Stanford AAUP

@stanfordaaup.bsky.social

The Stanford Chapter of the @aaup.bsky.social. Fighting to preserve academic freedom for all. All Stanford academic staff are eligible to join. Opinions our own. Find out more and join here: https://aaupstanford.org

I just noticed that if you look over cardboard Jay’s right shoulder in this shameful tableau, you can see on the video monitor that there is a memorial service for Officer David Rose going on the same day. Officer Rose tried to protect CDC employees from the man shooting at them and was killed.

Tweet from Jay Bhattacharya that says I'm in my last week as acting CDC director, & my good friends there, who know my love of all things @WWE, unveiled this astonishing artifact. I won't let it go to my head, but I will forever remember the amazing people of the @cdc. It's been an honor to serve alongside them.

There is a photo of him standing next to a literal cardboard cutout of himself dressed in wrestling garb with a championship belt thrown over his shoulder. 

I apologize but it’s impossible for me to describe how cringe this is.

Universities need to stop half-assing their response to the all-out assault on science (and higher education more broadly) if we are to have a hope of surviving. We should know that a concept of a plan is not going to work. Universities need to coordinate and take bold action or we're cooked.

University science in the US needs a coherent plan

The Trump administration continues to degrade America’s scientific establishment, causing widespread harm to the country’s broader interests and well-being. Last week, the Association of American Univ...

science.org

Most-recent common ancestor of the bacterium that causes Lyme disease was about 60,000 years ago, well before there were people in the Americas. I don't think the chipmunks were doing gain-of-function experiments. Figure 3 from Walter et al. (2017): doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Phylogeny (i.e., inferred evolutionary tree) of the spirochete bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

Dated phylogeny of B. burgdorferi in North America. MCC tree of
the best-fitting model inferred with BEAST (relaxed log-normal molecular clock model; Bayesian skyline population size). Tips are coloured by sampling region. Evidence of ancient midwestern ancestry (the oldest internal node in each clade with support for ancestral location in the midwest) is labelled ‘MW’. Branch lengths are in years bp. Blue bars at each interior node represent 95% credible intervals of estimated node age. Branches are labelled with posterior probability values (not shown for shallow nodes for clarity).
Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · last wk.

RFK told Dana Bash that Lyme disease “almost certainly” came from gain of function research. Which is utterly false. www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdi...

It's part of a major federal court case over those cancelations. Here's what the government admitted as part of a process meant to avoid discovery (and perhaps spare it from sharing more damaging records):

Bild

11. I don't think I have to help anyone read between the lines here. AI: good. Universities: bad. Trades: good. Academics: bad. It's a straightforward continuation of the Vought/Vance "the universities are the enemy" program.

Fourth, we must prepare our research enterprise for the AI revolution. AI will accelerate and radically transform the way we do science. But even the most capable AI models will be slowed down in the bottleneck of institutions and systems built for the last century. As we renew the infrastructure that powers American science, we must reengineer it for the AI age. And even as AI compresses the time from question to answer, we will still need human hands to build the instrument or prototype. We must build that capacity, too, investing in advanced manufacturing, the skilled trades, and the vast pools of talent and tacit knowledge outside the traditional academic pipeline.

A quick word on Taco Bell: That's where we found the suspected lettuce, and it's not bc Taco Bell is gross. It's bc Taco Bell is REALLY GOOD at tracing product! Keeping track of exactly where they got their ingredients, & exactly what restaurants each shipment of ingredients went to!

“Practitioners of analytic philosophy will be aware that the charge of absurdity or incoherence is not an uncommon or even an unjust criticism of many claims made within their own discipline.” @ramoran.bsky.social on the Boghossian report on the humanities:

The Wrong Way to Criticize the Humanities

A recent report, commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University, invites further intrusions on scholarly self-governance.

bostonreview.net

This is crucial and often unmentioned. Almost every single diagnosis of declining faith in universities fails to mention that it is runs in parallel to declining faith in almost all American institutions. Any failure to recognize this means it is really flawed or not a serious effort.

Mark Copelovitch@mcopelov.bsky.social · 4w ago

👇🎯 The tell about this is that none of these people claiming academia had a trust problem benchmark universities to other societal institutions or spend any time banging on about the problems with those institutions: bsky.app/profile/mcop...

John Ioannidis recently blasted us as SBM for criticizing supposedly "serious scientists." But were MAHA/MAGA doctors serious scientists or political propagandists using science as a shield to stave off criticism? Don't trust my answer. Just watch their videos. My latest.

Should We Treat MAHA/MAGA Doctors as Serious Scientists or Political Actors? Their Own Videos Provide the Answer.

Although MAHA/MAGA doctors wrapped themselves in the protective cloak of science to stave off criticism, we are under no obligation to treat doctors who spread COVID disinformation and right-wing poli

sciencebasedmedicine.org