The Academy
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Nottingham faculty protesting proposed bloodbath
A philosopher at the University of Nottingham calls my attention to this: He summarizes the situation as follows: – the removal of just over 600 FTE posts, if necessary through compulsory redundancy in January 2027 (that’s around 50% of academics in arts). – local union (UoNUCU) has declared a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) starting on the…
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Federal judge orders Texas State to continue paying philosophy professor it wrongfully fired…
….in violation of his First Amendment rights. Thank goodness for judges, and FIRE, which retained the local lawyers representing Professor Robinson.
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The American Bar Association needs to investigate Texas Tech Law School for violating the First Amendment rights of a student
A Texas Tech Law alum writes: Texas Tech, as you might know, is in the forefront of demolishing any semblance of academic freedom. Their new system Chancellor (Brandon Creighton) is the former state legislator who authored SB17, the legislation that outlawed DEI, requires Regent review of syllabi, and loosens tenure protections. A Texas Tech School…
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Philosopher Ann Cudd’s rampage at Portland State continues
52 positions (including 4 in philosophy) are on the chopping block. As this informative post explains, the mischief originates with the Orwellian “University Innovation Alliance”: The UIA’s theory of institutional change rests on a set of identifiable assumptions: that transformation requires centralized administrative authority; that academic programs should be evaluated primarily through data analytics and…
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Another blow for American universities trying to recruit and enroll foreign students
From CHE: The [new Trump Administratin] guidance, which is expected to be released any day, would make visas valid for four years or the anticipated length of a student’s degree — whichever is shorter. Students in longer programs like doctorates would have to apply for an extension to finish their studies. It’s a shift from…
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How is your school responding to the “Canvas” security breach by hackers?
Most academic readers will have heard of this fiasco. How is it affecting grades, finals, etc.? Is your administration expecting instructors to carry on as though nothing happened? You can post anonymously, but please include a valid university email address (which will not appear).
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Frequency of fabricated references (probably AI generated) in biomedical papers over a three-year period
From The Lancet: Among 97·1 million verified references [across 2.5 million papers], we identified 4046 fabricated references across 2810 papers (illustrative examples are shown in the appendix p 5–6). In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025, this had risen to one in 458 and in the first 7…
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A philosopher takes on the “pedagogy experts”
Paul Schofield (Bates) makes the case against them at CHE. (Thanks to Brian Skyrms for the pointer.) UPDATE: Philosopher Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin writes: As both a tenured philosophy professor and director of a teaching and learning center, I read Paul Schofield’s recent CHE piece, “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong,” with great interest when I saw it…
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Arizona State using AI to chop up and repackage faculty lectures
Bizarre and pretty outrageous: Arizona State University rolled out a platform called Atomic that creates AI-generated modules based on lectures taken from ASU faculty by cutting long videos down to very short clips then generating text and sections based on those clips. Faculty and scholars I spoke to whose lectures are included in Atomic are…
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The Republican war on academic freedom and freedom of expression: a survey of faculty
From CHE: Academic researchers’ self-censorship occurred across nearly all disciplines, the survey found. Twenty-nine percent of respondents who lived in states with a [prohibition on] “divisive concepts” law said they had altered their research, and 10 percent said they were looking for a job in a different state because of the political climate. Researchers in…
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What an embarrassment: Harvard raising money to hire faculty who contribute to “viewpoint diversity” which is not an academic value
Pathetic. Public universities can’t do anything when their legislatures create institutes and schools for the purpose of hiring right-wing faculty. But Harvard departments will need to stand firm in what looks to be massive push for affirmative action for faculty with the right “politics” but not the right scholarly bona fides to be appointed on…
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“Distinguished” Yale professors write report that indicts Yale for the public hostility towards higher education
The report is here. Many of the authors are, to my knowledge, distinguished in their field. Remarkably, the report never mentions the massive right-wing media propaganda campaign to discredit universities over the last 25 years–no mention of Fox, Tucker Carlson, The Daily Caller, etc. The positive proposals are mostly fine (universities exist to produce and…
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The Texas war on academic freedom: Texas Tech University system edition
An outright ban on any teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity! As philosopher Alex Byrne observed on Twitter: Want to write your thesis on the fraternal birth order effect? (Gay men tend to have more older brothers.) Nope. “Graduate theses and dissertations may only center on SOGI topics as a strictly temporary teach-out exception,…
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Social science papers may lean “liberal”…
…but they do not lean “left,” and it would be nice if journalists were a little more careful about this. One entire social science discipline leans anti-left (i.e., pro-capitalist), while others may, at best, tend to be liberal in the parochial American sense. If only the social sciences really leaned left, we’d learn a lot…
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Does AI degrade human comprehension and reasoning?
Law professors at the University of Minnesota investigated, and came up with a somewhat more optimistic answer than a lot of research–although careful structuring of how and when it’s used is probably needed to avoid negative effects. Comments from readers who actually read the paper are welcome.
David J. Gunkel «Person, Thing, Robot: A Moral and Legal Ontology for the 21st Century and Beyond» (MIT, 2023) Link:…