Penn State Comp Lit departmental statement on in-class tech use (recommended), posting here in case you are working on one of your own or want to use/copy/edit for yourself.
Eric Hayot
@ehayot.bsky.social
Teacher (Penn State), writer of books about China and the West, literary worlds, academic style, history of the humanities. New project on the end of aesthetic history. Arsenal fan, occasional Cassandra.
Penn State comp lit departmental statement on AI (recommended, not required), posting here in case others are drafting their own (or want to copy/use/rework).
utterly patient response to professional misconduct Appiah DOGEd disciplines and fields about which he knows nothing, incinerating his reputation in the process "He just hasn’t done the reading."
Gabriel Hankins@gabrielh.bsky.social · 3w agoMy response to Appiah's "field report" is up: please repost www.chronicle.com/article/kwam...
Great piece by @gabrielh.bsky.social on the recent Vandy/Wash U report on the humanities... www.chronicle.com/article/kwam...
Opinion | Dear Critics of Literary Studies: Do the Reading
The philosopher’s report on the state of literary studies is a shambles.
chronicle.com
Sounds great. Now please fund universally.
Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa@benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 3w agoA really interesting piece on reducing AI cheating in the classroom from a Professor of English and former Dean of Humanities at University of Utah. The solutions? Smaller classes, lower teaching loads for faculty, and in-person classes.
A really interesting and important piece on the history of literary criticism, and the way it produces an axiology of the aesthetic...
Here’s a must read critique of that “report” on the humanities/soc sciences. “But you know how when someone says ‘I don’t want to say X, but,’ the only important part of the sentence is the part that comes after the ‘but’?” @michael-berube.bsky.social @pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social
Report on the State of a Report (on the Humanities) - Pittsburgh Review of Books
On June 5, 2026, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article in a genre that has unfortunately become all too familiar in that venue titled “Has
pghrev.com
"This committee’s report would be terrible in the best of times, with its secret evidence and embarrassingly weak arguments compounded by a call for administrative repression. But to make these fantastical claims during the middle of a war against the humanities is a particularly dangerous delusion"
JJohn K. Wilson@johnkwilson.bsky.social · 2mo ago
My column today for @insidehighered.com criticizes the new report on the decline of the #humanities and all its flaws. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...
OK... I wasn't going to do a thread about this, but after trying to draft something short and pithy, I'm going to. It's a thread from my perspective, as someone who was a student of Paul Boghossian, an analytic philosophy acolyte, who abandoned the views of this about 15 years ago. 🧵
Des Fitzgerald@desfitzgerald.bsky.social · 2mo agoVery awkward for the presidents of two major US universities, as well as a series of highly regarded scholars (Keane Anthony Appiah!) to publicly shit in their own their trousers like this: www.vanderbilt.edu/principles/s...
I thought this was very good. It also got me thinking: I can tell *immediately* when my writing has been edited by someone else, because I know my voice so well. I assume others are the same. I wonder what it means to never gain that ability. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...
Writing, Cognitive Offloading and Generative AI (opinion)
Neither paradigm captures what matters when it comes to questions of cognitive offloading.
insidehighered.com
This is a diabolically evil report. That is the only way to put it. Its objective is to reignite the culture wars using the imprimatur of both the university and prominent scholars so as to sow deep epistemic doubt about the humanities and hasten the project of killing us off entirely.
Josh Shepperd@joshshepperd.bsky.social · 2mo agoI got through a bit of this already notorious report, written by very prominent philosophers about the “decline of the humanities.” Everyone on this report is smarter than I am, yet none of them seems to understand what it’s been like to navigate the academy since the late 1990s.
So the Rosenbaum FUTURE OF TRUTH thing is appalling, but let’s not pretend this is an aberration: the over the fence talk I hear is that full on AI is now the norm in trade nonfiction.
I Was a University AI Czar. I'm Not Equipped to Teach in the Age of AI. jgellers.substack.com/p/i-was-a-un...
I Was a University AI Czar. I'm Not Equipped to Teach in the Age of AI.
Over the past academic year, I served as the Inaugural Faculty Fellow for Artificial Intelligence (AI) at my university, a mid-sized public institution in the South.
jgellers.substack.com
Please read and share this story. Grateful to @nbcnews.com for running this series on how cuts to Medicaid will dramatically alter how families care for disabled sons, daughters, and spouses. Great work, @mikehixenbaugh.com, and thank you for reporting. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
Families caring for disabled relatives face unthinkable choices as Medicaid cuts loom
President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” state budget turmoil and new attacks on paid family caregiving have people fearing financial ruin as they fight to keep loved ones out of institutions.
nbcnews.com
The best rational for getting off Canvas (or other PE-funded LMS) is forming solidarity with students. For years, several of my colleagues & I have opened each course emphasizing the surveillance & security risks of Canvas. Last week many students realized we weren't just a contingent of paranoids
Column three is toast, so they will revert to column two.
Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · 3mo agoEvery CFO at every Canvas institution should put a stop payment on the next SaaS withdrawal. Things do not get better from here.
In the lawsuit by the MLA, @acls1919.bsky.social, & @historians.org, the court has ruled that termination by the NEH of grants to support scholars, research institutions, and humanities organizations was “unlawful, unconstitutional, ultra vires, and without legal effect.” www.mla.org/Resources/Ad...
The whole “restoring trust in higher ed” discussion falters in precisely the same way as Dems’ “if we listen, do good governance, and take the high road, we’ll win them over.” No you won’t. You can’t. You’ve misdiagnosed the nature of their “distrust.” 1/
Always heartening when my dear colleagues in the Law and Business schools oppose a union because they got theirs and what even is a university? Shouldn't we spin off the high-performing divisions and let the devil take the hindmost in Social Work and Arts & Sciences? docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Marshall Faculty Position in Opposition to Unionization
We, the undersigned members of the Marshall RTPC faculty, oppose unionization in the proposed bargaining unit under UAW. While we affirm the right of workers to unionize, we believe that inclusion in ...
docs.google.com
The always excellent @404media.co is on the ASU/Atomic/Canvas story. www.404media.co/asu-atomic-a...
University Professors Disturbed to Find Their Lectures Chopped Up and Turned Into AI Slop
ASU Atomic, a new tool in beta at Arizona State University, takes faculty lectures and chops them into extremely short clips, that AI then attempts to turn into learning materials.
404media.co
Faculty in CA in the 1990s successfully protested mandatory online components of their classes largely on the grounds of IP and labor intensification. We don’t have to accept this. We can start with abandoning the LMS.
Chris Hanlon@chrishanlon.bsky.social · 4mo agoMeet “ASU Atomic,” a subscription platform that claims to offer customized learning modules for fee-paying users. None of the ASU faculty whose course materials were harvested for the module I generated were aware that their image, lectures, lessons, or other teaching materials are being used.
Perfect case of what we termed academic content assetization in a recent paper, where HE institutions use their learning platforms to gather teaching materials from staff to then repurpose as future revenue-generating derivative products
Chris Hanlon@chrishanlon.bsky.social · 4mo agoMeet “ASU Atomic,” a subscription platform that claims to offer customized learning modules for fee-paying users. None of the ASU faculty whose course materials were harvested for the module I generated were aware that their image, lectures, lessons, or other teaching materials are being used.
This is a very interesting essay, and reminds me of a recent piece by Chris Newfield (link in next post). Newfield argues that humanists must articulate "a new cultural order" that includes economics. Thompson's piece (which I admire) and its facile theory of "facts" and "feelings" exemplifies (1/2)
If America's So Rich, How'd It Get So Sad?
Or: How the 2020s broke our brains
derekthompson.org
Absolutely true, conservatives realized universal higher education was turning their children into independent thinkers and they *hated* it. Students were even protesting Democrats for not stopping the war! They started by charging tuition for the UC’s under Reagan…