Okay so you hate Ai cause it regurgitates stolen content and burns the planet and melts your brain BUT what if it was just a guy, just a man with a soul burning the library of alexandria to make subpar corporate writing what then hmmmmmm

Happy to share this statement from the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which responds to recent comments about my position as Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth Century Studies and work I supervise. Solidarity with all marginalised academics under attack by the peddlers of a culture war.

That's right — our four-volume series on nineteenth-century iterations of one of the most lucrative and polarizing sectors of the media industry is out at last! If you're curious about what could be included in a volume called PORNOGRAPHY AND SCIENCE, or about the project more broadly, 🧵:

Kathleen Lubey@kathylubey.bsky.social · 13h ago

This summer, a project 5 years in the making has finally seen the light of day. Thanks to my co-editors @sarahebull.bsky.social, Colette Colligan, and Lisa Sigel (general editor extraordinaire). We’re really proud of making the porn archive more accessible. Ask your uni libraries to order it!

Until 2022 I was one of that <1%. And it feels to me that due to its politicisation, the academic environment has become even more hostile to Black academics since then.

Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 3d ago

"Barely one per cent of professors at UK universities are black, so he was joining a small and highly visible minority in academia" - BBC education editor Branwen Jeffreys www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

In the Renaissance people theorized, since the Aeneid is great, if you wrote poems made only of words & phrases from the Aeneid rearranged they should be great too, since a great source regurgitated should yield greatness. They produced NOTHING we still read. Thinking about that a lot lately.

So the AI juggernaut is chomping up all the books. You know what comes next, right? The archive. And I mean the material archive, all the pieces of paper and microfilm still held in physical locations around the world. National, state, local archives... into the chipper I wish I was joking

The University of Toronto is advertising a tenure-track job in Global Anglophone Literature and Postcolonial Theory. I pasted information below. Full details: jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-... Closing Date: October 15, 2026

'A prolonged fall in the number of international students applying to study in the UK means “the wheels are rapidly falling off” the student loan-funded higher education system in England, sector experts have warned.' The world's 2nd best university system being killed by malign neglect. 1/3

Research Professional News@resprofnews.bsky.social · 2d ago

‘Wheels rapidly falling off university funding system’. “No sign of awareness” at Treasury as international recruitment decline worsens financial outlook, experts warn. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...

I got tired of waiting for the journalists at @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social to cover this (it IS summer), but this is to say that ALL the staff members in Women & Gender Studies here were laid off last week, on the top of the cutting of 5 lecturer positions in the program last year.+

It (nearly) lives! Forthcoming from OUP in November or December! My first reaction, for once, was glee — though the terror of writing a book is that it’s never finished. Eek! Woohoo! Wild to have proofs in hand!!!!

Once again and over and over until it gets through: archives and libraries scanning something for preservation is an entirely different story than private citizens and companies doing it, because there are strict ethical standards for the former and the latter consider them annoyances.

For the record, the proportion of professors at Cambridge who are Black is 0.4%. The number of Black people in the UK population is 4%. So the number of Black professors at Cambridge is ONE TENTH of what you would expect in a meritocracy.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 3d ago

Paddy O'Connell, asked on the programme to estimate what % of professors at Cambridge are black, estimated it at 30%. Seriously, 30%.

Philosophers often bring up the "principle of charity": a willingness to assume good faith in an interlocutor and treat them accordingly. It's good to do in many circumstances. But it is worth formulating a principle of not being a fucking mark. If not during the rise of fascism, then when? 12/

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content

I’ve gone on at length about this, and am working with the many, many others behind the scenes, but if you are alumnae (yes I fempluralized) or simply an admirer of the program, and you care about the future of the program, you might send your notes to the provost’s office. The general idea is that

John Aerni-Flessner@lesothojohn.bsky.social · 4d ago

This is an absolute travesty. Northwestern has, probably, the 2nd best library collection for African History/Studies in the USA (behind Yale and ahead of MSU, UCLA, etc). A self-inflicted wound that is absolutely, 100% unnecessary given the massive wealth of Northwestern--north of $15 billion.

'The Program of African Studies was founded by American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits in 1948 as the first formal academic program focused on Africa in the U.S.' Counting in my head number of African History PhD graduates of this progamme interviewed for academic posts since the 1990s.

John Aerni-Flessner@lesothojohn.bsky.social · 4d ago

This is an absolute travesty. Northwestern has, probably, the 2nd best library collection for African History/Studies in the USA (behind Yale and ahead of MSU, UCLA, etc). A self-inflicted wound that is absolutely, 100% unnecessary given the massive wealth of Northwestern--north of $15 billion.

Northwestern University admin accepting $35 million for the football program from MAGA donors Dick and Liz Uihlein while also shuttering the African Studies program and its 80-year-old history is a pretty good encapsulation of higher ed in the US.

my god. Seeing it visually represented like this makes my stomach turn.

Jamie Mortimer@flimflammery.bsky.social · 4d ago

Does this seem like holding someone to account?

This is the coverage of Arday **just in the Telegraph** in the UK. This is only the first four pages of results, just in one outlet.

None of this shit is worth our lives.

Yes. They hounded him to death. Days and days of breathless undoing. Damn them all.

we heard you hate AI, so at LFP we've been making resources for turning off AI features across the web. but we also don't think AI problems can be solved at an individual level, so we included some of our fav tools for community resistance as well. more to download free at libraryfreedom.org

You know what takes the sting out of removing “Dept. Chair, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies” from all my signatures? (My uni closed our department starting tomorrow.) Replacing it with “New Book Available for Pre-Order”! Turn my frown upside down by clicking on the link in comments.

70% turnout, in case you were wondering whether we have an engaged membership ✌️ www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

University of Sussex staff vote in favour of strike over job cuts

Member of the UCU union back a strike over proposals to cut 200 jobs at the University of Sussex.

bbc.co.uk

I find the discourse around "wokeness" to be dishonest and tedious, but this is what I wrote about it a couple of years ago and I think it remains correct: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

"There are many problems with the Boghossian Report, but the most glaring and the most representative of all attempts to pathologize humanities scholarship is that its authors neither want nor know how to read"

Brandy Jensen@brandyjensen.bsky.social · 6d ago

love love love this essay by David Hollingshead. So smart, so funny, and winningly earnest

This is so, so good

Brandy Jensen@brandyjensen.bsky.social · 6d ago

love love love this essay by David Hollingshead. So smart, so funny, and winningly earnest

but imbeciles, managers, & fascists conflate fun with ease & reward with money. The beauty of struggle is lost on them, the gorgeousness of not-knowing totally foreign to minds pleased only by the already-thought. I feel bad for these people, in a way. They are lost & empty. But they are the enemies

"I have to be blunt here: Our critics are really f**king stupid, and we’ve given them way too much leeway to conjure senile fantasies out of their own illiteracy. We need to stop taking their trolling in good faith, and we need to stop apologizing for our work." 🙏😭🎉

Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · 6d ago

predictably excellent from hollingshead, every word "Against the forces of antiintellectual fascists+AI tech lords, self-flagellating academics+immediacy fetishists alike, we need to champion the difficulties+pleasures of humanities scholarship with our whole chests." defector.com/humanists-ha...