What @nearleft.bsky.social says:

Colleges will under-hire, expend zero time or resources to expand a major, and sink money into expensive boondoggle programs that send students into other pathways and then turn around and say the market has spoken so they’re shutting down a major.

The drive for more and more publications is another example of the management class fucking up higher ed. Measurable outcomes: you MUST publish a certain number of articles every year. Just keep churning them out. It's rationalization: productivity is making more, and productivity is good.

Historical research does not need to be done faster or in greater volume for any social or intellectual purpose whatever; if anything, it needs to be done more slowly and deliberately than at present, by people allowed the training, time, space, and resources to do it that way.

This is what makes it so egregious that CMU has not communicated to our students or faculty about this AT ALL. I spoke with a student today who knew nothing about it. Students deserve to be informed about what is happening with their data.

The best part of the canvas outage is the part where our central administration has not communicated even a single word to faculty or students about it, just absolute crickets 🙃

On Friday afternoon before the Bank Holiday, colleagues in the Humanities department were called to a meeting on Tuesday. They were informed that the University Portfolio Review had decided that English Language, English Literature, Philosophy, History & Creative Writing UG degrees would close

Messages you love to see on Canvas on the day seniors' grades are due

the best part of post-tenure academia has been having the career space to slow down. the damage done by the contraction of tenure track positions + poor security/working conditions of non tenure track faculty + quantification of academic contributions is incalculable

Just gonna call them “Homogeneity hires.”

The main place this graphic goes wrong is suggesting there's a discrete endpoint to the panic, as if I'm incapable of crying while in the midst of a multi-day panic attack

currently at the "smashing my head repeatedly into a wall" stage of the writing process

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the answer to this is "No."

Dear Professor [Insert Name] I write to apologize for the use of AI in my latest assignment. That wasn't just against the rules, that was disrespe

I have had TWO students email me to ask if it would be alright to enroll in one of my classes next semester and then only attend half of the meetings bc one of the days conflicts with another class. I have never in 18 years of teaching had a student ask me this before, what in the world?!?

It's not hyperbole in the least to say Musk purchased a six-month shadow presidency for $280 million and used the power of that shadow presidency to 1. Steal the government’s data, 2. Permanently damage the state’s ability to regulate his businesses, and 3, kill non-white people.

God almighty, never in my life did I imagine something like this could happen—but RFK Jr’s MAHA movement keeps surprising us😢 Tobacco is the world’s number 1 cause of premature death & the tobacco industry is one of the most repulsive & cynical industries on earth www.statnews.com/2026/04/22/n...

The expansion of surveillance on college campuses is extremely worrisome, curious to know if the Penn State @aaup.org chapter is organizing around this

When we fight, we win. Become part of the fight. Become a member of @aaup.org: www.aaup.org/join

Having students use paper to complete tasks is in this sense to help them understand how to disentangle a single focused thought task from the machine ensemble of our ubiquitous modern information systems.

Reading student essays and getting a little verklempt. Sometimes you get real lucky with the makeup of a class and the students who land in it. This semester has been one of those and I'm really gonna miss the care and thoughtfulness that these students brought to a course on some tough topics 🥲

also, the focus on "majors" is a way to cut programs that actually enroll fine, but students pick other things because they are told to by ... their parents media advisors admin college counselors general vibes ... but they still take the classes because they actually want to learn.

The circle of death is: Cut faculty (or non-replace) so you offer fewer classes so fewer people enroll so you cut faculty so you offer fewer classes so fewer people enroll so then the market has spoken.

Elon Musk's legacy cannot be cars and rockets and robots. His legacy is starvation and human degradation and mass death. This was a choice. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/o...

The volume of AI slop I am receiving from students is definitely increasing as term end nears. I'm so tired.

very good news for universities and research hospitals

I was speaking with a friend of mine who also teaches first-year writing, and I think the issue is people see writing as telling me what they know, but what writing really does is explain *how* you have come to know a thing. AI can’t tell us how you have come to know something; only you can.

Employers should cover work-related travel and other expenses directly rather than require employees to float their employer an interest-free loan while subjecting them to a byzantine reimbursement process that will take at least a month and entail multiple rounds of paperwork.

Students reaching out to me now, asking for syllabi for fall 26: lol, lmao even

Peer review: unpaid, uncounted in professional standing, and also as big of a pain in the ass as we can possibly make it. "Oh you agreed to review this paper? Before you can start you MUST fill out this multi-page form to complete your profile"

This is really a wonderful blog post about writing as thinking. Aimed at graduate students but applicable to undergraduate writing as well. Basically sending this to all of my students today

Hey surprise Nike is up to their old tricks. "Less-developed regions shouldn’t be excluded from economic growth" is corporate speak for "Exploitative jobs that pay less than a living wage are a benefit that poor people should be grateful for" Nike reported $46B in revenue last year

THIS. If you’re in central Glasgow tonight please close your windows; if you have to be out please wear the best mask you have available. If you can smell it, you’re at risk.

An incredible loss of talent. Self-inflicted brain drain. kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

THREAD: We just released a tool that allows you to search billions of dollars in wealth, ties to the most powerful companies in the country, and details of the personal finances of President Trump and over 1,500 of his appointees. Here’s how it works 1/

Getting on my official ethicist soapbox to proclaim that war is bad, actually, and we should do everything we can to prevent it from happening

Really distressed to read about our Tartan Scholars program being so under-supported that the student ambassadors would resign en masse. CMU just opened a $100M robotics center in Hazelwood, we can't afford more than 2 full-time staff to support this important program??

When academia's stars mistreat people, they're "punished" with relief from teaching, mentoring, and service responsibilities. This frees them to spend more time on the more valued work of research. And dumps less valued responsibilities onto colleagues, making it harder for them to become stars.

"Static" non-ideal theories of exploitation take structural injustice as a fixed background. Danielle M. Wenner and Derrick F. Gray argue this inadvertently serves an ideological function, reinforcing unjust conditions rather than challenging them.

Columbia says DHS entered a dorm at dawn today under false pretenses, detaining a student in violation of the law and university policy.

To do this, anti-trans lawmakers in Kansas moved fast to change the law, overrode the governor’s veto, and pushed for the legal changes to go into effect nearly immediately. That kind of power—to void gender on official documents, to compel gender conformity—is terrifying and it will not stop here.

It is 1954, gender-affirming care is criticised as “experimental” It is 1981, gender-affirming care is criticised as “experimental” It is 2002, gender-affirming care is criticised as “experimental” It is 2017, gender-affirming care is criticised as “experimental” It is 2026, gender-affirming ca

CMU increasing daily administrative burden by now making us sign into every single microsoft office product, even if already signed into a CMU account on the computer, the CMU network, CMU email, and every other CMU server already wtf are we doing here

Excited to announce publication of new JHPPL special issue: Public Health Under Siege (ungated) that explores the fate of public health during the second Trump administration: read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/issue/...

If you're looking for the source of academia's leaky pipeline--it's not women's lack of commitment, it's the misogyny of men like this.

I am never going to get over the fact thar so many Americans died that corpses stacked up in nursing homes and hospital morgues, that refrigerator trucks had to be brought in for the overflow, and that the big takeaway from Important Pundits is there should have been *less* mitigation.

Thousands of institutions abandoned programs, ended or rewrote scholarships, closed down clubs and publications, all in pre-emptive compliance. And you know why? Mostly because they wanted to do it if they thought they could blame someone else for it.

Nagel (L) and Feinberg (R), each writing in 1973, expressing very different views about the likely future place of Rawlsian liberalism in political theory

Trust me, the woman of academia are not at all surprised by the number of academic men orbiting Epstein.