Just a reminder to all grad students that we definitely DO NOT keep a "Grad Student Power Ranking" in the faculty lounge where we update your ranking weekly based on performance (along with little arrows indicating your movement relative to last week). Just something faculty, again, do not do
Odds are that 40 years from now no one will be reading your work that often. But your friends and family might still think about you every single day — and if you do it right maybe with gratitude.
No career path guarantees happiness. Happiness is not contingent on any given path.
Chase your dreams! But don’t internalize that success in this one weird profession defines your life.
I have several advisees who have chosen this route, most of whom could have landed entry level academic jobs (postdocs or better) and simply wanted something different. All of them seem extremely happy.
Getting a PhD and then working outside academia is dope. My advisees who’ve done that are more or less uniformly happy and feel that they’re using the skills they trained on. (I talked to one today who just landed a great gig). Just wanted to convey that to anyone it might benefit.
Hannibal Lecter's victim inviting him to dinner and asking what pairs well with liver.
Looks like the prosecutors couldn’t make it stand up in court
Warren Burger
Donald Trump is very unpopular and being seen as opposing Donald Trump in clear moral terms is an almost instant path to political and cultural relevance.
I would like iphones to provide a nonlethal electric shock to people who use their phone on speaker in public. I’m willing to compromise on the lethality.
Headphone jack.
I often think about what it will look like to rebuild NIH. It's going to be hard, expensive work.
And that's if we stop the damage and start rebuilding soon.
It's only going to get harder the longer this lasts.
It would be much smarter here to separate out 1) which reforms would be better on the merits, that is, which simply improve the university in your opinion, and 2) which will move public opinion as expressed in trust in higher ed. These are not the same thing! president.yale.edu/sites/defaul...
Too bad Yale doesn’t have any experts on American public opinion to help them I guess.
👇🎯 This is precisely the thing in which we as scholars & universities claim to have a comparative advantage, & it is incredibly disappointing to see this report produced with a total disregard for rigorous analysis & the actual empirical evidence/data.
Confidence in vaccines has also declined in the last decade. It has nothing to do with the safety or performance of vaccines, and everything to do with opportunistic attacks from political elites.
Although I think the Yale report raises some important issues, my main take away was disappointment that a university would provide such a shallow and empirically unsound analysis.
Again, if you want explain why trust in universities has declined in the last decade, & you don't benchmark that decline against contemporaneous declines in trust in <every other societal institution> in 🇺🇸, then you cannot identify variables internal to universities as the main or sole explanations.
Elite higher ed has many problems, but the key factor driving down trust is political. Look at the graph - backlash against costs, admissions, etc. can't explain the changes we see. We should still reform our institutions and refocus on our core mission, but blindly blaming ourselves is abuser logic
Yeah - time and again people have merely asked the court to maintain the status quo while the court decides the merits of an issue. And the court has decided time and again that the greater damage would not be to allow Trump to dismantle your government before they rule on its illegality. It’s nuts
I think bsky is right that the AI rollout differed from other tech. Yes, it was unusually fast. And yes, it was unusually controversial.
Is that odd? Well, this is the first time we’ve distributed a symbol-system capable of conversation & zero-shot learning. It’s not inline skates, y’all. +
A federal judge in Illinois today ruled that the Trump administration improperly coerced Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-tracking apps in violation of the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Oh my God WaPO, the Pope is TOURING AFRICA. So maybe just maybe this isn't about Trump. Get some perspective people.
www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...
God helps those who help themselves.
Oh my God WaPO, the Pope is TOURING AFRICA. So maybe just maybe this isn't about Trump. Get some perspective people.
www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...
In that sense, the logic of viewpoint diversity contains its own extinction, if truth really is the goal. Consider that a researcher in 1952, trying to figure out how DNA is structured, would need to survey all the theories and viewpoints on DNA structure up to that point before making an evidence-based opinion. DNA’s structure was still (just barely) a live question. But by 1954, our researcher wouldn’t need to study the theories of the triple-helix model, or the side-by-side model, at all, because by 1953 the double-helix model had been convincingly established. Our researcher could safely reject the triple-helix or side-by-side models—or simply ignore them, not even stopping to sniff at those particular diverse garden flowers—because the local question about DNA’s basic structure had been answered. Academics do this all the time because we are pursuing local truths. If we are even half-decent teachers, we are instructing our students how to do it too. On any particular topic, viewpoint diversity might be useful to initially survey competing theories, and once a consensus of the truth of that matter has been established, viewpoint diversity on that topic is rightly, habitually, dismissed.
Really excellent logical discussion about the practical problem with 'viewpoint diversity' as a governing logic for universities-- if truth is the goal of scientific research. www.aaup.org/academe/issu...
The pope is quoting the beatitudes, not snarking on the campaign trail! Not everything is a partisan horserace you nimrods.
Do better!!
This pope is baller ...
this is why you're not supposed to cross those databases, idiots
