Ralph Scott

For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today's decision will be dis-appointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people's elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative pro-cess, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation's future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today's result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.

These words by Supreme Justice Gorsuch should be printed, in full, on tomorrow’s front pages.

Yes precisely. Even just vocational qualifications in the UK over time is based on a fair few assumptions!

Yes sorry I was working from 386 based on this table, but you're right if we're using Owen's numbers (ie excluding DK as well as DNV) bsky.app/profile/adam...

It's an even smaller sample excluding would not vote, which these percentages do I think (as Owen notes here). MoE of around 5% I think? bsky.app/profile/owen...

BREAKING: The Supreme Court STRIKES DOWN Trump's "emergency" tariffs. The vote is 6–3. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

In the same way it's a proxy for pay inequality to some extent - which the UK has reduced between the bottom and middle in part through above inflation statutory minimum wage increases. bsky.app/profile/adam...

This is an important point, as the comparability of tertiary qualifications across systems (both in terms of the education itself and what it facilitates) is not especially straightforward!

(And here's a photo of it in the actual paper in case of paywall issues)

School subject choices in adolescence affect political party support The educational cleavage is restructuring electoral competition in many democracies, yet there has been insufficient attention on how variation in educational content affects this. In order to addr...

You can read the (open access!) paper here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Shift to Stem subjects means kids could be moving right Youngsters are ditching arts and humanities out of economic necessity — it both reflects and informs their politics

Our @wepsocial.bsky.social paper (with @nspmartin.bsky.social and @rolandkappe.bsky.social) on the effects of school subjects on political party support is the focus of @jkirkup.bsky.social's @thetimes.com piece today

Gorillaz are back so time to resurrect the greatest of all music tweets. We're all out here tryna be The Quietus and she just walks up and zeroes in on the essence.

HESA Spring 2026: Staff In times of turmoil and upheaval in the sector what's happening with full time academic staff numbers? As David Kernohan explains, the picture is more complex than you may expect

The number of academic staff in UK HE declines for the first time in a decade. But the number of full time academics is the highest on record: wonkhe.com/blogs/hesa-s...

Yes this is a good point, things like autonomy, flexibility etc. (Also often missed when looking at subject-level returns to degrees I think).

Bear in mind this analysis whenever you read some argument for cutting courses that don't pay. Particularly from Brexiteers. Graduating into a bad economy - thank you, Brexit - makes good courses look bad

Notable that despite these trends, educational polarisation has grown in UK over this period. Suggests that it is more values/identity-driven than material.

Congratulations Peter!

One unhelpful aspect of current discourse around universities is tendency to set HE & vocational courses in opposition.
Reality is more than half of students in UK universities are doing these directly vocational subjects:
-Business studies
-subjects allied to medicine
-computing
-engineering
-law

This is just really embarrassing for these guys. Your intellectual hero is an amphetamine casualty from the Britpop years. It would be less ridiculous to be queuing up for a lecture by Ginger Spice.

Historian of medicine here. Yes. Yes, they did.

Another example of how universities' unique regulatory position harms them.

Noone is claiming compensation from the schools that were forced to close during the worst of the pandemic.

Yes I suppose that's something... It's remarkable they're not yet paying more of a price for it though, given wider public opinion on this kind of racism.

Incidentally we all owe you a debt of thanks for keeping track of all this, as well as the manoeuvres on the even more extreme right!

It's been interesting seeing where they (belated and halfheartedly) draw the line during this campaign bsky.app/profile/sund...

The number of academics working in UK institutions has fallen for the first time on record, new figures reveal. In a further sign of the impact of the financial crisis gripping the sector, new data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) show that 244,755 academic staff were working in the UK in 2024-25. This was down from a peak of 246,930 the year before and the first time in the 10-year Hesa record that the total number has fallen. The figures exclude “atypical” roles including academics on short-term or one-off contracts. The number of professors increased slightly to 26,110, as did the number of other senior academics (6,590) – but there were 2,600 fewer people employed at other contract levels (212,055).

Seems pretty clear that the crisis is hitting ECRs worse too - increase in number of profs and other senior staff but declines in other levels:

As I was saying....

Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible “America at 250!” achievement

The Apprentice's Sorcerer Or I how I learned to start worrying and love Claude Code

🤖NEW POST ON AI🤖

Perhaps you're thinking like Brenda from Bristol, 'not another one!' but... I felt that lots of writing about Claude Code doesn't really show you how it works. So I thought well, why not? And along the way some bad literary allusions. 1/n

benansell.substack.com/p/the-appren...

Article: The political effects of X’s feed algorithm Abstract: Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

Figure 2. ITT estimates of feed-setting changes on engagement and political attitudes. ITT effect estimates of switching the algorithm on and off (in s.d.). Left, effect of moving from the chronological to the algorithmic feed for users initially on the chronological feed. Right, effect of moving in the opposite direction for users initially on the algorithmic feed. For each outcome, the results of two specifications are reported. Blue, unconditional estimates with robust s.e., controlling only for the initial feed setting and, where applicable, pre-treatment outcome levels. Orange: conditional estimates, controlling for pre-treatment covariates using GRFs; 90% and 95% CIs are reported. Numerical effect sizes and P values correspond to the conditional estimates (all tests are two-sided). The unit of observation is respondent. From top to bottom, sample sizes are n = 4,965, n = 3,337, n = 4,965, n = 4,965, n = 4,596, n = 4,596 and n = 4,850. Tests are described in Methods. Supplementary Information Table 2.16 reports the exact numerical point estimates, s.e., CIs and sample sizes for every specification. All outcomes are standardized. Additional results are presented in Supplementary Information section 2. PCA, first principal component from principal component analysis.

X's algorithm is in fact doing what you think it's doing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yes I'm also in!

I don't think it's widely known (especially outside the sector) just how unprecedentedly bad the current HE job market is