#universities

Top story at the CBC:
“Canadian university teachers warned against travelling to the United States”

"The association says academics who are from countries that have tense diplomatic relations with the United States, or who have themselves expressed negative views about the Trump administration, should be particularly cautious about attempting to cross the border."

#TheAmericanFascist #Universities #Canada #USA #canPoli #CdnPoli #USPoli

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/travel-warning-united-states-1.7510877

Obama and Yale faculty back Harvard as Trump cuts $2bn in federal grants- #HIgherEd #Academia #AcademicChatter #Universities #AmericanCoup #RepublicansDidThis https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/apr/15/obama-yale-harvard-trump-cuts

That trump had nothing to say about the attempt to kill Gov. Josh Shapiro during Passover tells you one thing: All of trump's own attempts to destroy academia by claiming the universities haven't done enough to keep Jewish students safe is a pack of lies. Trump doesn't care about Jewish students OR Jews. He cares only about turning all American culture and education over to white Christian nationalists who, like him, are the real anti-semites. #Jews #universities #JoshShapiro

Most private, nonprofit #colleges & #universities are exempt from paying federal income taxes because they are classified as a 501(c)(3) organization with an #educational mission. Universities do pay other taxes, such as payroll taxes for employees.

“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit & hire, & which areas of study & inquiry they can pursue,” #Harvard President Alan Garber said in his message.

#law

Harvard hit with $US2.2 billion funding freeze after defying Trump's demands

The funding freeze comes after the institution said it would reject the Trump administration's demands to change hiring, admissions and other policies.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-16/trump-administration-to-freeze-funding-for-harvard/105180950

#Universities

UNIVERSITIES HAVE A WEAPON IN THE FIGHT AGAINST TRUMP. WHY AREN’T THEY USING IT?
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Why rich universities aren’t tapping their fortunes to push back against the administration

#Colleges #universities #maga #trump

https://www.vox.com/education/407529/why-arent-universities-using-their-billion-dollar-endowments-to-fight-trump

( paywall bypass : https://archive.ph/VMuCl )

"3.) The advantage of a #decentralised approach based on open software and open protocols is that the development can take place step-by-step, modular and in different locations at the same time.

While public law companies are starting to open their #medialibraries, other media providers such as #universities can also begin to build a decentralised #open network #infrastructure: https://netzpolitik.org/2023/aufruf-hochschulen-aller-laender-ins-fediverse/ 4/4"

From: @leonido
https://chaos.social/@leonido/114320196473756442

The Joy of Academic Writing in the Age of AI

I once imagined an academic career involved a lofty devotion to knowledge at a distance from the world. This is what Bourdieu (2000: 1) described as “the free time, freedom from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world”. Or as the philosopher Richard Rorty once put it to a friend asking him about whether he was happy in this new role, “Universities permit one to read books and report what one thinks about them, and get paid for it” (Gross 2003).

Even if this was true of a tenured professor at an Ivy League university in 1980s America, it certainly isn’t true now for the vast majority of academics. It took me a while to come to terms with that fact, but what was constant in this process was the enjoyment of writing. It was precisely because of that enjoyment, the impulse ‘to read books and report what I thought about them’, that the reality of academic work felt so disappointing to me. It’s something I’ve long since made my peace with, but the fact it was a compromise I came to has left the enjoyment of writing at the heart of my professional self-conception: the space that can be found for it and the obstacles which stand in its way.

Unfortunately those obstacles are numerous. There are the new things which academics are expected to do, such as make research relevant to wider society and the mechanisms, such as social media, through which we are expected to do it. There is the growth in the work to be done as student numbers increase and our interactions with them increasingly take place through multiple channels. There are the spiralling expectations of what constitutes being productive, driven in part by a job market which is brutally competitive in some systems.

I take as background the widespread sense that there is a deep somatic crisis in higher education, which has structural roots (Burrows 2012). As Vostal (2016) demonstrates, it would be too simple to say the problem is one of speeding up, to which the solution would be to slow down. The evidence suggests that our relationship to speed is more ambivalent than this. I certainly recognize the enjoyment which can be realized through rushing under the right circumstances, such as the intense focus which can come with an imminent deadline or the intellectual sociability generated through an intensive workshop.

There is also a politics to speed too often overlooked by advocates of ideas like the ‘slow professor’ (Berg 2022). In my experience, the choice for a professor to slow down often relies on post docs who are willing to pick up the slack for them. But there is nonetheless a sense of rushing, of never having quite enough time for all the things we are expected to do, common within the contemporary academy (Carrigan 2016).

Obviously this is an experience which is far from confined to academics and the university, reflecting a broader sense of being harried in contemporary societies (Rosa 2014). It is easy for the time and space in which we might enjoy writing to find itself squeezed on all sides by the urgent items we are struggling to clear from our to-do list. It is easy to conclude from this experience that writing necessarily has to be a slow process, in which an excess of time and space provide the conditions in which creative writing is possible.

This is fundamentally mistaken, with the sense that writing requires an abundance of time actually being a potent obstacle to a regular and rewarding writing routine. But it is conversely difficult to immerse yourself in writing if you feel harried, assailed on all sides by unmet expectations and impending deadlines. There is a risk this leads to a sense of enjoying writing being a luxury, as opposed to a practical requirement of the job which must be dispensed with as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If you frame writing in these terms then the instrumental use of AI becomes an inevitability. Why wouldn’t you rely on these systems to do your writing for you if that writing is an unwelcome obligation which weighs heavily on your working life? This gets to the heart of my concern. There is a pessimistic and self-defeating mood which too often accompanies academic writing. This is a problem in its own terms because it makes what should be a source of joy for academics into a gruelling chore. But with the advent of a technology which can do this writing for us, this mood goes from being individually self-defeating to potentially catastrophic for the knowledge system.

As Sword (2023: loc 220) points out, “writing signals hard work and puritanical virtue, while pleasure drips with hedonistic vice”. The tendency for academics to relate to writing as a serious matter, serving a lofty purpose beyond the trivial matters of feeling, rather than something which pleasure can be taken in makes it difficult to have these conversations. I share Sword’s (2023: loc 226) project “to recuperate pleasure as a legitimate, indeed crucial, writing-related emotion”. Indeed, such a recuperation is imperative, individually and collectively, because of the impact which AI is already starting to exercise over why and how we write.

If you’re taking joy in an activity, why would you outsource it? I struggle to see a difference in this sense between relying on machine writing and seeking an assistant who can work on your behalf. There might be contingent challenges which mean you need support at a particular point in time, as well as a need to prioritize certain tasks over others. In this sense I wouldn’t suggest the impulse to outsource a task necessarily means you don’t take joy in it, but if you persistently seek external support for a type of task or a project composed of multiple tasks, this suggests the potential for exploring your motivation.

There are parts of my administrative work which I’ve found myself tempted to rely on machine writing for. I’ve come to realize this is a red flag which indicates there’s a part of my portfolio of work I’m struggling with in some way or coming to be alienated from. The impulse to outsource it to a machine, to just get it done immediately rather than expanding any more energy on it, will become a mainstream one within higher education over the coming years. The ubiquity of this software, particularly as it comes to be embedded in the existing collaboration platforms which universities provide for their staff, means it will be ‘in here’ rather than ‘out there’.

Meeting this temptation reflexively requires that we understand our work, the tasks that compose it, and how we tend to experience them. Do we persistently avoid or procrastinate from particular activities? What do we choose to do instead when we’re being avoidant? These questions help us identify which aspects of our academic writing might be at risk of being outsourced to AI, not because the technology offers genuine improvements, but because we’ve lost touch with the joy those activities might provide.

#academicWriting #acceleratedAcademy #acceleration #productivity #sociologyOfHigherEducation #time #universities

On one level I agree with Paul Greatrix, a lot of the complaint(s) from academic staff about the work of professional services staff is misplaced, they do much needed organisational work to keep the university functioning....

But I also think he misses the associated data/information pressure now forced on academics by (some) professional service functions that actually detract from their academic focus as administrators seek ever more 'management data'.

#universities
https://wonderfulhighered.com/2025/04/14/what-are-all-these-so-called-bullshit-jobs-in-universities/

Harvard University has rejected a list of sweeping demands that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump said are intended to crack down on campus antisemitism, risking billions of dollars in federal funding. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/04/15/world/politics/harvard-trump-policy-funding/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #worldnews #politics #harvard #universities #us #republicans #donaldtrump

#Harvard says no chance it will comply with changes feds demand

The #Trump administration has been using federal research funding as a cudgel. The government has blocked billions of dollars in #research funds and threatened to put a hold on even more in order to compel #universities to adopt what it presents as essential reforms. In the case of #Columbia University, that includes changes in the leadership of individual #academic departments.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/harvard-says-feds-research-funding-demands-amount-to-a-takeover/

"The Little-Known Bureaucrats Tearing Through American Universities:

A new task force formed to combat antisemitism is using funding threats to force broader changes on campus"

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/anti-semitism-task-force-who-247c234e?st=vzuR1u&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

#Trump #Bureaucrats #Universities #Education #FreeSpeech #Politics #Government #FederalFunds #Censorship

These types of tests have no transparency, cost students money every year, and have no evidence-based benefit as described in the article. Casper should die.

“It disappoints me that something is so lacking in scholarship, lacking in rigour, robustness and credibility,"
#Canada #Medicine #Universities

@heidilifeldman@mastodon.sociall #universities has made the same statement together. Now #trump will play them out.

"Thousands of grants, including many at public universities and on topics as politically benign as Alzheimer’s, have been caught in what critics say is an unprecedented slowdown of the American research system that is threatening to upend universities and halt progress toward medical innovations, treatments and cures."

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/one-countrys-leading-alzheimers-projects-jeopardy-rcna199788

#healthcare #NIH #HHS #science #research #ClinicalTrials #grants #funding #universities #DOGE #USpol

1/ Kudos to #Harvard for standing up to the #Trump admin. #AcadSky #AcademicSky #EduSky #AcademicFreedom #Censorship #DefendResearch #Universities #USPol #USPolitics @academic-chatter.bsky.social

Kudos to #Harvard for standing up to the #Trump admin.

Friday, April 11, the Trump admin expanded its list of demands to Harvard. (Note that Harvard made the govt letter public on the Harvard website.)
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Letter-Sent-to-Harvard-2025-04-11.pdf

Today, Harvard President Alan Garber issued a public letter to the university community, explaining the latest Trump demands and the university's 𝙣𝙤 answer. "The University will not negotiate over its independence or its constitutional rights."
https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2025/the-promise-of-american-higher-education/

Also see Harvard's official answer to the Trump admin, through its lawyers. "Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle."
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Harvard-Response-2025-04-14.pdf

#Academia #AcademicFreedom #Censorship #DefendResearch #Universities #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

The UK's University business model is now pretty stark.... fees from non-UK students, and drawing down reserves (and income from investments) are the only two things left to cross-subsidise the rest of universities' activities (research & the teaching UK students, both of which are 'loss-making').

This model cannot go on forever - international students are in a post-Brexit deciine reserves are by their character, limited!

The crisis in higher education is going to get deeper!

#universities

Harvard professors sue over Trump's review of $9 billion in funding - This is nothing short of an overt attack on #HigherEd in general and #Universities in particular. #Academia is under siege from the #Fascists in DC. #AcademicChatter https://www.reuters.com/legal/harvard-professors-sue-over-trumps-review-9-billion-funding-2025-04-12/

"She is 30 years old, shy and prone to nervous laughter. She cannot work, because her laptop was confiscated. She plays chess with other women when the guards allow it. Otherwise, she passes the time reading books about evolution and cell development.

For nearly eight weeks, Kseniia Petrova has been captive to the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump administration. A graduate of a renowned Russian physics and technology institute, Ms. Petrova was recruited to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School. She was part of a team investigating how cells can rejuvenate themselves, with the goal of fending off the damage of aging.

On Feb. 16, customs officials detained her at Logan International Airport in Boston for failing to declare samples of frog embryos she had carried from France at the request of her boss at Harvard.

Such an infraction is normally considered minor, punishable with a fine of up to $500. Instead, the customs official canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa on the spot and began deportation proceedings. Then Ms. Petrova told her that she had fled Russia for political reasons and faced arrest if she returned there.

This is how she wound up at the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, La., waiting for the U.S. government to decide what to do with her.

Ms. Petrova’s case is being watched by thousands of young, highly educated Russians who, like her, fled the country after Russia invaded Ukraine."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/science/russian-scientist-ice-detained-harvard.html

#USA #Trump #Harvard #Universities #HigherEd #Russia #Deportation