If you're a member of a union I'd *highly* recommend contacting your rep about your organisation or company's continued use of X. *Particularly* if you're required to use/monitor the platform as part of your job. Question whether it's ethical or legal to maintain a presence there...

Is there any task more mind-numbing than building a Canvas site, hit "like" if no, repost if no

Last week I sent an email to CMU president Farnam Jahanian asking him why CMU is still on X given the now ubiquitous deepfake porn content spreading around the site. In response I was told "we are reviewing" the matter. What is there to review? X is a platform of abuse. Get @cmu.edu off of X, now.

Excellent

OK yinz asking for thoughts on two competing ideas for trying to stem AI use in a lower-level survey course with writing assignments:

I would really caution anyone against implying that paywalling this feature is a legitimate response to public outcry. The paywall is an endorsement, not a restriction. Musk is saying "this thing you're all talking about is valuable. Pay me for it." The actual material effect is just monetization.

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

consent manufacture machine go brrr

who's published the best public-facing stuff on global political realism and the recent actions of the Trump regime? looking for accessible week 1 content for a course on global justice #polisky #poltheory #InternationalRelations

meanwhile, the vice provost for education has invited me (and presumably all other faculty) to participate in piloting the use of an AI chatbot in my spring course materials 🫠 seriously wtf are we doing here

Spending today thinking about (small and large) ways to revamp my syllabi and assignment structure(s) to better serve educational goals given the ubiquity of AI use that I saw last term. Good resources here, ironically the very first linked item is an argument against doing what I am doing right now

Every time I see a news article about ChatGPT pushing vulnerable people to harm themselves and others, I want to know how the universities who have eagerly proclaimed their partnerships with this company intend to account for the increasing evidence of the harms of this tech

i'm hiring a postdoc to map the age-verification space and do some audits if you’ve worked in this area, pls apply: aial.ie/hiring/postd... pls share widely

Audre Lorde spitting an absolute gem: "Coalitions don't happen between parts of wholes. They happen with wholes coming together. They happen with different people coming together, recognizing each other's differences. We cannot become each other in order to work together. We must become ourselves."

Absolutely love to see it

It really upsets me at conferences when moderators let an early speaker in a session, or their q&a, extend way past their allotted time. Total disservice to the other speaker(s) in a session.

Academic freedom is applicable to anyone with a teaching role. You can’t ask graduate students to teach, advise students, and evaluate student work with granting them academic freedom. The recent debacle at OU and a previous one in the School of Social Work at UT Austin illustrate this.

Pittsburgh area friends, a message from the Allegheny Health Department! It’s a law that rental units must be able to heat to at least 68 degrees. If your heat can’t keep up, and the landlord won’t fix it, the Health Department can help!

this encapsulates the essential relationship between the people running universities, the people doing academic work in universities, and the people looking to smash and grab as much as possible from universities while we're on the way down

The first school to market itself as AI free is going to corner the market on people interested in actually learning. And I would not be surprised if rich families and the children of people creating this tech were the first movers.

I've just discovered that bsky has my moderation set to automatically hide all adult content. I'm unable to change this setting. I toggle it to "enable" and change all the difficult settings to "warn" instead of "hide" and as soon as I exit the menu the settings revert. what is this

Doing a little dance in my office bc the faculty meeting scheduled for tomorrow afternoon has just been cancelled 🕺

I also asked students to (anonymously) tell me what reading or readings they found least helpful (not disliked the most! least *helpful*) in my political philosophy class and yinz a whole bunch of them said RAWLS

Also want to say that when I opened this topic up for discussion, the very first student comment was "it's really hard when there's no university-wide policy and in a lot of classes we are encouraged to use it" Which is, you know, what we've all been saying is a major source of the problem! 🙃

Had a really wonderful & wide-ranging last day of class discussion with my political philosophy class about AI, the pressures they face as students in 2025, & how to think about their time at university. I've been really discouraged by how much students are outsourcing to these tools 1/

Literally in the last week we have watched a graduate student instructor in Oklahoma be placed on administrative leave after being targeted by the right for the substance of her teaching. This position on the part of Pitt is not only untenable it is morally repugnant

The U.S. is the only democracy in the world with: - Lifetime terms for high court judges - An electoral college for choosing an executive - A legislative chamber where legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative majorities - 75% requirements for constitutional amendments

hey #feministsky - who's writing or has written things you've found valuable about platonic friendship between men & women? #philsky

Campus on the first snow of the year

I feel this in the marrow of my bones. The future of a university should be shaped by leaders whose own careers depend materially on the future they are shaping.

Leaderships’ inability to live up to their mandate demonstrates even more strikingly how important shared governance is. For one, there are typically world-class experts on these campuses who could help contextualize and offer input. But they don’t even think about us in that way.

Among other things, a giant red flag for faculty at private institutions that our "advisory" faculty governance bodies are wholly inadequate, we should be fighting for shared governance with actual teeth

Northwestern and Columbia being famous for journalism and bending over for Trump seems a little too on the nose these days

Universities are assembling larger and larger teams to deal with academic integrity issues--mostly focused on AI--while simultaneously holding AI "writing" contests, AI-themed events, "hey, come play with these fun tools!" The messages are so mixed, it's criminal. Because AI is bloated with money.

WE'VE ALL GOT BOOKS TO WRITE TOM I'M STILL HAVING LOTS OF OPINIONS AND THAT'S HAD NO NEGATIVE IMPACT ON THE BOOK WRITING PROCESS AT ALL HAS IT OH GOD

Nothing like your bus driver forgetting what route he's driving to spice up the evening commute

"Unlike continental nonsense, analytic philosophy is clear and intelligible"

It is the day before thanksgiving break, how many students do we think will show up to my morning class today (current enrollment = 24)

the screams were actually us from the future

So tired of old white men and their dumb opinions

Our entire economy is a house of cards stacked on top of some data centers that are balancing on top of an AI bubble like bears at the circus running on top of giant balls while wearing tutus

From CDC: "As of November 18, 2025, we estimate that COVID-19 infections are growing or likely growing in 19 states..." "As of November 18, 2025, we estimate that Influenza infections are growing or likely growing in 42 states..." www.cdc.gov/cfa-modeling....

Josh Shapiro is teaming up with Republicans to push for fossil fuel deregulation, signaling to local communities all across PA that we are on our own in the fight against rampant data center scale up and all the environmental harms that come with it

There’s a word we used to say. They don’t let you say it anymore, but I think it’s a beautiful word. We call it: dialectic. You have the thesis, and then the antithesis, and if you put them together it’s a synthesis. Very powerful. We’ll be looking into that. Very materialist, the theory of history

TRUMP [after spending 5 minutes with Zohran]: surplus value, it’s a very wonderful thing, very wonderful, and they’re stealing it. Can you believe that? We’re going to be looking very strongly at the bourgeoisie, what they’re up to

for days we got the "Showdown with Socialism" buildup only to get the payoff of Trump essentially saying "wow this socialist guy fuckin rules. I, on the other hand, am a fascist". what a country. what an era bsky.app/profile/self...

WHOA. The FBI was/is spying on a Signal chat for a New York immigration court watch group, claiming they were “anarchist violent extremist actors.” Your reminder that the government is watching and don’t say anything in a big group chat you wouldn’t say on TV. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

This is exactly what I'm seeing, and spent an hour discussing with our department's student advisor today. Students are citing materials we have not covered in my class and which they cannot plausibly be assumed to have read in other courses. I can't prove they're cheating, but they are.

- White Refugees Only - restoring Confederate names and memorials - allowing swastikas, nooses and Confederate flags in the Coast Guard - mass-arresting nonwhite people and telling citizens their IDs must be fake - removing Black history (incl military history) markers What do they mean by this?🤔

Really excellent point that often gets lost in the (deserved) mockery. These things are not neutral arbiters of truth. They are easily manipulated extensions of the ideology of their creators. The attempt to shove them into every conceivable knowledge space is an explicitly political project.