Hey, #academic friends, Oxford University Press is sending around a survey about the use of AI in teaching and learning. If you haven't already received an email from them, here's the link! Tell them what you think!
‘He had a sarcastic turn of phrase’: discovery of 1509 book sheds new light on ‘father of utilitarianism’
“Last month, UCL academics unveiled the most significant rediscovered books left to the university in Bentham’s will, including the translation of Brandt’s Ship of Fools and a maths textbook explaining Euclid’s propositions. Their contents, together with the philosopher’s own notes, indicate how some of his radical theories were first sparked.”
“…what bothers me about this educational approach—the “problem” approach, the “STEAM” (STEM + arts) approach—is what it leaves out. It leaves out the humanities. It leaves out books. It leaves out literature and philosophy, history and art history and the history of religion. It leaves out any mode of inquiry—reflection, speculation, conversation with the past—that cannot be turned to immediate practical ends.”
A photo shared by Israeli soldiers and media on Thursday shows a soldier holding a book while a fire burns behind him in the Al-Aqsa University library, one of the largest libraries in the Gaza Strip.
Dear UK #Students, get yourselves on the #ElectoralRoll right now as you will be at home in July. Tell you families, tell your neighbours, tell your friends.
Today in Labor History May 15, 1969: Police fought students in the Battle for People's Park at the University of California Berkeley, California. The battle was over a small strip of land that the students had claimed as community commons. Governor Ronald Reagan sent in National Guards to reclaim the Park. Police gunfire killed a bystander, James Rector, and wounded 60 others, including Alan Blanchard, who was blinded for life. Street fighting continued for 17 days. Another 150 demonstrators would be shot and wounded. The battle for the park has continued ever since, with the university continuing to claim ownership and threatening to turn the park into everything from units of student housing to a parking lot. The defenders of the park have done numerous direct actions over the past 50 years to defend the park, provide mutual aid, provide free food and clothes to unhoused folks, and offer community classes. As recently as 2024, the cops have attacked, beaten, and/or arrested park defenders.
Trump, at a rally in Waukesha, #Wisconsin, called for tougher action against campus protests & again suggested some of the protesters were paid actors. He called on college presidents to “remove the encampments immediately, vanquish the locals & take back our campuses for all of the normal students.”
For now, #Biden is taking a hands-off posture toward the unrest & has no plans to step up his involvement in escalating clashes between #police & #protesters, WH & campaign advisers said, even as #Trump looks to capitalize on the issue.
"The term “eugenics” (from the Greek for ‘well born’) was birthed here in Cambridge by Trinity’s own Francis Galton in 1883. Galton was inspired by his cousin Charles Darwin and adapted the idea of natural selection to presuppose that the survival of the fittest had been distorted by social welfare policies."
In the late ‘60s, to right-wing activists, communists were over-running #college campuses and #university administrators needed to be subpoenaed and law enforcement sent in to forcibly end protests.
In 2024, to right-wing activists, antisemites are over-running college campuses and university administrators need to be subpoenaed and law enforcement sent in to forcibly end protests.
And here's a piece I wrote on why universities are reluctant to run their own Mastodon servers (recently updated with information on referrer tracking and social media platform support)
While I fundamentally disagree with the wholly instrumental view of education (that its just about preparing workers for work), given this is largely the view of the Tories, their treatment of arts education is either economically illiterate or driven by non-economic reassign....
I suspect its the latter; whatever the arts economic contribution, the right seems just to hate the creative sector & so their policy disregards their own economic logic!
The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hyper-competition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship.
Not sure I can bring myself to watch this, with major redundancies at my university and others, and whole departments being closed down, because there are not enough students. The whole sector is breaking apart. I hope the series will consider this too.
Yes, your son should go, and even better if he chooses a subject like #Anthropology which is shrinking just as the world needs it more than ever #university#UK#TheCrumble
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
“I am sick of higher education leaders, I am sick of neoliberal thinking, I am sick of scarcity mindsets, I am sick of austerity, I am sick of senior management lacking morals, I am sick of education being decimated, I don’t know how we hang on + do important work for students”