“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

"Bucknell has decided to close its highly respected, decades-old UP in June 2026. The stated reason? The press serves scholars, not Bucknell undergrads. Bucknell undergrads—& some grad students as well—disagree." FANTASTIC piece on BUP's student internship program. networks.h-net.org/group/discus...

reminder:

Totally fine for random people to determine what colleges teach so long as they pass a small test first of explaining and operating the Large Hadron Collider, a simple task for people so capable of immediately knowing more than career experts in a field of study.

Applicants Sought for Editor of Environmental History - @envirohistory.bsky.social @aseh.bsky.social & @foresthistory.bsky.social seek applicants to serve as Editor(s) and a new institutional home for the journal Environmental History for a 5-year term. niche-canada.org/2025/09/27/a... #envhist

Our July 2025 issue is now available! If you are a print subscriber look for it in the mail! #envhist #envhum www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/eh/current

Im begging the NYT to spend time talking to people who actually teach and work at universities. Especially ones that don't have billion dollar endowments. My issues are AI use, crumbling infrastructure, vanishing staff, unfunded state mandates, a customer service model of education...

Conservative efforts to punish educators over liberal ideas have grown for years, led in part by Charlie Kirk himself. The American Association of University Professors, an organization founded to defend academic freedom, said it was aware of retaliation against about 60 professors and teachers.

Now updated with more links (thanks to everyone who suggested new material!) and with the years that each article was published. catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

Disney: over the last 72 hours we were shocked to discover that censorship isn’t cool.

they’re putting Kimmel back on the air. I would now like to see the same amount of outrage for the firing of professors for their statements

question for Pacific War historians: I'm looking for reliable figures on the number of Allied airmen captured in Japan or the Pacific theater more broadly. I've seen 568 mentioned in passing a few places, but can't find a credible source. Any ideas on where I can find one?

I’m pleased to announce that my forthcoming book, _Deadly Divide_, will be out in spring 2026 with @uncpress.bsky.social with the help of my fabulous editor Cate Hodorowicz (@catehodorowicz.bsky.social).

Why the history of medicine matters.

You’ll be shocked to hear that their recommendation is not limiting the circumstances in which AI is deployed, but rather accepting the inevitability it will occasionally have catastrophic effects.

if you have anything important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken in your game

seems like a bit of a deal-breaker, no

"Let’s put a stop to the same old partisan sniping and divisiveness about healthcare, defense, and who’s striking whom with a bulging sock full of US currency."

I am biased but I don’t think there is a better website on the internet today than TheOnion.com.

reminder: Jimmy Kimmel is enough of a mensch that he devised a segment on which actors who are just short of having enough work to qualify for union healthcare come on his show and deliver a single line of dialogue deadline.com/2024/07/jimm...

Some smart publication should reach out to every single person who signed the Harper’s letter and get their comment / explicit no-comment

Reminder, on the same day that Kirk was killed, there was a school shooting (in the same school district as Columbine, as it happens). If schools held a moment of silence for every gun death in this country, well, there would be no education, just silence.

New releases this week—Mrs Dalloway as Woolf wanted it; late and great (the best?) Barbara Pym; and a work of genius manga from the 80s, Miss Ruki.

Time to take this out for another spin. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

These firings, with zero due process, are violations of widely accepted principles of academic freedom & are completely unacceptable. College & university administrators MUST NOT exploit these shocking events to censor protected speech & concentrate their own power. www.wsmv.com/2025/09/12/t...

Judith Butler: "It is important to refuse the notion that this is just how things are right now, invoking a feckless realpolitik that justifies complicity with a brutal and rising authoritarianism."

Judith Butler on being named to a list of UC Berkeley faculty & students provided to the Department of Education to be investigated for anti-semitism, w/ zero transparency about what they're being accused of or by whom. Pure McCarthyism & totally indefensible. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

if you’re an isolated, angsty, strange young man, please know that you can become a Kierkegaard scholar instead of joining fringe online communities

“We have a right to know the charges against us, to know who has made the charges and to review them and defend ourselves… But none of that has happened, which is why we’re in Kafka-land… It is an enormous breach of trust.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

“Did you consider not complying with this request?” Judith Butler spoke to @samtlevin.bsky.social about being reported to the feds by UC Berkeley for supposed antisemitism

Clutching my pearls that a college student might learn about redlining and residential segregation, which is totally a woke conspiracy and not, y'know, an objective fact which anyone can see for themselves in the actual government documents.

Rather than reading the NPR produced infomercial for this cretin, perhaps consider how we can value the labor of humans. open.substack.com/pub/bibliora...

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.

Our book is out!! Happy publication day to our fantastic team of editors and authors.

A thread devoted to Jacob Lawrence, one of the great American artists of the 20th century, born #OnThisDay in 1917. First up, one of my favorite paintings by him: Sidewalk Drawings, which celebrates visual power of human mark making with two girls exuberantly drawing in chalk on a city sidewalk

Attention #AcademicSky Everyone is talking about books, but thousands of academic journals were also pirated and are entitled to up to $3,000 *per pirated volume!!!* if editors submit titles to join the suit. Incredible opportunity for underfunded journals to get some $$! #SkyStorians #MedievalSky

I’ve said this before but this is one of the downstream effects of the hollowing out of the professoriate. It’s why everyone (incl. and esp. tenureds) should always have been wary of adjunctification: those with tenure/TT positions have to do even more work; too many w/o academic jobs can’t.

The AI authorship issue is real. We've caught papers that looked OK but had references to works by the *journal editors* that *do not exist*. Like, don't send us papers citing papers we know we didn't write, right?

Any guesses about the writing on this shirt? It looks like Japanese to me, hentaigana or some such?

“Massachusetts will require health insurers operating in the state to cover vaccines recommended by the state's department of public health. Massachusetts is the first state to mandate insurance coverage of vaccines even if the federal government stops requiring it.” www.axios.com/2025/09/04/m...

Next they'll be rewriting textbooks to say Japanese American internment camps were delightful summer resorts.

We have forgotten all the ways people used to get toxins out of their food before federal regulation. It's not that food and water used to be cleaner -- it's that domestic work used to include detoxing everything we put in our mouths!

🤬🤬🤬

Make sure your work is peer reviewed but we're not going to recognize DOING peer review as valuable OR if we do we'll overload you with so much other service that who has time for it? But the entire inward-facing value system is the OPPOSITE of what's BEST abt research--its inter-institutional dev't

It seems like the uni is leaning on the claim that UPs don't serve students/undergrad education, thus further undermining the link b/w research and teaching. But there's also this persistence problem with unis' sort of territorial tribalism/IP obsession.

The published books I noted thus far weren't published by Bucknell UP but that's the point. They were pub'd by Virginia, Edinburgh, Delaware...And presumably Bucknell will keep expecting their fac to publish bks, reaping the prestige born of others' labor and investment while disinvesting themselves

Side note: I look forward to Chicago and any other schools suspending PhD admissions and hiring also suspending publication requirements for current faculty in those fields since such reqs presuppose the existence of an adequate pool of peer reviewers