Humanities advocates can’t defend the value of academic departments of specialized researchers without defending specialized research. Trying to make generalized critical skills do that work suggests a lack of conviction and, ironically, doesn’t say much for our critical skills. Arguing that you need 20-30 full-time, permanent specialists in ancient religion, medieval poetry, early modern trade, and modern political history, because they all teach critical reading and writing skills is like arguing that you need a car so that you can listen to the radio.

As far as academic employment goes, a much, much, much bigger problem than senior faculty members not retiring is universities not replacing faculty when they retire.

The problem isn't that the pipeline to secure, senior status is blocked, it's that there is no pipeline. What, do we think state schools are cutting programs and folding departments and casualizing teaching because Old People?

This is something I wrote for my intro-level students in history, as a way to think about how to read the different kinds of text they will encounter. 1. Read actively. Write in the margin; don’t just underline, make notes. With practice you will learn to distinguish between ideas or arguments that authors emphasize, and details that you can look up again later. ...

This is one reason why pundits confusing declining *majors* with empty *classrooms* is so irritating — and why the Father’s-Day “solutions” proposed (“why not teach cool classes like MOAR WAR?”) miss the point.

My classroom is full, it’s just more and more full of non-majors.

https://twitter.com/drewmckevitt/status/1690524146751471617

History majors make up about a third of my scheduled intro lecture this coming year. Last year it was closer to 50%. When I started they were the majority. The subject hasn’t changed, but perceptions about future employment, a lot of them driven more by media than by data, have.

I think we’re slowly figuring out that students, parents, faculty, administrators all internalizing a vision of higher education as coercive workplace discipline rather than an opportunity to pursue intellectual interests brings out the worst in everybody and has no happy ending

https://twitter.com/rezekjoe/status/1658162017218478080

“They should force me to think”

half your classes are taught by grad students and adjuncts making a fraction of what you will at McKinsey, you could choose to think about that

Curious about the model of learning that necessitates “hurting” students but only coddling their edgy professors

https://twitter.com/christapeterso/status/1657235602532888576

Next time a senior prof breaks down at the thought of a barista’s pronouns or a Black mermaid I’ll remind him it’s supposed to hurt

Summer fun is pondering new readings for my "Knowledge and Power in Early Modern Europe" seminar @concordiahist (Fall). I've taught it a few times over 12-odd years and each time I keep a few and switch a few.

Past books that have worked well include (in no particular order)... Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? (which also sounds like the title of a first novel when you read it all together)
press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…

"The Academic Freedom Committee will make recommendations by consensus whenever possible" is a hell of a line gotta hand it to em, etc

.⁦@Concordia⁩ proposes to “protect” academic freedom by political & administrative discipline of professors. The policy is informed by the right-wing McDonald-Laurier Institute, part of the anti-CRT drive. Here’s the ⁦@concordiahist⁩ statement. drive.google.com/file/d/1T87JYf… There has been no transparency from the administration about the makeup of the drafting committee, no properly public consultation during the drafting process, just a tight deadline (today) for individual, non-anonymous feedback — that a right-wing think tank guy gets to read.

https://twitter.com/mccormick_ted/status/1637843621310529537

Today is the last day -- per the Provost's Office -- for @Concordia faculty to comment on the future of their academic freedom, and we still don't know who wrote the "policy."

https://twitter.com/mccormick_ted/status/1637843621310529537

Here is the @Concordia Department of History's statement on the policy (it's long, because there are several significant problems)

Interesting that ⁦@Concordia⁩ is considering an “academic freedom” policy that mostly gives administrators the power to punish professors, partly drafted by McDonald-Laurier Institute think-tankers who did not disclose their roles nationalpost.com/opinion/opinio… If you are actually concerned with academic freedom as it relates to academic teaching and scholarly research, rather than with the right up use slurs in class, you should be paying attention, because only the latter is getting meaningful protection out of this policy.

Like tens of thousands of others I went down to DC for an antiwar march, and another march to the UN in NYC (we didn’t make it), the biggest groups I’ve ever been part of, all the while shaking off the feeling it wouldn’t matter in the end. Only more horrors have made those fade.

https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1637824017448009729

After Trump it can be hard to recall the visceral moral repugnance of Bush, but it’s important to do so

When I think “dumbing down,” I think Enlightenment Now

https://twitter.com/caitlinmoriah/status/1629168824661725184

It’s kind of remarkable that a guy who has made “intellectuals hate progress” one of his signature claims should get in a public twist about “dumbing down,” not that anything he says is serious anyway

tfw your university is setting up an "Academic Freedom Committee" and academics are a minority oh well I'm sure senior admin just have our best interests at heart

Reminder that this formal state elimination of academic freedom and banning of fields of research and teaching began with pseudocentrist “Campus Free Speech” and “Viewpoint Diversity” movements, which morphed into anti-gender studies, anti-CRT, and broadly anti-history ideology.

https://twitter.com/jeremycyoung/status/1628870290745790464

“Liberal” clowns who think ad hominems violate their free speech have lined up behind the state dictating what can be studied and taught, and by whom.

I have just one rule for life, and it may sound unusual, but it's served me well: don't take advice from a man who screams he's being tyrannized by paper towels Cider-soaked compostable tissues would kill this man. The fragility is real

I'm teaching Darwin's Descent of Man (1871) at the moment and I am floored by how prevalent the idea that Darwin had *nothing* to do with Spencer, Galton, "social Darwinism," or eugenics seems to be.

The impulse to defend Science outweighs the willingness to deal with evidence. He repeatedly and approvingly cites "our great philosopher" Spencer (148) and Galton's "admirable labours" (46) and "remarkable work" (150n) on natural selection as distinguishing "civilised nations" from "savages" (158-9). Pages from Penguin ed.; thread:

https://twitter.com/Jairo_I_Funez/status/1555233292516982784?s=20

The exams office demanding that I supply them with a final exam a month before the end of term -- when I don't know how much remaining material students will get through, or how they will do -- is a perfect example of a university run for the convenience of its administrators. Imagine, for a second, a university that prioritized teaching, and created administrative structures and processes to facilitate rather than constrain it.

The more exceptional good academic jobs become, the more exceptional the ordinary mortals who are lucky enough to get them must be made to seem. This lies behind a lot of run-of-the-mill narcissistic behaviour on an interpersonal level but it also lies behind the brand differentiation-as-analytical innovation and minting of superstars that is central to so much academic hiring and promotion.

billionaires are, in the end, just ordinary citizens like you and me, and, in a democracy, that means we should do what they want it may be true that they are temporarily outnumbered but in the long term they may be the only ones left. we have to think about this responsibly

If you "fall" for this kind of thing (litterboxes for students, toddlers being brainwashed by CRT) it's not because you're horrified by The Excesses of The Left, it's because you want to be And you uncritically consume, and reflexively defend, a lot of media that supplies that want