Her office said the Office for Students (OfS), which regulates universities, had received reports of speakers and lecturers being harassed and blocked for holding gender-critical or religious views, of foreign interference suppressing academic freedoms, and of ideological belief requirements featuring in job advertisements.

The OfS will be able to use the new complaints scheme from September. From April, it will be able to fine universities the greater of £500,000 or 2 per cent of their income, which would amount to millions of pounds for large institutions, for breaches under the Freedom of Speech Act. Ultimately, universities could be deregistered for egregious cases.

Bridget Phillipson will introduce new laws to make it possible for Universities to be fined millions of pounds if they don't silence students who protest bigots invited onto their campuses. It's like the Tories never left office.

The RGS higher ed section is now on bluesky!

It's important to remember that political genius Kier Starmer and his cronies ratfucked Faiza Shaheen on the eve of the general election, because they have more in common with Ian Duncan Smith than someone with morals.

The closure of Southend rips away jobs, education and the lifeblood of local businesses.

The rationale? Barely fills an A4 page.

In Westminister Yesterday MPs & union reps handed a vote of no confidence in Bowen to education minister Jacqui Smith.

I have been using powerbi this morning and I would now like to go live in the woods. I KNOW SQL, JUST LET ME WRITE A QUERY. I DON'T WANT TO CLICK ON ANYTHING.

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Copilot can fuck off. I've now deactivated it on outlook 6 times today. Take the hint, Microsoft.

I've been languishing on a waiting list for over 12 months, but seeing that private firms have made £0.8 billion during that period makes it all worthwhile.

A 'Dinosaur Smarties' Easter egg.

Erm, they're called palaeontologists, actually.

This is so, so well-articulated.

Feb 14, 2025: Guardian Media Group today announced a strategic partnership with Open AI, a leader in artificial intelligence and deployment.

Highlighted section of the Copilot ToS which says "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros... is it good to build an entire economy and software infrastructure on this

Remember when that dangerous maniac Jeremy Corbyn proposed investing in UK drug manufacturing to better insulate us from supply shocks like this?

Thank god we put a stop to that nonsense

This is incredibly relevant for many of us in academia

What is needed now is not managed messaging but honesty.”

Relieved to see politicians recognise & call out the terrible managerial practices so many have been gaslit in accepting. No, behind-closed-doors tickbox conversations aren’t consultation. No, evidence-free decisions aren’t acceptable. #UKHE

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Confusingly, TPS is used for most academic and many academic related posts at post-92 universities. So it's a massive erosion of people's benefits.

This is deeply alarming and further entrenches inequality between research and teaching posts. It might be instructive to see what the differences in demographics are between those two categories of staff.

Purpose of a system is what it does, etc etc

The troubles

Suspect Guilty GIF Alt: Suspect Guilty GIF

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

i think this is an important point - not just the way ai coding tools can affect an individual programmer, but the way it interrupts a social practice / a community of people making software

Yup! The only lessons UKRI have learned over the last decade has been how to appropriate the language of EDI without actually meaning it

Maybe this will be the performative cruelty that will finally convince reform voters to vote labour!

This is deeply suspicious. I don't believe anyone can turn around a competitive multi institution £40 million EoI in 2 weeks.

A lot of people say AI isn't very good for the world and its outputs are routinely unreliable, but these haters fail to see how it's revolutionizing how we incinerate schoolchildren.

Some quick back-of-the-envelope arithmetic indicates that this "cash boost" will support the National Year of Reading by giving each public library enough money for a one-time purchase of two (2) additional books for their collections or cover approximately three (3) man-hours of staffing.

I don't listen to predictions from a man who was so confident that the blockchain was the future that he named his company "block".

See also, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.

I heard today in a meeting that by 2028 my institution will be fully AI enabled. I'd love it if just once, managers were made to define their terms.

Feb 14, 2025: Guardian Media Group today announced a strategic partnership with Open AI, a leader in artificial intelligence and deployment