“Educators have the right — and responsibility — to teach the full complexity of human biology and identity without fear of censorship or retaliation. Students deserve honest, accurate education that prepares them to understand the world as it truly is, not as some wish it to be.”

I so appreciate the framing here (in contrast to academic freedom arguments, which feel esoteric): By forcing educators to say there are two genders, the federal government (via university admins, school boards, etc) are requiring educators to lie to students. It’s lies!

Today I started my grad cognition class for our masters program (we’re on a quarter system). After introductions, I start with a brief historical consideration of cognitive psychology. I note that the Gestalt school was a cognitive approach based in Germany. We then talked about what happened. 1/

All my best to this FEMA employee, and may they succeed in their mission:

Whewwww

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered the University of South Dakota to reinstate a professor who posted criticism of Charlie Kirk on his Facebook page the day of the shooting, finding the action likely violated the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

"If you want these conditions to change, you will have to act. Faculty are afraid to carry out their jobs faithfully in what they view to be your interest, and there is little evidence that the administration will shield them... Missing in this equation is you. What kind of education do you want?"

And it's particularly sign languages in the Southern Hemisphere that have been added to the Glottolog database in the past 8 years.

Because sign language linguistics is a young field, many sign languages were undocumented for a long time, and still are. In fact, in Glottolog, the "sign language" category is in the top with regard to the increase in number of documented languages across version releases.

Critical race theory says that racism is the foundation of America and we need to fix that. PragerU says racism is the foundation of America and it should stay that way. Little wonder then that they object to anything that smells remotely like critical race theory.

New paper: We argue that linearization in language production is a foraging process, with speakers navigating semantic and spatial clusters. Lead author: Karina Tachihara, former UC Davis postdoc, now faculty at UIUC! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I think a lot of people are sleeping on how the ghost of Samuel Huntington haunts the Trump administration

These people seem to think the reason why race science disappeared at institutions was because it was considered taboo and not because it doesn't stand up to academic rigour

I wrote recently about my more than 20 years in higher ed: "The biggest change I have observed is that I, my colleagues, and our students are intensely surveilled in the hope that we can be publicly shamed, fired or expelled if we say or do something wrong." donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-hi...

Student newspapers, again doing the work @michigandaily.bsky.social specials.michigandaily.com/2025/grant-t...

The conservative activist behind the Harvard admissions and Abigail Fisher cases is now going after schools set up to educate Native Hawaiian students.

Not surprisingly but still unfortunately, the McNair program is under attack. I was not a beneficiary of the program but have participated in it as a mentor and speaker, and I have seen how it positively impacts the lives of its students. coenet.org/protect-the-...

What's being "protected" is not "free speech" but rather the RIGHT for white men to be white supremacists in public without any criticism or any consequences. I hope that's clear.

for the late nite crew: stat_manual() is super good

To the Trump regime, “fighting antisemitism” doesn’t mean countering anti-Jewish bigotry and violence. Obviously not. It means pressuring American Jewish philosopher Judith Butler to shut up, suppress other speech on campus, and install political commissars to oversee and distort higher education.

An antisemite shot two kids in Colorado, at least one of whom is Jewish. The White House “fighting antisemitism” doesn’t care, because the shooter was a student radicalized online into far right beliefs, which the regime is cool with, rather than a student verbally criticizing Israeli govt policy.

And let it sink in that a U.S. senator made a phone call to demand that a university dean be fired, and the college president did it immediately, the same day, no investigation and no questions asked.

Showing insufficient public sympathy for a person who called for the subjugation of 75% of the people in this country is now a fireable offense. The irony is that Kirk himself relied on the 1st amendment for the existence of his entire career. www.wgnsradio.com/article/9482...

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

Yesterday I wrote about how Turning Point put many of us on the Professor Watchlist What I didn't write about was the years of harassment from the right, including rape, deportation & death fantasies that played out in my messages, comments in the stories about me & voice mails. That’s his legacy.

When you publish a website that posts the names and photos of scholars who have written or said things you disagree with and encourage people to surveil and harass them, you are not, in fact, a “free speech” organization.

Unsurprisingly, the thing Noah Smith is saying is obviously not true. Look at reports on the reaction to the assassination of MLK... "glee, satisfaction and weeping in equal parts" (www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/r...) as the Smithsonian notes "some actually celebrated" (nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stor...).

I think we shouldn't put flags at half-mast for neo-Nazis, actually

A colleague on campus today asked me why I’d forgo office w/a window & I reminded her I get active & credible death threats. When I ended up on the Turning Point professor list I got them for a month. We have got to raise better humans & change our gun laws. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09...

A lot of the quotes from Charlie Kirk in this thread are incitements to violence. Weird that they're not making it into the obituaries about him or the statements from public officials asking everyone to tone it down.

Turning Point USA made a literal watch list of professors, primarily women, queer folks and people of color, and made us targets of political violence. I’ve received hate mail and harassment and death threats off and on for nearly a decade in part due to that man’s organization so 🤷🏽‍♀️

These people genuinely know nothing of the history—white conservative state & vigilante violence has been arguably *the defining feature* of U.S. history. They apparently also know very little of the present, in which, again, the very opposite is the case.

Anyway… I get mad about academic freedom yelling because a lot of it is very opaque and unhelpful. And I’ve seen profs use it as an excuse to be absolute monsters. The thing that most bothers me is this prof is simply correct that trans people exist and it’s stupid that being correct didn’t matter.

THIS. And we need to fight for the rights and protections of adjuncts and clinical faculty too-which is often the roles where Black and Brown professors are put in. ALL of us are in this together.

Being Latino and speaking Spanish is not probative of anything but being Latino and speaking Spanish The only way the Court could conclude otherwise is if it thinks being Latino is incompatible with innocence ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/noem-...

As the attacks on mostly Black & Brown women & queer junior professors was effective, the right attacked curriculum & programs like CRT and DEI. And because the universities & admin had produced no defense of us, they followed that same pattern of silence. Now they are the ones being fired. 4/

One admin told me he didn't want to put out a statement in defense of me because he "didn't want to fan the flames of harassment". And I replied, the problem is "I'm already on fire and you're letting me burn on my own." The universities & admin were content to let us burn. 2/

THIS. Campus Reform, The College Fix & Turning Point's Professor Watchlist created a harassment campaign of mostly Black & Brown women & queer folks who were also junior professors. Our universities & admins opted for silence when we needed defense. Here's the story they wrote about me in 2017 1/

almost hard to remember when the center and right were having a years-long meltdown about free speech on campus because students protested Milo Yiannopoulos speeches

Update: The President of Texas A&M, the largest public university in the US, removed the Dean of the College and Chair of the English Dept just hours after coming under right-wing political pressure because a student recorded herself interrupting a lecture’s class that included topics on gender.

BREAKING: The Supreme Court — over the objection of Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson — allows the Trump administration’s racial profiling of people working certain types of jobs in its immigration raids during litigation.

This point from Sotomayor: what Kavanaugh is proposing to shift administrative burdens from the state to the individual, with the widely-agreed upon expectation that the burdens will fall heavier on some groups more than others.

“What we can do is what generations of antifascist intellectuals, from Gramsci to Cayton to Claudia Jones, did eighty years ago and after: cast our lot with the insurgent class and enter the struggle”

In our new forum Robin D. G. Kelley revisits Noam Chomsky’s argument on the responsibility of intellectuals, written as the Vietnam War was rapidly escalating. His injunction—“to speak the truth and to expose lies”—remains a powerful call to conscience, Kelley argues. But today it feels incomplete.

"LLMs do not improve one’s writing ability much like taking a taxi does not improve one’s driving ability. ... What holds for writing is, of course, true for any cognitive skill to-be-learned in education, such as programming skills ... and these too suffer deskilling if not continuously practised"

We end on "Machine Yearning for a Better Present" because why can't we dream? Why accept that universities are not places of learning? Nothing, except industry and their paid shills amongst us, force us to accept this & this force is not one of reason, but one of regressive values & profit. 10/n

7. the kinda appealing, but substantively indefensible, idea that somehow AI is different to other technology, like calculators, in a pedagogical context — but we totally ban a great deal of technology in the classroom. (Section 3.7 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...) 9/n

6. the extremely unhinged series of claims that without training them on how to be users of such systems that we somehow fail as teachers — truly ludicrous, utterly bizarre, and in fact directly contradicts other industry selling points. (Section 3.6 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...) 8/n