Critique of the current article:

Critique of the current article:

Critique of the current article:

I do not think he adequately understands the contemporary rightwing authoritarian project.

This man watched the rise of Moms for Liberty and Turning Point USA. He saw the campaigns and policies of Trump, DeSantis, and Youngkin. He was revising his book while state legislatures were passing anti-equity and anti-trans policies.

And he argues that religion-inflected conflicts [had] cooled.

Zimmerman (2022) looked at the fights in K12 public education after Covid lockdowns and wrote that most "religion-inflected conflicts [had] cooled" as the "liberal side" had won on issues related to school prayer, sex education, and trans rights.

Forgive me if I do not trust his political analysis.

Creating a "set of institutional rankings around teaching"—as Zimmerman proposes—will not help colleges and universities. Look at how those "rankings" have been used in K12 schools!

We cannot neoliberal our way out of fascism. We have to organize for the common good.

Faculty and instructional staff: Join your union, talk to colleagues, fight for funding, fight for better instructional support and pedagogical training.

Their underlying data set—the Open Syllabus Project—are syllabi from 140 countries. Although most syllabi are from universities in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, this project is not only about the higher ed institutions Zimmerman critiques.

(2) Zimmerman references the research after talking about professors' obligation to "our democracy," which we can infer means democracy in the US (given Zimmerman's focus on higher ed in the US).

But data analyzed by Shields et al. does not exclusively focus on the US.

Two other thoughts: (1) These authors identified "canonical" texts guided "primarily by citation counts and our own familiarity with the academic literature" (p. 3). It seems like they chose Alexander, Coates, Said, and others because they had specific objections with those texts...

A screenshot Table 2 on p. 12 of Shields, Avnur, & Muravchik's "Frequency with which Alexander is Taught in Courses that Assign her Critics." The table is titled "Frequency with which Prominent Critics are Assigned with Alexander's The New Jim Crow."

It does not seem like a grand conspiracy that syllabi featuring prominent critics of Alexander, for instance, also assign Alexander as reading...

If I am assigning a direct critique of The New Jim Crow, I would want my students to have read that book.

A screenshot of two paragraphs on p. 4 of Shields, Avnur, & Muravchik's "Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues" that reads: Additionally, we flipped these analyses to see how often the most important critics of these canonical texts are taught with like-minded thinkers. Here again, we asked whether they are taught along with the canonical texts they are criticizing — or are the critics simply taught with other voices that tend to reinforce their central claims? To varying degrees, we found a strong asymmetry: While some of the most important voices like Alexander’s, Said’s and Thomson’s are routinely taught, their critics are not generally assigned along with them. And when we flip the analysis to see how often the critics are assigned along with the canonical texts, we find that they generally are taught together. In other words, in the comparatively rare cases when these critics are assigned, they are apparently taught to widen the conversation, not cement a different orthodoxy. That suggests a minority of professors do teach these intellectual controversies.

The analysis of Shields, Avnur, & Muravchik takes specific "canonical" texts and compares their inclusion in syllabi to the inclusion of specific critics of those canonical texts.

This reference is even more disingenuous than it appears... Zimmerman cites to summary of a working paper by those authors. The article has not been peer reviewed and has not been published in a research journal.

Another change that drew conservative backlash in that era and "broke trust" in higher ed: racial and gender integration.

Odd that Zimmerman does not highlight the segregationist and white supremacist aspects of the rightwing assault on colleges and universities.

🗃️ Funny how it's ALWAYS an older, white, male professor, who stems an op-ed that "actually everyone that came into this discipline after me is doing it wrong and they are the problem. Not me!"

There are so many leaps in this piece that it's hard to wrap my head around, but I'll try a few:

1/

The real failure to look in the mirror is academics falling back on comfortable “we’re partly responsible because we enforced left wing orthodoxy“ thinking rather than the less comfortable truth that Trump/MAGA are bad faith actors who will only be satisfied with resegregated MAGA academies

I promise I'm not trying to revive this discussion. Just wanted to highlight how this aligns with my "whose trust?" question. Nobody seems to care about the ways my trust in higher ed has been eroded.

Wake educators are speaking out, and they’ll be marching in Raleigh on May 1st! Will you stand with them and join us? #KidsOverCorporations

Great thread on jail support.

UNC-Chapel Hill faculty say civics school is eroding trust, formalize concerns about its leadership The School of Civic Life and Leadership has been controversial since its inception and increasingly so in recent times.

In a partially divided vote, UNC-Chapel Hill faculty have adopted two resolutions formalizing their concerns about the university's School of Civic Life and Leadership.

www.wunc.org/education/20...

Fund Education Not War and Deportation MAY DAY

you know you gotta get in formation/

I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS!!!

People hold signs that say “YES I AM READY TO STRIKE” at a 32BJ union event.

Mayor Mamdani speaks at a 32BJ union event.

Someone holds a sign that says “WE MAKE NYC HOME” at a 32BJ union event.

Mayor Mamdani chats with the 32BJ President Manny Pastreich.

34,000 doormen, porters, & building workers sustain 3,500 buildings across this city. The gap between the people who serve and the people they serve has gone on long enough.

I'll be proudly standing with 32BJ on the picket line. The people who power New York deserve better wages & safer conditions.

I hopped on Live yesterday to talk about some books that informed our short doc. If you’re that kind of nerd, here are a few from that discussion

Whenever a doctor tells me this, I instantly ask clap back, "Are you offering to supplement my salary out of your own, doc?"

Because, historically, I'd estimate that 80-90% of the stresses that have impacted my health as an adult have been economically driven.

#negreg

Does anyone know if there are actually reported statistics on the amount of Title IV spent to replace courses that don't transfer (or something like that??)

Doubling down on policies that will harm kids:

Republican lawmakers eager to begin tracking immigrant students in TN public schs also added a last-minute amendment that would require public schs to collect student Social Security numbers to maintain hold harmless funding over the next several yrs

Thanks! As an aside, Shires is listed as affiliated with America First Policy Institute rather than Heritage in the committee list.

Do you know what Shires was referencing when he cited a Rutgers study that 31% of people think it is okay to kill someone because of their ideas?