I would like to add that there is something indescribably beautiful about this humility in the face of knowledge and if we can help encourage it in even a tiny sliver of our students we have done something very, very consequential

Honesty this is one thing (major thing? only?) that in my experience separates the legit intellectuals I’ve met from the posers & bullshit artists. If you’ve ever studied anything seriously, the main thing you’ve learned is that you *don’t know* so much more. Real ones know their work is never over

I kinda wondered honestly

Great song tbh

oof. here, many colleagues including myself are parties to *active class action lawsuits* against anthropic for stealing our scholarship (much of which had been funded by the university!), and i admit there's something darkly funny in a school paying the company that just ripped it off

Screenshot from Georgetown Office of Finance Email: The University is currently negotiating an enterprise agreement with OpenAI for ChatGPT, that will incorporate data protections for the University. Once the University has that agreement in place, all purchases for OpenAI must be processed through UIS and reimbursements will not be approved. The Main Campus will process reimbursements for OpenAI through that time, as long as the relevant University policies around data protection are followed. The University is also working with Anthropic for an enterprise license for the Claude tool. The Main Campus will process reimbursements for Anthropic through June 30, as long as the relevant University policies around data protection are followed.

oh okay cool. does this mean the salary freeze and hiring moratorium is over,,

Also *publish & circulate the names** of people who submit slop to academic journals so they can be shamed by their peers, excluded from intellectual networks, and denied access to circles of exchange whose entire existence depends on norms of intellectual integrity

They think you're stupid.

I am a highly partisan Central Valley CA orange guy —Sanger, Reedley, Selma, etc: buy them if you can find them— but this is pretty bleak and hard to read

“They sprayed so much chemicals, the damn grass don’t even grow here anymore—you can quote me,” Gunther said. “I knew it back in 1990. I said, ‘They’re sprayin’ so much chemicals it’s gonna be the end.’ And it’s the end.”

very weird to live in an epoch of intensifying badness where insights about deeply concerning trends only become more true as time goes on -- flat circle, etc

“Fundamentally, this hiring push is part of a broader effort to diminish the authority and autonomy of the faculty. It would weaken a robust tradition of peer review and increase administrative control over University affairs.”

rightly so!!! 🥂🎉👏

Congrats Sheila— hooray!!!!

Really does make you think how people would think about academia differently if a full account of the academic job market were public knowledge

But I repeat that any institution willing to lead by investing positively at this moment of crisis cd basically buy up faculty on the cheap, stockpile geniuses, & create a legendary humanistic institution that would be positioned in a shifting market to survive these assaults for a very long time.

It is a recipe for a continual, unchecked degradation across the sector, a race to the bottom whose various modalities (AI onboarding, universalization of workforce development ideology, supercharged class stratification) work together to threaten the purpose & social role of the university as such+

it is the collapse of that larger system itself that's a yet more durable and therefore dangerous threat to academic freedom, since the new mantra in the age of right wing retrenchment will be: well, it's worse elsewhere, and you couldn't get a job there anyway, so where are you going to go. +

this is awful for many reasons, but IHE's framing suggests a frictionless market for academic labor where tenured faculty who dislike the terms of their job can leave for "bluer pastures" anytime. This recodes a functionally collapsed market for humanistic expertise in terms of free market fantasy

yes it is such a bummer. universities stop begging to be dominated by billionaires challenge

How is CEW funded? CEW is funded by generous support from its partner foundations: Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Arnold Ventures, Ascendium Education Group, College Futures Foundation, ECMC Foundation, and JPMorganChase. Note that Arnold Ventures is no longer a nonprofit but an LLC run by Laura and John Arnold, the latter being a former Enron analyst and hedge fund billionaire born 1974

cew.georgetown.edu/about-us/faqs/

Ad seeking a graduate research assistant at the "Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce," seeking "a motivated graduate student intern to help investigate ways to integrate AI tools into our research processes." The successful candidate will "have experience across multiple LLM's and related AI tools."

Very on the nose that the institute hiring a grad intern to "integrate AI tools into our research processes," i.e. make future grad labor unnecessary, is funded by at least two separate billionaires, Chase bank, & a student loan collection agency. Its name? The GU Center on Education & the Workforce

About halfway through my glacially slow reading of Brothers Karamazov (it’s my car book that I read while sitting around during kid classes) and in continuous awe that books like this have been written and that we live in an age where we can just pick them up and read them at any time.

Gov. Bill Lee signed a resolution defining family as a man, a woman, and their children, a move critics say targets LGBTQ+ households.

I am a gay dad and this is FUCKED UP

These same boards are the same ones pushing “AI literacy” into every corner of our institutions, so the convergence-effect Ted describes in this thread—increasingly powerful boards filled w/ rich ppl whose anti-intellectual, airport-book obsessions drive research & teaching—is also the story of “AI”

The Harvard story is lurid and disgraceful but it’s one of many. In other places people are hearing what they’ll be allowed to teach or assign from week to week or waiting for boards of directors full of rich alums with MBAs to tell them what history books are OK to have students read

Yes It keeps getting more and more insane as you read — unbelievable stuff in here

“Researchers that have attempted to make the university’s connections –and potential obligations– to the Caribbean explicit say their efforts have been stymied. …“The conversation is not happening,” said Carla Martin, a Harvard professor of African and African American Studies. “We all have tried.””

this looks amazing, JD! tx for sharing this

omg ours is happening today too! sincerely inspiring to see this entirely student-organized event come together and hear their absolutely blazing papers

docs.google.com/document/d/1...