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#academia

27 posts24 participants0 posts today

Interesting (not short) read in the Chronicle

Why Universities Are So Powerless in Their Fight Against Trump

"The administration needs to determine and articulate satisfactory steps toward reform. If only a fitful, limited engine of innovation and opportunity shackled to this administration’s ideology will suffice, then we are not talking about reform; we are talking about destruction, and there is nothing for universities to negotiate."

#Academia #AcademicChatter

chronicle.com/article/why-univ

Hive mind:

I would like to conduct my class discussions this semester on non-surveillant, non-AI-saturated platform, instead of Canvas, which is the default at my university.

What should I use? Accessibility and ease of use are big must-haves.

Wow. University and its president support DEI. Trump admin investigates them. Faculty write a resolution in support of the president and DEI policies. Trump admin investigates those faculty too.
nytimes.com/2025/07/28/us/just

"In a letter sent on Friday, the Trump administration said it would seek drafts of the faculty resolution, all written communications among the Faculty Senate members who drafted the resolution, and all communications between those faculty members and the office of the university’s president…Free speech advocates quickly denounced the move as an attack on academic freedom."

#Academia #Censorship #DefendResearch #DEI #FreeSpeech #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

Faculty members at George Mason said they were worried that the school’s president, Gregory Washington, would be forced out.
The New York Times · Justice Department Scrutinizes George Mason Faculty’s Diversity StanceBy Vimal Patel

So, I got invited for a talk at AGU 2025. Seems like you have to fess up $140 to submit an abstract (even if invited), then to notice that the cheapest rate will be roughly ~$800 with no day-rates or remote only options.

That's $1K for playing a damn video, as they don't do interactive remote presentations either (and I sure as hell won't be traveling to the US as too far left of center).

So, no, cancelled that and cut my losses. I thought things changed post-COVID.

The UK gov look like complete digitally illiterate idiots. The disaster of huge VPN uptake as a consequence of ill thought out simplistic age verification policy in the UK is stupid beyond credibility. We ARE led by donkeys. I said a while back that AI policy (in HE, and at national level) is being made by ppl who don't even know what a VPN is to indicate level of naïve ignorance. Now we know just how true that is.

“In my 35-year association with the University – more than half of those as a staff member – I have not seen such a lack of vision, such a vacuum of ideas, such general disorganisation, nor such cavalier decision-making about institutions and programs built up through hard work over decades. The end, I am afraid, will be an ugly one.” (Frank Bongiorno - ANU)

#ANU

There is nothing new to the corporatisation of #TertiaryEducation except for the extent of destruction it has wrought in what should be an environment of excellence in pedagogy and research. The sector has faced many perils ever since its religious beginnings in the Middle Ages and yet managed to survive and even thrived on occasions. But the debunked neoliberal thinking of today, along with its market-driven imperative in an age of run-away corporate capitalism might drive our universities back to the brink of collapse in a new kind of politically manufactured dark ages (if the US is any guide to our immediate future).

I truly hope that saner minds will prevail in Aus and that we may eventually (though not too far in the future) pull back from the dark.

Not sure what I’m trying to say here… I fear we are getting more illiterate by the day… more receptive to propaganda… reverting back to a society fetttered by their lack of education… (not in a happy place right now, thinking about how we are failing on so many levels with higher education being the only way out of this mess)

Read more of Bongiorno’s rebuttal of the ANU #BeanCounters’ proposal to compensate for their past decision which resulted in the financial mess they are asking #academia (staff and students alike) to pay for. The #Chancellery and #Admins ought to be subjected to similar cuts as the fairest of ill-advised solutions. Fairer would be to sack those people who got ANU in this mess in the first place, wherever these people hide.
(That was a rant!)

johnmenadue.com/post/2025/07/c

johnmenadue.comChange proposals risk relegating ANU to middle-ranking regional uniWell known historian and long-time ANU staff member, Frank Bongiorno, says he has never seen, such a lack of vision, such a vacuum of ideas, such general disorganisation, nor such cavalier decision-making about institutions and programs built up through hard work over decades in all his years at ANU. He outlined his concerns in this submission to ANU management.
Replied to Ana Viñuela

@AnaVinuela As long as any member of a faculty search committee, promotion committee, or grant panel, continues to speak of a candidate or applicant as "having a <galmour journal>" paper as if this was proof of anything, or considers for a second the "impact factor" of any of the papers, or raises the point of an applicant having been "productive" for having published lots, then, trouble persists.

All of these practices are abhorrent and it is our duty to speak back and dismiss any such comments as having any weight whatsoever. And to push for dismissal of such people from said committees on bias grounds.

The retort that works on the spot for me is, "have you read the paper", and then raise the critical points and insight (or lack of) of said paper, and expect to see any pushback grounded on any actual research.

It takes work: one has to read the papers.

Does anyone know if there is a way, or if it's even worth, to put a complain about academic institutions breaking the principles of DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment)?

Things are quite bad right now in UK #academia, and more than ever I'm seeing institutions using metrics that go against DORA principles, and despite being signatories.

Wondering if DORA has any value at all....

*edited for typos

Saw a Reddit post about a "Peer Review LLM", and I decided to test it with one of my own current preprints to see how good it actually is.

As I expected, it's rubbish, at least in the context of what one should actually expect from a peer review, because an LLM doesn't actually *think*.

You can see it's output here:

bgpt.pro/?q=Paper%20Review%3A%

/1