received my nearly 2 year old’s daycare progress report and noted that it was generated via edtech platform software by a company called TeachingStrategies which I then discovered was bought by private-equity firm KKR in 2021.
Three of my colleagues from USC did a long interview with Jacobin radio about our union, United Faculty, and it drops Tuesday, and if you want to hear about one of the country's biggest ongoing labor battles you better listen!
Two blue books in front of a blooming cherry tree
couldn’t be more excited for @anniemcc.bsky.social and @alybatt.bsky.social to be in conversation with @mattseybold.bsky.social this Friday at noon at Swarthmore. Hope those nearby can join!
I had fun (?), for instance, reading & sharing the Exxon sustainability page with my class this morning, which pairs beautifully w/ @andyhines.bsky.social’s argument abt sustainability logics’ fundamental purpose being to solidify the steady-state of a social order based on extractive domination. +
If only every month were national poetry month? While we work on that, check out this list of CUP books by @kristingrogan.bsky.social and @xenoglossic.bsky.social and @johannawinant.bsky.social and @afilreis.bsky.social and
yours truly. 🤩
A huge loss, a bad sign. Plus the elimination of Hampshire College means an end to one of the best things about Hampshire: getting to take classes there on UMass tuition. (I did, all the sweeter for having been accepted to but not being able to afford Hampshire.) RIP “the Five Colleges.”
Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe.
Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities
www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...
Baltimore! I am looking forward to @stschrader1.bsky.social ‘s launch tonight! Can’t wait to read the book too
And hes gonna sign it and we're gonna change the lives of thousands of contingent faculty and the education of tens of thousands of students
big day today, the Baltimore Seed Commons project I am part of has officially opened Baltimore's first seed bank providing free seeds to any and all! Find the stocked seed cabinet inside St Luke's Church in Hampden whenever they are open and take what you'll use 💚 seed donations welcome too xoxox
love this!
images of links to a July 4 2025 declaration from SUNY and CUNY governance leaders; as well as to HELU’s and the Debt Collective’s websites.
Images of the covers of Lend & Rule, and University Keywords.
Links to The Great Mistake, two pieces on medical debt, and the agenda for the SUnY University Faculty Senate Winter 2026 Plenary agenda, where Upstate Medical University students presented their research on these issues.
Article and book on debt: from The Debt Collective and Burdened.
Screenshots of text chats with a student governance leader organizing students to fight for med school/public health affordability.
Learned societies and academies, and their journals, need to take a stand. We need to make it clear that we expect our authors to be able to read (the references they cite) and write (the articles they claim to have authored).
The far Right’s enemies are fused together into what Musk so helpfully calls a “woke mind virus.” This works to provide a focus that papers over the contradictions between these different modalities of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms “the anti-State State.” As long as these different components of the governing reactionary coalition can be represented and see themselves as converging on common enemies, and as long as this production of enemies provides sufficient material lucre and political-ideological gain for elements of this broad coalition, then there will also be a need to keep up the tempo of social and political antagonism in a kind of restless flight forward.
"Trumpism has reached a kind of ceiling, it doesn’t treat itself as a hegemonic project, but instead as a project to achieve durable dominance with a mass base that’s not a majority."
appreciated this interview with Toscano.
communispress.com/preventive-c...
Relatedly.
it's officially out! :)
1/ Bloomberg is reporting on ED’s proposed new guidelines for accreditation. If an active, they would upend the accreditation system as we know it. They appear to have at least two important goals. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
WE DID IT!
Our illegal union @uam-umd.bsky.social is a lot less illegal today. 12,000 contingent faculty in MD just won the right to collectively bargain. Life-changing win for teachers and students. Only happened bc thousands of people worked together to beat our bosses in the statehouse.
things are terrible, but after a lengthy campaign the bill providing collective bargaining rights to nontenure track faculty at university system of Maryland institutions has passed the state general assembly and is now awaiting the Governor's signature.
mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/L...
Seems like the China piece here is the key—and another sign of collapsing US hegemony.
Read: "What Universities Can Be: Strategizing amid the Crisis in Higher Education," a virtual roundtable, made freely available: buff.ly/EJZuGXb
couldn’t be more excited about this!
Free Gifts, Service Work, and the Problem of Education: A conversation with Alyssa Battistoni, Annie McClanahan, and Matt Seybold April 17 at Noon Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College
Coming to @aydelottefound.bsky.social later this month.
Vandal Live with @alybatt.bsky.social & @anniemcc.bsky.social.
Lots of help from @andyhines.bsky.social
Currently reading this pair of new releases, both available from @princetonupress.bsky.social
aydelotte.swarthmore.edu/publications...
It is past time to do a power mapping of which consultants are advising which universities, and which Super Efficiency Optimizing Plans they're laying out as their Burger King menu of options
always follow the money
bsky.app/profile/anna...
I’ve found it to be really successful, especially when the recipe for collaboration involves bringing people with distinct expertise together to work on an overlapping topic. In projects where we have had to do more learning together, it takes a little bit more effort.
I haven’t done this for solo writing project but for collaborative projects this has been the primary method: a discussion amongst collaborators with thorough notes (not transcription) that we then subsequently shape into written prose
Video >>
"How to Build a College: Experimental Alternatives in Higher Education"
Series: Forgotten Pasts, Alternative Futures
Co-sponsors w @aaup.org Center for Defense of Academic Freedom and Critical Legal Collective
@aimloiselle.bsky.social
@jenmittelstadt.bsky.social
@eileenboris.bsky.social
thanks so much for reading!!