Notably, this incident does not correspond to any of the videos posted online by SOUTHCOM.

Goldsmiths students occupy library in protest against job cuts Group demands university leaders rule out compulsory redundancies and course closures following new cost-saving plans

'The students – who have launched a “Free Goldsmiths” campaign – are asking for “immediate widespread transparency” about the latest redundancy plans and the state of the university’s finances. They...demand that university leaders rule out compulsory redundancies, course closures and mergers.' 1/2

Well he DOES love the 1890s. Maybe he can have his own Paquete Habana.

Honestly I’m amazed the article didn’t mention AI. If you grade a course based only on papers, and you never see the students, and completion speed has gone up in recent years…what do you THINK is going on???

Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators - The Boston Globe Some students are finishing online degrees in weeks or months.

The students here aren’t doing anything wrong. The problem is that the “colleges” and their accreditors have completely failed at making sure the degree means anything.

AI makes this 1000x worse; it could “speed-run” these degrees without ANY student effort. Online asynchronous ed is a crisis.

This is the apotheosis of the Administrative Mindset: everything is just a communications problem.

That’s the job, whether it’s a corporation or a university or DOGE: you cut jobs. If anyone doesn’t like it, that’s just a “communications problem,” the decision itself is never wrong.

'AI boosters...think that when people write they are directly transferring...ideas that exist pristinely in their heads directly into language. They see the effort of writing as something that gets in the way of this pure process. They see writing as a transparent process of transference'. 1/2

Maybe when THEY are scared by who Trump would replace them with

Could they really be this dumb? Not retiring this year actually could hand the Court to the Dems in 2029

And I wonder about accreditation problems. In the law school, for example

(if you can't get past the paywall, the bill isn't just about genuine financial crises, like many headlines say; it allows firing for "low enrollment" or "misalignment of revenue and costs," whatever that might mean, with 30 days' notice

it's hard to see how this actually achieves anything, aside from satisfying ideological goals--the ideology being that only scared employees are "productive"

Kentucky GOP Overrides Beshear's Veto of Faculty Firing Bill A new law says Kentucky public college and university boards can lay off even tenured faculty for “bona fide financial reasons” including, but not limited to, low enrollment in a major or “misalignmen...

Obviously this will make hiring+retention harder. But also:

1) It'll break budgets. How much will they need to pay business+STEM faculty, without tenure?

2) Research, not teaching, makes you mobile. So if profs can be fired anytime, they will spend more time on publishing, less on students. Oops.

yeah, if it's true that entry level jobs in white collar professions will go away, but that society will still need *senior* lawyers, software engineers, accountants, etc, then logically we need to EXTEND education (so people can get the wisdom they would've once acquired through grunt work)

This does show how the wind is blowing in elite opinion though.

In 2017 the framing was "Trump voters took him seriously but not literally, and that's a problem for Democrats."

Now instead it's framed as "Trump voters took him seriously but not literally, and that's a problem for TRUMP."

Higher ed without faculty would be a dream come true for so many

The Higher Education We Can Afford Hampshire College closes and an institute without faculty arises.

The same week Hampshire College (a place predicated on community between faculty and students) closes, the Khan TED Academy (an institution without faculty) rises. Academic freedom depends on the shape and kind of our institutions. substack.com/inbox/post/1...

Delimitating Northwestern Ottoman Borders: An Analysis of 1830 Ottoman-Russian Border Protocol From the 18th century until 1829, Russia persistently exerted pressure on the Danube frontier through successive wars with the Ottoman Empire. By the end of the century, the occupation of the fortress...

論文　オスマン帝国の北西国境：1830年オスマン・ロシア国境プロトコルの分析
Engin, Hakan, ve Serkan Keçeci. 2026. “Delimitating Northwestern Ottoman Borders: An Analysis of 1830 Ottoman-Russian Border Protocol”. Kadim, sy 11: 1-40. otmn
doi.org/10.54462/kad....

That suggests educational credentials, especially from public universities, will be the only route left to allow social mobility. Too bad we’re not investing in that any more!

For the cost of one Harvard Professor of the Constitution Only Applies to White People, you could endow 10 professorships of any less commonly taught language at any university in the USA

For all the problems in US academia, *most* of us still have the autonomy to do things like this, and we should use it while we can.

Device-free classrooms mooted in Yale plan to rebuild public trust Ivy League university also urged to look again at tuition costs, free speech rules and admissions policy after wide-ranging inquiry into declining public support

Interesting to see Yale piloting device-free intensive classrooms. One of the casualties of the current hoovering-up-of-students mode of staying solvent has been attrition of just such teaching and a reluctance to expect (much less require) students consistently to attend and engage in person.

What AI Can’t Do AI may replace narrow technical skills, but the liberal arts equip students with the critical thinking employers increasingly demand.

“Today’s students might think AI has made the liberal arts irrelevant. Yet this centuries-old educational tradition is precisely what they will need to thrive, personally and professionally, in the age of AI.“

I just saw a Tony Robbins ad offering to teach you about AI so you aren't left behind. Like, if AI really is that good, why do I need a washed up celebrity who has no expertise to teach it to me? Why not just use AI to learn?

A google AI overview resulting from a search for a course titled "Russia and the World." It says: "Russia and the World" is a course (HUMA 547 or HIST 547) offered at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) that covers the history of the Russian state from the 1200s to the present, focusing on imperial expansion, cultural diversity, and international relations. It examines the continuities between Muscovy, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union. ® University of New Hampshire +1 Key Aspects of the Course • Time Period: Covers from 1200s through the Russian Federation. • Focus: Analyzes Russia's role in the world, specifically its relationships between East and West. • Themes: Includes war and society, social justice, political freedom, and state building. • Example Term: Fall 2024 (HUMA 547, 4.0 credits). @ University of New Hampshire +2 This course is listed under both Humanities and History departments at UNH. ® University of New Hampshire

I teach a Russian history survey course. I specifically did NOT focus it on "East and West," and I definitely didn't use those terms in the course description. But Google Gemini decided they should be there anyway, because you just can't have a Russian history course without an east-west obsession!

Words spoken just now by the chancellor of the Florida State University system

please do!

I wish I had something to suggest off hand. I've assigned selections from the Freddoso translation of Aquinas and then jumped into discussion from there. My own thinking is colored by the Whitman, Witt, and Hathaway & Shapiro, in the books linked in the thread (which I'm sure you're familiar with!)

In His Nakedness He Appears But A Man YouTube video by tjwparso

Also, Capt. Picard and Data went over some of this in their holodeck version of Henry V:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu25...