More than any higher ed development in recent memory, institutional subsidies for AI at R1 universities prove that austerity is a choice. It is not “too expensive” to invest in a humanities research infrastructure; rather, it is a choice that R1 universities make not to & subsidize AI instead.

Avery@dyingsignals.love · 7d ago

The amount of money I saw one department paying for several AI services in a school year could cover the University’s pay one price textbook costs for nearly their entire enrolled student body in said department

Once again, the median pay for an adjunct professor in the United States of America is $3,500 per course. Not per month, per course.

Jed Brown@jedbrown.org · 6d ago

Oh. That's a heck of a subsidy.

The cultural disdain for English and History has never made any sense. Humanities courses were one of the only spaces during my BA where the goal was to think deeply and to write well, not just to memorize or to solve problem sets.

Evan Urquhart@evanurquhart.bsky.social · 5d ago

Who had "English majors too rigorous for students to handle" on your declining empire bingo card?

Sub Lime

Mark Doyle@markdoyle.bsky.social · last wk.

Make a band edible: Queens of the Scone Age

Renting? Too expensive. Homeownership? Too expensive. I’m about ready to live in the woods, which isn’t ideal for someone allergic to grass, pollen, and pine sap.

Calling #HistSTM folks: If you or your colleagues have experience writing amicus briefs, the AAHM Education and Outreach Committee is planning to host a training session for History of Medicine week this October. Feel free to reply to this thread, DM me, or email me if you have any leads!

Scholarship often requires slow and inconvenient tasks like “reading” and “thinking.” Now you can pretend to have done both!

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 3w ago

Tech companies don’t understand scholarship. ‘Quickness’ and ‘efficiency‘ are not always the right values. Sometimes you don’t want to “answer your research queries faster” and when you do, existing search technology is more than adequate to help you do scholar.googleblog.com/2026/08/quic...

I would prefer an academy where being “controversial” or “unorthodox” wasn’t confused with doing meaningful and rigorous research.

Zero new NSF grants in sociology, anthropology, political science and economics. The agenda of this US govt is to stop documenting the society in which we live while they are destroying it. We will find other ways to track and explain our times and fight to restore our research funding.

Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · last mo.

Finally, this has gone a bit under the radar, so I want to highlight it: The social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate (SBE) has simply ceased to deliver grants to many of its subareas. Any topic not specifically OK'd by the Trump administration is receiving zero new awards.

this is lying with statistics in 3+ ways. 1. y-axis crime 2. we have more recalls at this point in the year than we’ve had in recent years 3. recall counts aren’t very helpful measures because they don’t tell you anything about things like scale or health outcomes and severity.

Jonathan Howard@joho.bsky.social · last mo.

And the FDA is bragging that they are recalling fewer foods.

Andrew Baker was also a “token black professor” at Bates College. But his perspective on the events Tyler Austin Harper recounts in his Atlantic cover story is very different. Read Baker’s side of the story online today. newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/racism-and...

Racism and labor at Bates: the other side of the story

Andrew Baker responds to Tyler Austin Harper

newsletter.thedriftmag.com

A few things: (1) AI should not be used to assist writing. Cognitive outsourcing is bad. (2) The college essay is on the decline because of labor as much as AI. Learning to write well requires a lot of personal contact which neoliberal logics of higher ed work against www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/u...

What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?

Educators are worried that many students can no longer write essays without A.I. And it’s costing more than just grammar skills.

nytimes.com

Not to be some wild-eyed innocent, but I think it should be slightly bigger news that The Lancet have crunched the numbers and found that Musk's USAID cuts will kill 14 million people. And that's just by 2030. That's 9,600 people a day, every day, until the next world cup rolls around.

Jørgen Heszlein@heszlein.bsky.social · last mo.

New estimate of Elon Musk’s death toll just dropped www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Whatever else was wrong with the United States, we truly did have a higher education system that was the envy of the world. Now we’re lighting it on fire because some people are bored and racist.

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com · last mo.

There will probably be far fewer foreign students on college campuses nationwide this fall following the Trump administration’s crackdown on international visas. A new report predicts international enrollment will decrease by 9.5 percent this fall.

Today in completely predictable consequences…

The Real News Network@therealnews.com · 2mo ago

Four years ago, then-President Joe Biden and both parties in Congress blocked railroad workers across the US from striking. Railroad workers tell us things have only gotten worse on the job since then.

Ron Daniels contributing to this self-destructive nonsense is no surprise. At the height of the COVID pandemic, he couldn’t fathom why historians and anthropologists couldn’t access archival records or conduct fieldwork at home.

Jacob T. Levy@jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Four university presidents, "Andrew Martin at Washington University in St. Louis, Michael Crow at Arizona State University, Douglas Girod at the University of Kansas, & Ronald Daniels at the Johns Hopkins University" collaborated in the latest attack on higher ed. www.chronicle.com/liveblog/her...

Sometimes teaching is one of the best jobs out there.

The same goes for product safety. If you’ve never read about injuries involving wringer washers, glass storm doors, gas space heaters, or lawnmowers before the @cpsc.gov, there are some hard lessons to learn about industry self-regulation.

Will Borger@edgarallanbro.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I worked at Disney a while ago. Do you know why theme parks are so safe? Because OOSHA reps can walk the track on any ride at any time and any safety violation they see is a $10,000 fine. Each. Theme parks are not safe because the company cares. They're safe because it's cheaper to comply.

Our long-running suspicion is that people who follow CPSC on social media are really learning about safety and it's why we think every social media platform should give us 350 million followers.

Lauren the Flute@laurentheflute.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I saw someone on here casually mention "don't let friends deep-fry turkeys indoors" the other day You did that! You made that happen! Good job.

Many of these features are also characteristic of AI-supported undergraduate research. Few primary sources, almost no direct quotations, and no argument beyond “applying” or “synthesizing” existing literature.

Ben Williamson@benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/

Nationalize the airlines.

On my way home from #SSHM and #HSS. It was a privilege to present some new research on safety equipment and fraud and to hold a roundtable with the Injury Studies Network on interdisciplinary approaches to injuries. If you haven’t already, check out our essay on this exciting new field!

Injury Studies: Setting the Agenda for a Critical Medical Humanities Approach to the Control, Perception, Representation, and Experience of Injuries - Journal of Medical Humanities

This article describes a new and expanding field in the health humanities: injury studies. Following a recent international conference sponsored by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, the ...

link.springer.com

My expression at the airport.

hookland.bsky.social@hookland.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Those guardian grotesques who live high on churches often seem closer to God than we who look up at them. Whether Woodwose or Maned-man, monsters living wild in our imaginations are wise to the terror which is man. Their grimaces show they know us well. – #CLNolan

The thing about doing archival research is that you read documents that exist and you can precisely reference where in the archive they were at the moment that you looked at them, and then report that to others through citation. Yes, collections get reorganized but something is there or it isn’t.

CFP: Global Childhood (s) and Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Leeds 16-18 November. Keynote by Dr Sebastián Gil-Riañ. Deadline for submissions June 22nd hpsleeds.wordpress.com/2026/06/02/c...

Every single conference is filled with academics talking about how this period of UK higher education is the worst they've ever seen. The entire industry is collapsing and no one is doing anything. Union is dead, politicians don't give a shit, public still think we're all rich

not sure how many of us from the special issue are on bluesky, but here's alex on home accidents!

Alex Parry, Ph.D.@safetyworkhstm.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Injuries receive less attention from health professionals and historians than acute and chronic diseases. My new article uses the history of home accident prevention to explain why public health failed to prioritize injury control and what made home accidents especially intractable. #HistSTM #STS

the special issue, on data and disease in historical perspective, was organized by the epidemy lab at the university of edinburgh. we all gathered online in the summer of 2023, then in edinburgh in december 2023, and the papers are all going to be so good

Alex Parry, Ph.D.@safetyworkhstm.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Excited to read this new article from @sarambsimon.bsky.social on electronic death registration! This piece, and several others, are currently available online from Medical History and will be part of a forthcoming collection on data and disease. #STS #HistSTM