The Academy
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The Mellon Foundation’s campaign to destroy the humanities?
From Tyler Harper in The Atlantic: Today, no single entity, including the federal government, has a more profound influence on the fiscal health and cultural output of the humanities than the Mellon Foundation. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ grant budget was $78 million in 2024 (its overall budget was less than half of what…
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AI developer warns the AI jobs apocalypse is closer than we realize
Here; an excerpt: [O]n February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been…
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Ambitious class action lawsuit against academic publishers dismissed
Here. (Earlier coverage.)
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Oklahoma Governor ends tenure for all future hires at all the state’s public colleges except…
…the two research universities, the University of Oklahoma at Norman and Oklahoma State University. There, faculty will be subject to post-tenure review, which even twenty years ago was already extremely common. Post-tenure review can be abused, of course, but it is not, in principle, inconsistent with tenure, which does not mean “life-time appointment,” as is…
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40% of Stanford undergraduates have disabilities?
This article makes it sound like a scam. Is it? I and readers would benefit from actual analysis and information, not emotive responses, which will not appear. Thanks.
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The Texas war on academic freedom: University of Houston edition
The President of the University of Houston has decided that state law requires her to ask all faculty to affirm they are not “indoctrinating” students. Here are her letters to the faculty on the subject: first, second. The first letter states that, “Our responsibility is to give them the ability to form their own opinions,…
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Viktor Orban is now running Texas A&M
The latest embarrassment, one straight out of the Hungarian playbook: the university closes it’s Women’s and Gender Studies program.
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Texas has paused H-1B visas at its public universities (and agencies), and Florida appears poised to do the same
This will be very bad for the public universities in these states. According to the preceding CHE article, the University of Florida had 131 such visas approved just in 2025; Texas A&M had 121 and UT Soutwestern (a major medical research center in Dallas) had 119. Any university strong in the natural and biological sciences…
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Emory fires tenure-track professor of medicine…
…because her father is a senior official in the Iranian government. The last time I looked, the “sins” of the parents were not grounds for removing a tenure-track faculty member from their job. Please email me if you have more information about what looks like a pretty blatant violation of the contractual rights of a…
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Reflections on the academic career of a married couple
Interesting reflections from Rachel Laudan about her and Larry Laudan’s career and intellectual work. I had the good fortune to get to know them both when I worked in Austin, and to visit with them later in Mexico. I still remember the day Larry came to my office to introduce himself, and I said, “I…
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Texas launches portal for the public to lodge complaints against colleges
This should do wonders for the already fragile state of academic freedom in this benighted state. (Thanks to Jason Stanley for the pointer.)
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Graduate school admissions in the age of AI
This is going to become a very serious issue. PhD and MA admissions depend very importantly on the writing sample. What do programs do when they later come to suspect the admitted student used AI to produce the writing sample? I think all graduate programs need to adopt an absolutely draconian rule, namely, automatic expulsion…
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Philosopher Jason Stanley (now at U of Toronto) urges Canadians not to send their kids to U.S. universities
Stanley, who decamped from Yale to Toronto after just a few months of Trump’s reign of lawlessness, advises Canadians not to send their children to U.S. universities. An excerpt: I have heard Canadians hope their children might attend university in the U.S., apparently unaware that they would be plunged into an unfree society and subject…
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Professor Peterson at Texas A&M revises his syllabus.
A propos the story we broke a few days ago, Professor Peterson kindly shared the new syllabus: https://leiterreports.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Syllabus-PHIL-111-S-2026-_-Peterson_censored.pdf He wrote to his Chair, Professor Sweet, as follows: Dr. Sweet, As you may have noticed, I believe it is important to document that philosophy professors at Texas A&M University are not permitted to teach Plato at…
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“The Lost Generation,” i.e., white guys who couldn’t get jobs they once might have gotten, starting around 2014
Several readers sent this article which clearly describes a real phenomenon, although I’m skeptical 2014 is the relevant start date, although the “Great Awokening” circa 2011 certainly accelerated an existing trend (2014 was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the year the online philosophy profession went crazy). But the article does adduce some striking numbers: White men…
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…