does anyone know of any work that’s been done on career trajectories of (UK humanities) academics who have been made redundant? eg information about how many go into school teaching, early retirement, independent research? appreciate this is complex, sensitive and much data is too recent

You can succeed in the marketplace as a humanities researcher! By telling other humanities researchers that they can succeed in the marketplace. (Yes, I've listened to enough @ifbookspod.bsky.social episodes to know that the One Weird Trick to make it is selling other people your One Weird Trick.)

open.substack.com/pub/lizzywil...

On Redundancy

Four weeks ago, the university that I have been working at for 9 years announced massive, unjustified, reckless job cuts, predominantly targeting the humanities, arts and social sciences.

open.substack.com

It’s really starting to grind me down

Bridget Phillipson, reflecting on her years spent standing idly by while UK higher education crumbled into the abyss and tens of thousands of university workers implored her to do something, literally anything, to save their jobs: BUT WHAT ABOUT ME THO www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

‘It hurts to lose a job you love’: Starmer loyalist Bridget Phillipson fights on despite cabinet demotion

Exclusive: The former education secretary on her new role as Labour chair and continuing as the minister for women and equalities

theguardian.com

Counterpoint: no one ever thought AI could replace employees, but corporations wanted to discipline the workforce through layoffs and hiring freezes.

The Wall Street Journal@wsj.com · last wk.

Many companies stopped hiring entry-level employees, thinking AI agents could pick up the slack. They have since realized that humans are necessary to work alongside AI.

These supposed great innovators keep reinventing the 19th century.

Rachel Gilmore@rachelgilmore.bsky.social · last wk.

Very cool that Shopify’s CEO thinks the poor should have far less of a vote than the rich. Still worth that ad read money, folks?

Not mutually exclusive: generative AI is a 19th-century technology because it's predicated on commodity fetishism and the concealment of labour, like Wagner's theatre in Bayreuth.

Roland Meyer@bildoperationen.bsky.social · 2w ago

Ideologically, generative AI is a 19th century technology: the flawed dream that once you have assembled a supposedly total archive of culture via technical media, you can use it to statistically derive new meaning from patterns of the past

AI companies are destroying our collective shared history to put it into their slop buckets, because the slop they push out would destroy their models if they tried to re-input it

Emanuel Maiberg@emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social · 2w ago

companies are sourcing millions of printed books for AI labs that scan them for training data, then destroy them. printed books are more valuable because they're free of AI slop, and AI labs know destroying them is an "optics problem." www.404media.co/ai-companies...

I find the idea that Shabana Mahmood has made 'progress'on immigration farcical. She has normalised Far-Right talking points, helping Reform. Undermined the UK economy, decimated the rights of migrants and destroyed civil liberties. The county would be in a better place if she had done nothing.

For no reason at all, a few examples I can think of of PMs who lost their job in a de facto reshuffle of their own cabinets: • Alexandre Millerand, 🇫🇷 1920 (elected President, replaced by Georges Leygues) • Charles Michel, 🇧🇪 2018 (elected President of the European Council, replaced by Sophie Wilmès)

Eat your heart out, Hemingway

Scopro facendo le parole crociate che ‘nel linguaggio giornalistico’ italiano il contrario di boom non è bust ma SBOOM? 😳 @terminologiaetc.it (Incroci obbligati 65131, non ho idea della data della rivista perché è una pagina strappata chissà quando da un vecchio numero trovato in casa dei miei).

If you think that Bridget Phillipson has ‘performed well’, you've never talked to trans people, higher education workers, and families of SEND children. Or, worse, you don't care. The Guardian has definitely entered the bunker phase of White Middle Class Pasokified Labour.

TIL that (a) they have polenta in Romania, and (b) Montserrat Caballé moonlighted as a Romanian-polenta model.

👀 Open AI telling you exactly what they're about there folks. (Context: line up for far-right conference CPAC UK)

Mark Chadbourn@chadbourn.bsky.social · last mo.

If you still have the stomach. 2/2

Higher education is an investment in your human capital, your value is determined by your usefulness to your employer, and too many young people go to uni. Brought to you by our definitely non-ideological public broadcaster.

On one hand, you have a Labour peer who fled the Nazis as a child saying the party must rip up her plans and fire her. On the other hand, Michael Gove, a notorious Islamophobe who allegedly participated in a fabricated moral panic about Muslim indoctrination, thinks she’s impressive. So it’s a wash.

Poor Bridget Phillipson. First she came for trans people, then she presided over the collapse of British universities, then she alienated the families of disabled children, and now that the Tories are attacking her there's no one left to defend her. 😢

Via a colleague. Posted without comment.

Changing the voting system to make sure the far right can't translate a tiny plurality into a landslide? Can't be done, there's no electoral mandate for it! Bringing back a neoliberal empty suit no one likes and no one voted for? Of course, who cares about what the public want! 🤡

SMD@anothersmd.bsky.social · 2mo ago

burnham bringing back david miliband is exactly the sort of intellectual bankruptcy the shambling undead corpse of new labour would do

Hundreds of thousands of disabled people with lifelong conditions are being put through “pointless” benefit reassessments, contrary to official guidance. My exclusive in today’s paper: www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Disabled people with lifelong conditions facing ‘unnecessary’ Pip reassessments

‘Pointless’ reviews are wasting public money and ‘significantly harming’ the mental health of claimants, charity says

theguardian.com

Wtf

Sir Almaviva@ilcontealmaviva.bsky.social · 2mo ago

«The Telegraph understands that dual nationals, who hold both British and foreign citizenship, would have their welfare entitlement, including housing benefit, reduced but would not be automatically forced to leave social housing.» So dual nationals would be made second-class citizens under Farage.

Andy Burnham as continuity Starmer, you say? (from 2 weeks ago) www.newstatesman.com/politics/lab...

Andy Burnham is a Starmerite

Should he ever become prime minister, we will have the same government with a different accent

newstatesman.com

I don't think Burnham is a shoo-in and my prediction is that Labour will soon poll in the single digits regardless of who's leader, BUT the idea of a government that is as reactionary as Starmer's, yet more popular is pretty scary to me.

Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Allies of Shabana Mahmood are confident that she would be kept as Home Secretary by a Burnham premiership and her reforms would hardly be watered down, if at all" - PoliticsHome www.politicshome.com/news/article...

If you're an academic, you've made it past ‘early career’, and you've managed to hold on to your job, perhaps, instead of complaining on Bluesky about being given too much to read, you might want to try and read one more thing: the room.

😩

James Murray@james-bg.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Maybe this time cutting capital spending on the long term infrastructure the country desperately needs to maintain its competitiveness and prosperity will work out well.

It's hard enough to keep up with the destruction of universities locally. Especially when the dial is set to full-on demolition. But really this is a global, or at least pan-Western crisis. Reaction, inequality, elite failure, AI delusion – a perfect storm for which we seem totally ill-prepared. 1/4