Vanderbilt upper admin keeps telling faculty that they're not "at the table" with the Trump administration discussing higher ed. This "Call to Action" from the Dept. of Ed. begs to differ. www.ed.gov/media/docume...
ed.gov
@vanderbiltaaup.bsky.social
Trump Compact 2.0 has arrived, y'all, and Vanderbilt U helped with the rebranding! No threats, just a lil' nudge from McMahon to all university presidents and boards to copy and paste the "Declaration of Principles," no mention of faculty, students, or staff having a say. www.ed.gov/media/docume...
ed.gov
“Conservatives have spent 40 years attacking the legitimacy of higher education as an institution, which means to restore trust in academia we have to make the university less woke.” I mean, after a certain point the willingness of so many leaders to just flat out lie has to catch up to them…right?
@vanderbiltaaup.bsky.social · 6d agoYou cannot speak for a community without consulting its members. You cannot declare “first principles” for a university without faculty participation. The Vanderbilt faculty did not draft or “adopt” this. www.vanderbilt.edu/declaration/
You cannot speak for a community without consulting its members. You cannot declare “first principles” for a university without faculty participation. The Vanderbilt faculty did not draft or “adopt” this. www.vanderbilt.edu/declaration/
Declaration
The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles was adopted by the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust in June 2026. The declaration is organized around three core purposes: Pathbre...
vanderbilt.edu
Federal research cuts to minority serving colleges have threatened to crush the aspirations of young scholars who, just a few years ago, were hired because of their expertise on race-related topics that many now feel pressure to play down. https://chroni.cl/4yyNb4h
The Research Cuts No One Is Talking About
Minority-serving institutions are quietly being denied funds key to their aspirations. Their leaders don’t want to discuss it.
chronicle.com
OUT TODAY, the AAUP just released the first comprehensive account of how the Trump administration has taken the same playbook it's used on law firms & foreign governments & turned it on American universities. US higher ed has, in effect, become a target of a massive extortion racket. 🧵
New Report on Extorted Compliance Charges “Massive Extortion Racket” Against Higher Ed
A new AAUP report, "Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance," exposes how the Trump administration has extended its pay-to-play approach to gov...
aaup.org
We join with faculty in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas to note with dismay that central tenets of the AAUP have disappeared from the Principles of Accreditation of the Commission on Colleges and Universities (formerly SACSCOC). 🧵 1/8 sacscoc.org/principles-r...
Principles Review - SACSCOC
SACSCOC Principles of Accreditation review The future of accreditation should be shaped by the institutions and stakeholders it serves. The Principles Review Committee, composed of peer representative...
sacscoc.org
Just spell it out clearly: Vanderbilt’s chancellor is collabing with tech fascists like Peter Thiel to turn Vanderbilt into a Silicon Valley subsidiary, which requires discrediting those forms of knowledge that question AI’s empire via the Vanderbilt Report.
There is great value in refuting the specific charges in the Vanderbilt Report against various disciplines but we also need to repeatedly say is that this Report is about invalidating critical thought to pave the way for the tech-fascist takeover of the university. That, in the end, is the motive.
Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · last mo.More evidence that the purpose of the Vanderbilt Report is to pave the way for tech-fascism by discrediting those disciplines that are at the forefront of the critical study of AI: www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithint...
Imagining a moderate Democrat study group where everyone reads the Harper’s Letter, the Vanderbilt Report, and the Kahlenberg-Lin document on ”the distortion of American Studies” by woke
Nathan Kalman-Lamb@nkalamb.bsky.social · last mo.I’m crying
“The advancement of knowledge through scholarship has always been inextricable from political goals; the Vanderbilt report position is based on a completely fictitious version of a pre-political scholarly past.“ open.substack.com/pub/asheeshk...
The Vanderbilt Report Ignores the History of Scholarship
Criticizing the distortion of scholarship by politics, the authors conveniently elide how knowledge and politics have long been intertwined.
open.substack.com
"We also asked about how the committee’s work was funded. The chair, Boghossian, told us that the money did not come from a private foundation but rather the coffers of Vanderbilt and Wash U." unsurprising but also SERIOUSLY WTF www.chronicle.com/article/insi...
Is a New Report About the Humanities ‘Diabolically Evil’? We Questioned Its Authors.
K. Anthony Appiah, Paul Boghossian, Katherine Fleming, and Sean Wilentz on what’s gone wrong in the humanities.
chronicle.com
AAUP NC VP Tori Ekstrand argues that "institutional neutrality" as imposed on UNC system schools not only chills academic freedom and free speech, it forces universities to surrender their ability to protect their educational and research missions. www.newsobserver.com/opinion/arti...
Professor: Here’s an alternative to UNC’s charade of ‘institutional neutrality’ | Opinion
The author is a professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
newsobserver.com
AAUP members came together @ the Higher Ed Summit & Biennial to approve a package of critical proposals that will serve as a sweeping strategic blueprint for our Union to build structural power & go on the offensive against the political & economic threats to higher ed in this moment. 🧵
Opinion | What people are saying about an influential (and, to some, infuriating) report on the humanities. https://chroni.cl/4oyBPJ3
On That Vanderbilt/WashU Report
Plus:
chroni.cl
exactly. this is a massive embarrassment.
Carlos Noreña@carlosfnorena.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe "Vanderbilt Report" on the "State of Scholarship" will enter our cultural lexicon in the same niche currently monopolized by the "Harper's Letter" as a byword for an insidiously reactionary politics couched in the soothing language of east-coast-establishment intellectual and moral seriousness.
The AAUP chapters at Vanderbilt & Wash U have issued a joint statement denouncing the “State of Scholarship” report commissioned by their chancellors. Please, let’s make this as widely read as the gaslighting to which it responds.
The AAUP chapters at Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis have a joint response to the "State of the Scholarship" report. Please share! bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl.... 🗃️
Michael Lobel@mlobelart.bsky.social · 2mo agoFor some reason the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University commissioned a study on general state of the humanities with no faculty from their respective universities and 40% of the authors from a single school (NYU). While we're at it, curious how much these folks got paid for this
WashU and Vanderbilt AAUP chapters have issued a *joint* statement on the "State of Scholarship in the Humanities" report commissioned by our university leadership. bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl....
bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com
The Vanderbilt and Wash U AAUP chapters have released a *joint* statement rejecting the dangerously shoddy and hyper-politicized "Report on the State of Scholarship" commissioned by our chancellors. Please read and circulate!
bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com
Vanderbilt University commissioned a report on the state of humanities scholarship. Now some of the scholars accused of producing work driven by political ideology rather than the pursuit of truth are fighting back. @emmawhitford.bsky.social has the scoop. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
Professors Say Vanderbilt Report Misrepresents Their Work
The report on the state of humanities scholarship has generated a lot of debate in academic circles and received backlash from the leading anthropology association.
insidehighered.com
The Chronicle piece on the "Vanderbilt report" and the news about the dissolution of the faculty senate at Auburn really should have been reported together as two pieces of THE SAME STORY. Follow @asheeshks.org if you don't see how they go together. I mean, damn. It's open season on higher ed.
More on the Vanderbilt report. In “The Nature of the Problem” section, the authors claim that “liberal skew in the professoriat” plays a role in “discouraging full participation in academia on the part of students who find themselves culturally and politically alienated from their professors.”
Jason Rhody@jasonrhody.bsky.social · 2mo agoReading the State of Scholarship Report left me with the same feeling I had when leading disinformation work at SSRC and people said "I love democracy but I'm really worried about voter fraud." This report is "I love the humanities but I'm really worried about scholarly standards.”
🚨On the recent Vanderbilt report on the humanities: “the committee takes a…disturbing direction toward endorsing academic authoritarianism—the use of administrative power to seize control of academic departments + impose ideological standards on them in order to purge leftist scholars.”
Academic Authoritarianism in New Attack on Humanities Scholars
There is virtually no evidence offered in the report for its sweeping conclusions about the entirety of the humanities.
insidehighered.com
Surprise, surprise! The Vanderbilt report decrying the state of scholarship in the humanities is itself a terrible work of “scholarship“:
Inside Higher Ed @insidehighered.com · 2mo agoCited Professors Say the Vanderbilt Report Misrepresents Their Work The report on the state of humanities scholarship has generated a lot of debate in academic circles and received backlash from the leading anthropology association. https://bit.ly/4aoW45U #AcademicSky #EDUSky #HigherEd
I'm sure it's completely coincidental that Vanderbilt & Wash U spearheaded a report casting doubt on scholarship in "the humanities and humanistic social sciences," disciplines at the forefront of critiquing tech-fascism, at the very same moment they're about to cash in on tech-fascist investments.
Max Kennerly@maxkennerly.bsky.social · 2mo agoUNC, UVa, Stanford, WashU, and Vanderbilt took the billions in federal funding they got over the years and handed it to Elon Musk so he could build a CSAM generator, wreck the NSF, and shutter USAID.
"Claude write me a PhD, here is my credit card number" and it prints one right out
Four thousand PhDs per year are awarded at Renmin University-Anchorage
Eighteen new PhDs are awarded per year. Surprisingly, they are all in Classics
It’s the year 2040. All American PhDs work for Vanderbilt branch campuses or Anthropic