Dave Addison

I think you might benefit from googling Lee Mordechai

Well people can read the pieces and make their mind up. I've said my piece. You have a good day, too!

Fwiw I'm don't even follow the Eisenberg-Mordechai in my own work, but the idea that they are anti science is just false. They accept the aDNA evidence for Y. Pestis, but contest the way a relatively small number of cases are generalized. I have different views, but they made an imp point.

From what I know of Merle's politics I would be amazed if the intention was to lessen the severity of the Covid pandemic, but I don't have any insider info and I can't read the tea leaves. He's on here; I imagine he'll make his case.

I don't think that's the message your (now deleted) skeet sent. Glad you thought twice about it.

Yeah, it's interesting work! Great to teach with

See also this from his faculty page

2019, I think, unless we're thinking of different work - but yes, this is exactly the point!

I wonder about the value-add of university research on certain bits of pop culture, when journalism/blog/fans are doing an equally good if not better job already. Whereas some culture (e.g. that from very different times/places) might require university exposition in order to be accessible.

Agreed, and have no beef with Taylor Swift studies. But I suppose my slight hesitation with poptimism in a university setting is that certain cultural entities would die without the infrastructure of universities and arts schools and conservatoires around them, and others wouldn't.

Which journal?

The shadow economy behind the international student boom A lucrative revenue stream for universities has led to an industry of unregulated agents now under scrutiny for making lofty promises

From this great piece, which I am late to: www.ft.com/content/3f49...

Wild stat in the FT: Coventry University spend 12% of *all* annual expenditure paying fees to middle-men who recruit international students 🤯

Ah, that's the model? I'm out of touch

I agree entirely. I wonder how much of this is downstream of output-based metrics in wider university cultures. It seems hard for people at the moment to talk with a straight face about the development people and minds and practices as a goal of education or research.

Do you have a sense of who the target for this kind of messaging is? I've heard these views from plenty of self-declared iconoclasts in university policy, but I struggle to see who the wider constituency is ... But presumably there is *some* method here?!

I genuinely don't understand who this kind of messaging from Kyle is for. Do red wall voters dream of Silicon valley in the fens? Are Economist subscribers a major voting bloc? Or does he just spend too much time talking fifteen or so guys from a handful of think tanks?

Particularly weird in that the pro-entrepreneurial view (if, for the sake of argument, you decide to accept it) is surely that the spin-outs follow from a prior stage of "exploring research and knowledge".

Peter Kyle: "too often people go to university to 'explore research and knowledge'".

Hmmmmm.

www.lbc.co.uk/article/brit...

Ditto

Also interesting material in the Regula communis, which has a chapter about how to integrate families (men, women, children) into monastic life. The idea is that there's some kind of double monastery, or a single monastry with gendered spaces. And there's an eremitic woman in the Vita Fructuosi.

On Leander, see e.g.: www.raco.cat/index.php/SV...

There's actually better work on the pre-Visigothic period, becuase of the scholarship on Priscillian, Egeria, etc, but this is about villa asceticism rather than monasticism per se (and Egeria might not be Iberian). Are you interested in this, too?

If I remember correctly, there's not a lot of obvious bibliography. There's Leander's De institutione virginum, and the scholarship around that. And there are a few canons. Florian Gallon's work on post-Visigothic monasteries has some useful refs: doi.org/10.3406/ANAM...

A Google Ngram showing the frequency of the phrase 'dark ages' in books archived by Google from 1600 to 2022. There is a large spike in the middle of the 19th century.

More about old fashioned Victorian liberalism than neoliberalism, I think!

Would be easier to imagine journalism surviving the AI threat if certain journalists weren't equally, or rather more, prone to hallucination.

Indeed!

I remember a senior academic (trying to be helpful I think?) saying "don't stress over details of your writing, no-one has to time read every word of an article these days anyway" ... Which is obviously half the reason that these frauds are possible.

Yeah, the Cambridge thing is trying to be v generic, which limits it. I agree with your pointers. Thanks!

Culturally, there are big differences, but institutionally we're often in the same spaces, so we have to make that work.

Yeah, there's no substitute for personal engagement. My sense in the UK, at least, is that ever more power over funding lies at the level of "humanities and social sciences" (or some equivalent umbrella), so I'm def keen to get better at these conversations.