are smaller than violet and infrared because its waves are larger than red.

Genuinely this makes university management make so much more sense. They don’t understand which parts of our jobs we enjoy - talking to colleagues and students, teasing out problems in our sources, reading and thinking, random discovery. They think in outputs and we think in process.

I’m mildly annoyed that I had to go to bed last night and missed Jenn Lichter’s BLAZING finish at Western States, but either way I’m at my first ever karate tournament.

A lot of media coverage of the ‘AI’ reading of the Herculaneum scrolls really fails to understand what’s happened here. There’s no language processing happening, the AI/ML is not trained on a corpus of texts or language. It can detect ink to see shapes. HUMAN EXPERTS are then transcribing the text.

COME ON HANS. YOUNG AND FIT. YOUNG AND FIT.

The crisis in UK higher education is worsening week by week — Exeter University is one of the best in the UK, with superb lecturers (and several You’re Dead To Me guests), but it’s planning massive job cuts in History, Archaeology, Classics — see the petition below to lend your voice in support

I have never had any specific feelings about Take That but I am now firmly anti-Take That based on the road closures around my house.

And Western States Endurance Run has begun. COME ON TARA. COME ON FUZHAO.

Here is a bunch of stuff I’ve written that you can read! #ClassicsBluesky #AncientGreekReligion #SensoryStudies

My chosen profession did not exist when I was in college, and it took the solid background I got from my liberal arts education to open my mind up to brand new career paths. 🤯

I am once again begging US Americans to click through to people’s profiles before you sound off in the comments of any post. American exceptionalism is even worse than British exceptionalism and that’s saying something.

It's not even this - it's that early career you are expected to be *exceptionally* movable, and then exceptionally immovable. Neither are like most other professions.

Today I am feeling incandescent rage at the way successive governments have absolutely failed higher education in this country and are basically wilfully refusing to do anything about it even though universities are huge employers and economic drivers of so many cities across the country.

I always feel so sad after I have good, productive conversations with my colleagues. Being precariously employed really, really, really sucks.

Oh here’s another one:

Cleaning out my photos and found this, which may be a helpful guide at this time of year, when discussing jobs with the precarious academic in your life:

In which I routinely get the emails I am not waiting for and do not get the emails I am waiting for.

This months editing session is TOMORROW!! 🏛️🏛️ join using the link below!! us06web.zoom.us/j/85192010168

Here is a bunch of stuff I’ve written that you can read! #ClassicsBluesky #AncientGreekReligion #SensoryStudies

The chapter I am working on is actually really good. My research at the moment feels like it’s all just clicking into place. I’m so happy with all of it (except the 2 typos I’ve already found in the published version of Frames in Stone, but like don’t talk about that.

It's really weird to see how the careers of people who got the permanent jobs I interviewed for have taken off, and how mine has not.

Côté #ESR français, ça veut aussi dire : ne pas maltraiter, surcharger, burnouter, précariser, etc., la liste est longue. Une fois de plus : NOUS sommes l'université.

I am once again begging universities to realise that staff - academic, professional services, estates, all of them - are the product they are trying to sell. Without staff there is nothing to sell. No amount of flashy buildings will replace staff in universities. UKHE is in freefall.

Another day, another opportunity to write to my MP and ask why they don’t think protecting universities and the thousands upon thousands of jobs that are at risk across the country is worth their time.

It’s wild that politicians don’t seem to grasp the degree to which universities contribute to the economy- local, regional, national. The failure to intervene is a stain on this govt - a shocking dereliction of duty to every worker, every local business, every student, every area that is suffering

the media and voter messaging should be this: the current government and the government in waiting do not want your children to be able to go to university, they will not support people in the UK to do original research, they do not care about job losses in one of the largest sectors in the economy

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

I am once again begging universities to realise that staff - academic, professional services, estates, all of them - are the product they are trying to sell. Without staff there is nothing to sell. No amount of flashy buildings will replace staff in universities. UKHE is in freefall.

Americans telling people in the UK that our heatwave is like your normal day and we should get on with it - babe that major mean girl energy, what is your point actually? #subtweet

Back from my run and sadly did not have a breakthrough for the chapter I’m stuck on. I do a lot of my thinking while running (I also listen to a lot of books and articles), but sometimes the problem takes more than 10 km to percolate through.

This thread.

Does anyone happen to have access to this? #icanhazpdf brill.com/display/book...