Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
University College London shoutout! UCL is unwilling to set up a Mastodon account now, but they say that if there's lots of UCL presence here already it will nudge them in this direction. If you're at UCL or know someone who is, and you're on here, please reply to this to let us know! Current chief plotters: @sellathechemist , me and maybe more)
Since October 7th, I've joined protests, fundraising events for Gaza, and students on university campuses.
As a Jew and someone who has a ton of friends and family in Israel, I want to share some thoughts on claims of antisemitism in student encampments and the broader Palestinian solidarity movement:
'Negotiations' for the UK to rejoin the #Horizon research programme continue.... #JeremyHunt's in #Brussels trying (again) to get a discount because we've missed the first two years of the new programme.
Problem is that we caused that delay not the EU, and the feeling at the #EuropeanCommision is that they're not going to offer a discount because the UK can't get its ducks in a row.
Meanwhile #universities are hemorrhaging #researchers departing for somewhere they can get Horizon money now!
Our paper “No Research on a Dead Planet” is out today! Aaron Thierry is very much the lead author, but it’s been great working on this together with AT, Laura Horn and Charlie Gardner. Why do #Universities, #ClimateEmergency declarations and all, still largely continue with #BusinessAsUsual? For us it’s about #CognitiveDissonance as well as the structures of neoliberal #HE. HE needs to change & lead on true #ClimateAction. Open access @ScientistRebellion
Students continue to protest at campuses across the country, despite the risk of arrest. Some schools now threaten demonstrators with disciplinary action, while others promise the opposite.
"Palestine has always served as a litmus test of our collective imagination of what freedom could look like. When we say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, we imagine a world free of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Blackness, militarism, occupation & apartheid."
— letter from 65 student organizations to The Daily Northwestern
"Without the right to use their own content, universities are hostage to the decisions of publishers…With those rights, universities, and researchers, become the players they should be: with an active role in determining the future of research dissemination and hence promoting the dissemination of knowledge."
"Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it."
Israel has destroyed all the universities in Gaza. Every single one of them. That is a war crime, pure and simple. It’s the obliteration of education and Palestinian future. Every university in the world should be outraged.
"University administrators from Texas to California moved to clear protesters and prevent encampments from taking hold on their own campuses as they have at Columbia University, deploying police in tense new confrontations that already have led to dozens of arrests.
At the same time, new protests continued erupting in places like Pittsburgh and San Antonio."
And here's a piece I wrote on why universities are reluctant to run their own Mastodon servers (recently updated with information on referrer tracking and social media platform support)
There are so many bad actors who have a clear interest in civil unrest within the United States we can be sure there are state actors (besides Hamas) actively supporting violence and polarisation during the various protests at universities in the US. #universities#US#Gaza#Israel#Palestinians#hamas#geopolitics@geopolitics
Israel had destroyed literally all universities in Gaza and damaged over 400 schools. Lest we forget also Israel's deliberate targeting of university professors and academics.
Here's William Davies (in the Guardian) setting out on why the marketisation of #highereducation was never really going to work as its architects intended, drawing Govt. into a regulatory 'fine tuning' that makes a mockery of the idea that #universities operate in a market
As he concludes: 'what greater confirmation could there be that marketisation has failed than a government getting to stipulate how many students are permitted to take a given university course?'
I agree with Kenan Malik; behind the increasingly instrumental view of university education (that it should be judged by what it does for your subsequent career & earning potential), lies a class-based assessment of who should benefit from education at all.
The working class do not deserve the humanistic value of education but rather must be trained in work skills... while the privileged should be able to buy the benefits of enlightenment!
Just had an emergency #UCU meetings at our university, after the “discovery” (best word - it suddenly tripled from previous figure) of an absolutely enormous deficit. The situation looks pretty dire, redundancies wise.
Discussing what union can do has left me yet again
angry about the complete lack of democracy in UK #Universities. They are really top-down, undemocratic institutions, and this is a major contributing factor to the mess #HE is in
If you are an #educator, you may have spent recent weeks grappling with your position with respect to #student#NonviolentResistance. You’re not alone, and in this moment, perhaps it is helpful to identify ways #teachers & staff at #schools, #colleges & #universities have supported students engaged in nonviolent #CivilResistance. Below, I will share a range of options, progressing from familiar #faculty roles to those with greater proximity to student #NonviolentAction.
As student protesters get arrested, they risk being banned from campus too (www.npr.org)
Students continue to protest at campuses across the country, despite the risk of arrest. Some schools now threaten demonstrators with disciplinary action, while others promise the opposite.