"SLACs face so many challenges today that their precarious survival may be more surprising than their escalating demise.... And yet the shuttering of Hampshire... feels different, not so much another liberal arts domino falling as the symbolic end of a whole tradition of progressive education"
The Entire Archives of Radical Philosophy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972–2022)
Even as liberal arts colleges, beyond a handful of elite and wealthy ones, are slowly but surely dying
There’s Trump-style corruption, which is all bullshit, bluster, bags of cash, and him daring you to stop him. And then there’s corruption of the John Roberts kind. It’s just as deliberate and destructive, but quieter, more genteel, like a cancer that grows in your bones rather than on your face.
NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!
Andrew, Marcel, & I introduce & draw some conclusions from a series of interviews w/ anthropologists experimenting w/ data sharing, process documentation, intermediate publishing models, & infrastructure building to enable new forms of collaborative knowledge making.
It is exceptionally well-written, even a page-turner, and also deeply researched and illuminating about the history of IAS and the social sciences.
See the new issue of History of Social Science, just published! Half the articles are free, including @brad.bolman.com’s account of Bruno Latour’s blocked appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study and Chas Camic’s short bio of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class muse.jhu.edu/issue/56614
In the early 1990s, Bruno Latour was not hired at the Institute for Advanced Study. I wrote an article about that decision and what it reveals about the science wars and the history of science studies, now live @histsocialscience.bsky.social
muse.jhu.edu/article/985884
On Elsevier's LeapSpace summary-and-citation tool: the camel-cased vacuity of the product name is an index for the whole thing: extractive parasitism on the knowledge that human scholars craft www.jeffpooley.com/2026/04/jo...
An effective long term strategy for those who care about independent and credible news would be to fund nonprofits to enable nonpartisan journalism. We can see where CNN is going, we need more ProPublicias.
This is absolutely disgraceful and deeply perpetuates the divisions between research active and teaching and scholarship colleagues. HE teaching requires research skills and this division is as incoherent and unsound as it is immoral.
Without support and engagement from the broader communities of institutions (e.g. HEIs, libraries, etc.) venture capital is looking to sweep in and centralise control of all of it. Some of it purely commercial, some of it for the data (which are, of course, not unrelated.)
Now is really a crucial and also vital time for supporting open infrastructures. Many have been built in many contexts. I'm reflecting upon @rupertgatti.bsky.social's end notes to last week's @copim.bsky.social conference on the work undertaken there to infrastructure the OA books space.
So the fact that we bombed a girls elementary school, while likely using AI for targeting, is going to be a major headline story dominating American news coverage when exactly?
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
James Baldwin
Irony alert: Springer Nature's Journal of the Knowledge Economy retracts 113 (!) articles from a special issue, for "compromised editorial handling," etc. Underscores one truth: special issue grift helps drive the journal-knowledge economy link.springer.com/journal/131...
Cutting, lovely sentence-level writing in this Andrew O'Hagan essay on the Murdochs www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Goldsmiths drops three out of five deals with big publishers.
University cites “financial and values-based” reasons for not renewing with Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley.
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-o...
"Quick, let's screw everyone over while they're too busy getting screwed over to notice" is a hell of a business strategy
Had a great day in Paris at the École pratique des hautes études mapping out the future alignment between @ojcollective.bsky.social & @openbookcollective.bsky.social. Here’s me with @rupertgatti.bsky.social & @joedeville.bsky.social (Fernand Braudel looks on). #diamond #openaccess
Our first report is out! Read on to find out why open research practices in AHSS are diverse and extend beyond the suite of practices emphasised within dominant accounts of open science.
Sad news but honestly a good innings for an APC-free, community-led open access journal.
An interesting post from Jeff here: with my technical hat on, I've long said that collectivised systems infrastructure is the way to go for HEIs and other overstretched bodies involved in open publishing. We need to pool resources and work together rather than waste money on individualism.
fundamentally, an open and interoperable infrastructure layer, especially if hosting/membership isn’t an option (or if it excludes in an important way) is going to need OBC-style collective funding. The @openbookcollective.bsky.social isn’t the right space for that, nor is @ojcollective.bsky.social
there are lots of ways to fund infrastructure, beyond grants— a free service subsidized by a paid layer, like @thoth-metadata.bsky.social (with, though and crucially, the @openbookcollective.bsky.social help). The other option is paid hosting, like @pkp.sfu.ca or Manifold or @janewayolh.bsky.social
the point about interoperability is well taken and utterly important. But one of the facts on the ground for infrastructure makers—nonprofit and open source—is that many of them can’t even pay the bills to stay afloat, interoperability or otherwise. Some of these are not in the OA book universe
Yes, so true about @openbookcollective.bsky.social already having an infrastructure package, something that I thought about mentioning. But it is, as @alittleroad.bsky.social you say, a broader issue, the lack of an OBC-like platform for infrastructure as such—book-related or otherwise
Waiting for an open infrastructure collective @oatp.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy @investinopen.bsky.social www.jeffpooley.com/2026/01/wa...
Until Miller’s gone these are just gestural purges to sanitize and consolidate his reign of terror.
Really hard to look at this and all the other examples of bravery and kindness from ordinary people in this moment not think also of the tremendous cowardice exhibited over the past year by some of the richest, most well-protected people in business, media and politics