It is hard to overstate the stress produced by the incoherence of academic institutions pumping generative AI when they want to play business and then leaving instructors to deal with the results when they want to play school

I would sincerely like for my colleagues to read this

Not only an embarrassing decision for an institution of higher education, but also deeply dishonest to frame as "harmless" given the environmental and resource costs associated with this technology. Shame triblive.com/local/region...

A Bard College student was kidnapped by ICE and Bard’s administration is advocating for his release and has created a website to assist the rest of the community in joining them. That’s what academic leaders should be doing for their students right now. www.instagram.com/p/DQKSTDJkeF...

every real writer who thinks hard about what they want to say and then sits down and writes it feels like a fraud, and the people who have the computer write the book for them feel like accomplished authors

We just gave $40 billion to a country that is screwing us by selling to China, so China doesn't have to buy from or deal with the US. That's almost the entire budget for USAID, except instead of saving one South American dude, we could have saved millions of children.

I hope that Tressie is right here, which in itself is a pretty bleak reflection of where we are

Nothing could possibly go wrong with this. Creating a lifelike digital avatar on a third party platform will definitely not open teaching staff up to career destroying issues in the event of that platform being hacked.

relatedly, I am teaching this huemer piece in the graduate section of my political theory course this semester and it's pretty wild how well huemer diagnosed the vulnerability of rawlsian liberalism that we are seeing play out in real time rn www.jstor.org/stable/23559...

had the occasion to reread Rawls on overlapping consensus and public reason this week and this passage stuck out to me in retrospect as rather prescient

ResearchGate is now sending me unsolicited advertisements for "green card profile evaluations" from immigration attorneys, this is a sign that we live in a normal, well-functioning society

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

People think they’re taking down a rich intellectual sinecure but they’re mostly terrorizing committed public servants who make $58,000 a year after 15 years of experience at a school that has to budget creatively so students can access textbooks.

Either most universities get shoehorned into the Trump scheme, eliminating the funding advantage, or a subset take the poisoned fruit and are isolated by peers who rightly view this as blood money and cheating. There is no upside for any university to take the deal.

"a laborious exposition of nozick's expository sloppiness appears as an addendum at the end of this chapter" 💀

Objecting to the scheduling of workshop speakers in alphabetical order on the grounds that I don't wanna go last 😭

Pfizer "secured a three-year grace period from President Donald Trump’s promised tariffs on pharmaceuticals" and in return will "sell some drugs at a 50% average discount on a direct-to-consumer website called TrumpRx" looks like state capitalism to me www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Yesterday the main quad on campus had a big google gemini tent, giving away big bags of schwag to students and advertising "free student accounts" and just what are we doing here? Are we a university or nah?

Faculty should strike. Shut it all down. We teach from research not the whims of dummies.

Autism doesn’t stop at 18. There are plenty of autistic adults that often get left behind during media coverage because the focus is often on moms of autistic children. It’s another way to erase autistic people’s personhood.

When @politico.com says "the autism problem" they don't mean tearing down the ableist barriers that discriminate against and disadvantage autistic people in all facets of American life. When @politico.com says "the autism problem" they mean the existence of autistic people is the problem.

The lie is that glasses are made to liberate you from screens. The purpose of the glasses is to make sure you have no experiences except those mediated through a companies’ technology.

Trump just announced that he always knew more about autism than the experts who‘ve studied it. Obviously, a very stupid, barely literate man with no expertise thinks he knows better than thousands of experts scientists. Not to worry, he has a man whose brain was partially eaten by worms to advise.

Crickets from our central administration, despite the overwhelming number of faculty we have on H1B visas. I can think of at least 5 in my own department!

Amongst the many, many other faults and follies of the party, perhaps the single most dangerous problem with the Democratic Party today is their incessant habit of reinforcing the idea that there is absolutely *no* principle that matters, no policy that is sacrosanct that they will stand behind.

The debate around what is or isn’t “cancel culture” really just obscures a simple truth that it’s BAD to be massively racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic and it’s GOOD to speak out against injustice. Some things are good and some things are bad and it’s okay to say which you think are which.

this may be the last nail in the coffin for US academia. generations of scholars from around the world have strived to get jobs at US unis, which has been a boon for US research and for US students. those scholars will not stay here if they cannot travel home to see their families. why would they?

One of the things to be remarked upon about the violence ICE directed at high-profile protesters in Broadview this morning—in full view of major media outlets—is what it says about the ICE violence that is occurring out of plain sight.

In other words: medical AI tools powered by LLMs produce the same epistemic injustice in clinic that women and minority patients already experience it's almost like these things recreate the same biases they're trained on, I wonder if anyone has considered that before 🤔

Anybody tune into the big press conference tonight that Dem leadership held to thoroughly denounce the fascist rhetoric & actions of the President & Vice President? (Just kidding, of course they didn’t do that)

one of the reasons these guys are just steamrolling right now is there isn't anyone in any kind of credible leadership role standing up passionately and effectively for civil liberties

In tenure letters the last few years I've been forcibly struck by how much service the women I'm reviewing are doing compared to the men. (Actual evidence backs this anecdote up - see below.) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Iconic opening lines of philosophy papers: "Isaiah Berlin was many things but he was not a black political theorist."

The question I try to keep in front of my students' minds is: how do you think the wealthy and powerful people who've developed these tools feel about students using them instead of thinking for themselves, and why?

100%. I'm sure the inboxes of every dep't chair, dean, and university president are currently full of complaints from students who dislike aspects of their classes. Those coming from right-wing students are coupled with threats that the next stop is DOJ.

The MSNBC commentator saying that most political violence has historically come from the left just once again showed how we suffer from failing to learn history. Lynching, pogroms, race riots, the political violence that ended Reconstruction, and against the Civil Rights Movement. Come on.

Great start to this university-wide town hall, where in the introduction the speaker said "although we are streaming this event we are not recording it" so people can speak freely.. As someone who is on the zoom, I can confirm they are very definitely recording this 🙃

I’m so sad and angry, man. The video in the article is chilling and exactly the type of action this WH hopes to see.

I would "ethical AI" edtech companies to stop pitching me. I despise you. I want you to fail. I want you to go out of business. I want you to sell all you own and walk the earth like Caine on Kung-Fu. This message will repeat.

This helps nobody and does a great deal of harm to junior/untenured scholars. What are we doing here?!

Several states are moving fast to remove barriers, but their power over insurance coverage is more limited than their power to permit pharmacists to give vaccines.…

Today I'm grateful to Elizabeth Camp for teaching me that when I don't understand passive aggressiveness and so obliviously respond to a speaker's literal meaning, I might instead be interpreted as engaging in the much more sophisticated practice of flat-footed pedantry

Class on Thursday was mind-blowingly great, so of course today's was an absolute train wreck, it's like a law of nature or something

and also self-destructive on the most narrow economic grounds: foreigners buying stuff in the US is one of our major exports! Foreign students spend $56 billion a year Foreign travelers and students are three quarters of the entire US trade surplus in services

It's time for today's game of "250 words is not a lot of words, actually"

"Environments where students with different views must talk to one another routinely... without distractions or prejudgments" Yes, we call those "humanities classes" and when students come out of them with more progressive views than they went in we are accused of brainwashing

Have just discovered that my college no longer has an office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Ahh the first day back in office after 9 months away, finally I can ponder life's truly important questions, like "why is my office an ice box?" and "why have I had to 2fa 6 times before noon?"