Chad Wellmon

I had the same experience last spring when I found money to buy the new Capital translation for a class…made all the difference.

After the University…page proofs

I fell in that creek around 6am this morning. No gym but good snowy walk until that point.

I imagine you’re looking for something a bit more substantial but this comment on that Current Affairs article had an in nuce truth about it: “if a chatbot can collapse your entire model, maybe the model wasn’t education — it was credential vending with academic cosplay."

After the University…page proofs

After the University Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work

Coming soon www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

After the University Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work

Coming soon www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Trump Officials Blame Mistake for Setting Off Confrontation With Harvard An official on the administration’s antisemitism task force told the university that a letter of demands had been sent without authorization.

Incompetent malice…just, what? www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/b...

The ‘China Shock’ Offers a Lesson. It Isn’t the One Trump Has Learned. Economists say the U.S. manufacturing decline in recent decades was not mainly about free trade, but about the pace of change without time to adjust.

I grew up near Hickory. This was my dad: 61, factory bought out, no pension, started at Lowes: “found work in service jobs that paid a fraction of factory wages, or left the labor force. Employment rates among men plummeted; rates of addiction, premature death soared. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/b...

Hard agree. I printed it out and keep returning to it at the end of another confounding day. I find it particularly good for framing what’s happening w.r.t higher ed: putting pressure on those now brittle contradictions etc.

“Abductions by government agents; unexplained, indefinite detentions; the targeting of allegedly dangerous ideas—Jews have been here before and it does not end well for us.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/trump-jewish-antisemitism-wesleyan.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

According to two **AEI** economists the Frump Team flubbed their formula: “the formula the administration relied on has no foundation in either economic theory or trade law.” https://www.aei.org/economics/president-trumps-tariff-formula-makes-no-economic-sense-its-also-based-on-an-error/

“Are we at the point where universities across the country must have presidents who are agreeable to President Trump or else risk calamitous cuts to their federal funding?” https://balkin.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-tenth-demand.html

Peter E. Gordon · Hair-splitting: Versions of Marx One reason to welcome a new translation is that old terms and cadences tend to petrify: repeat a phrase often enough and...

‘If the words in “Capital” become overly familiar they lose their revelatory power and become yet another veil that purports, paradoxically, not to be a veil.’

Peter E. Gordon on a new translation of Marx:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Was just rereading your first book on science vs market logic and Big Science. We’ve forgotten or were just ignorant about the complexities and politicking that made the post war university- science settlement. And what a historical anomaly

Peter E. Gordon · Hair-splitting: Versions of Marx One reason to welcome a new translation is that old terms and cadences tend to petrify: repeat a phrase often enough and...

On translating and thinking with Marx: “There is a fetishism of commodities, but there is also a fetishism of authors and original meanings. Thinking with Marx can often mean thinking against him, or even past him.” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Columbia going hard

Here’s a recording of Chris’ amazing, deeply moving, and inspiring talk this afternoon on building a future for the humanities. So much to think about: m.youtube.com/watch?v=yVNc... 🗃️

Not a good start to the day when you’re trying to get the kid to school but are late because you’re talking (yelling?) back to the madness on NPR as they interview Dartmouth president and boy was that crazy.

The Middlemen Linking Migrants in the U.S. to Your Shopping Cart The incoming Trump administration promises an immigration crackdown. But for years, the on-demand economy has been fueled by unscrupulous staffing agencies exploiting migrant workers.

The costs of our on-demand & cheap lifestyle…great, in-depth reporting here www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/u...

They’re nationalizing McKinsey & Company and the whole damn consultancy model.

They’re nationalizing McKinsey & Company and the whole damn consultancy model.

Editors’ Note Country Over Party

Whose democracy? “The Democrats bet that a desire to defend shared traditions, symbols of American democracy could transcend profound divides…America, as an ideal, was supposed to smooth over the contradictions. But “America” in this sense is over.” www.thedriftmag.com/editors-note...

Brutal championship round finish to the fall season ends with pushups for many a missed sign.

Opinion | This Rout Is an Opportunity for Democrats Resistance politics inevitably feels conservative. It’s reactionary in a literal sense, and this week, it ended in disaster for the Democrats.

Ignore Yale Facism School on NPR & read Shenk: “Resistance politics is reactionary….The other side decides the terms of debate; it ends w/ finding yet another norm under assault, a new outrage to be tutted over, another institution that needs protecting” www.nytimes.com/2024/11/08/o...

lol. Hi Ted