"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."
"This week may end up marking the moment when Republicans and the far-right hijacked the campus protest movement and tried to turn it into the same bogeyman they made of Black Lives Matters protests in 2020.
Radical lefties needing to be taken down by force plays to the right’s pre-existing authoritarian tendencies, and is a handy election-year cudgel for Republicans."
"A group of students assembled on the University of Texas at Austin campus to call for an end to the war in Gaza. They did not engage in violence. They did not disrupt classes or occupy administrative buildings. They set up tents on a lawn. They were met with a militarized response, ordered by Governor Abbott, and supported by University administrators. Students and journalists were arrested."
"Greg Abbott is one of many on the right that has bemoaned the death of free speech on campus. He signed a law to protect such speech in 2019. And then he calls for peaceful protestors to be arrested.
So how can Abbott justify such a reversal to his call for free speech? The protestors are anti-semitic, he says. Really? How does Abbott and the police wading through the crowd know the students are anti-semitic?"
A banner is pictured as a coalition of University of Michigan students set up a camp to pressure the university to divest its endowment from companies that support Israel or could profit from the ongoing conflict in Gaza, on the University of Michigan college campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on April 23, 2024 [Rebecca Cook/Reuters]
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)
"We were supposed to research #enshittification, not embrace it as a business model!" implored the DVC Research.
The Vice-Chancellor sighed audibly and exhaled.
"We're out of options."
She raised her hands, palms up, reminiscent of prayer.
"The research grants don't cover the research we do, much less the research we want to do.
International students have declined 20% year on year since India, China and Indonesia have on-shore partnerships with Deakin and Monash that still get the grads a permanent residency.
We have PhDs teaching most of the undergrad courses. The endowment took a major hit when the stock market crashed in '25.
Federation's gone bust, Adelaide's half the size it was before the merger, and you've seen CQ merge with SCU and James Cook and Charles Darwin just to be viable."
She took a sharp inhalation of burnt autumn air.
"It's tens of millions a year in recurring revenue. That's a School's worth of people."
#UK#HigherEd#Humanities#Universities#Goldsmiths: "More sinister is the sense that Freedman describes: “It’s hard not to think that a culture war is being evoked against you simply for trying to think independently and critically.” Science minister Michelle Donelan’s recent shameful attack on two academics, reporting them to UKRI (the national research-funding body) for extremism and blighting their lives over an accusation that was wholly without foundation, springs to mind – but then so does almost everything Donelan and education secretary Gillian Keegan say about the sector in general, and humanities in particular. All those references to “woke ideology”, “intolerant woke bullies” and “cancel culture” are increasingly accompanied by defunding of the humanities, using increased accessibility to education as a fig leaf, as Keegan announced last week.
“Your subjects are mocked and called low value,” Freedman says. “Arts, humanities and social sciences haven’t played the instrumentalist game, so they’re seen as easy targets by tabloids, by GB News. We would laugh it off, but this is a huge asset to the British economy.” More importantly, he continues, “it’s not just a tragedy – it’s almost like a crime to shrink those spaces that provide a home for the inquisitive, the experimental. If the space disappears, it’s very hard to recreate it.”" https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/apr/11/the-goldsmiths-crisis-how-cuts-and-culture-wars-sent-universities-into-a-death-spiral
While this research was undertaken in Scandinavia, its take of male shirking of admin is all pretty familiar from my 25 years in UK universities watching my male colleagues refusing necessary administration & leaving female colleagues to pick it up.
As the researchers note, however, once such admin is external-facing, males are willing to pitch in.
Its almost like they like the reputation for contributing but not the actual work.
If you're suspicious of the role fo global university rankings in some of the pernicious actions of university managers, its interesting to see the University of Zurich has reportedly stepped back from collaborating in such rankings' data collection activities.
They cite the perverse incentives to issue trivial & irrelevant research (turning universities into 'publishing machines').
It will be interesting to see if any other universities follow...