James A. Palmer

Every Discourse on this site is evidence of how it's not good to treat K-12 history education the way this country has.

Did people really memorize phone numbers before cell phones, or is that just a movie thing? 2? Questions I was watching some old shows from the 90s and noticed people would just dial numbers from memory - like they'd call their friends or family without looking anything up. Made me wonder if that was actually normal back then? Did people genuinely have all their important numbers memorized, or did most folks keep a little address book or written list nearby?

If anyone needs me I will be in the museum, lying down next to the bog bodies.

Early Medieval Europe: Vol 33, No 4 Early Medieval Europe is an interdisciplinary medieval studies journal covering European history from the fall of the Roman Empire up until the 11th century.

Need cheering up on a gloomy October afternoon? The new issue of Early Medieval Europe is out!
Articles on justice in Bavaria, tolls in Italy, women in 10th-c. Rome, Carolingian kingship, and child slavery: mostly available Open Access 😎https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14680254/2025/33/4

Adding to the thread - one thing missing from making knowledge creation visible is media coverage.

A pie-chart of federal research funding, using 2023 figures. The funding slices for the NIH (83%) and NSF (17%) are so large that the slices for the NEH and NEA round to 0%.

Again, it is worth keeping in mind when comparing the rate of discoveries that public funding for medicine and the sciences is orders of magnitude larger than for the humanities. We work slow in part because we work on a shoestring.

We need to talk about Russell Vought – But Properly Why certain mainstream outlets insist on sanitizing Vought as a devout “small government” conservative – and what actually animates his war against pluralistic democracy

Sunday reading:

I wrote about the aggrieved extremist who is currently firing thousands of federal workers and ravaging state capacity based on conspiratorial nonsense - and about mainstream media’s infuriating tendency to sanitize Russell Vought and the regime he serves.

This week’s piece:

Works for me!

There is no greater indication of the fallen state of the republic than that it is opening day for the Detroit Red Wings and yet, somehow, not a federal holiday.

I have looked at this a ton and he's right! There are NO rigorous peer reviewed studies showing faculty political leanings translate into skewed teaching or any form of vindictive grading or censorship on a systemic scale. Yes there are anecdotes, no there is NOT evidence of a widespread issue. 🗃️

Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down How Linda McMahon’s latest “compact” would do deep and permanent harm to American higher education

The “compact” for higher ed is an unserious document written by unserious people from a position of spectacular ignorance. No one should take it seriously. Sadly, my bosses are taking it seriously.

newrepublic.com/article/2013...

Job posting! OU Sociology is looking to hire a TT Assistant Professor or an accelerated TT or tenured Associate Professor, teaching criminology, criminal justice, & race/ethnicity courses. OU is OK's flagship R1, PhD program, 2-2 load with TA help. Please share!

Details: apply.interfolio.com/174925

Cover image of Minji Lee, The Medieval Womb: Hildegard of Bingen’s Views on the Female Reproductive Body. On the complex imagery reproduced on the cover, read the book!

#histmed #MedievalSky Minji Lee's book, The Medieval Womb: Hildegard of Bingen’s Views on the Female Reproductive Body, has just been released #OpenAccess: library.oapen.org/handle/20.50...

The US media's longstanding tendency to be unduly deferential to power at work. If there was a culture of aggressive questions, examination of implications and forced responses, we might not be in a place where refusing to consider an obviously important question was a viable comm strategy.

Kristi Noem ‘stares down’ Antifa. It was reporters and a guy in a chicken costume

Kristi Noem praised for ‘staring down’ Antifa. It was a dozen reporters and a guy in a chicken suit

Under the compact, a mix of nine public and private universities would receive favorable terms for government aid if they agreed to conditions like banning consideration of race or sex in hiring and admissions, capping international undergraduate enrollment, requiring that applicants pass admissions examinations and suppressing grade inflation. Universities with large endowments would be asked to waive tuition for students interested in the hard sciences.

A sex-blind admissions policy at selective universities will not go the way that the Trump administration thinks it will.

He’s winning by being gifted profiles and platforms like this, while his targets are denied them, or at best spoken for rather than to. Higher ed journalism has had as large a hand in this victory as any other force

Chris Rufo's disastrous takeover of New College in Florida shows what universities would become if they sign the Trump regime's extortionary "compact."

New College was supposed to model the anti-woke conservative higher-ed Americans crave. Instead, it showed the opposite, and serves as a warning.

Yes, New College is incredibly inefficient but it also dropped 60(!) spots on the US News & World Report rankings. Not easy!
Everytime Chris Rufo is introduced as an impt voice in higher ed, remember that the one time he had a hand in running an institution has been a disaster.
Competence matters.

I really want to see an "i" toward the end there and it is throwing me.

The Tiger sure as hell won't be happy with only two sosajis.

Honestly, either of these lads probably has a lot to teach us about the path of virtue.

I enjoy Peter's work, but for me the true poet laureate is Nael (who, to be fair, has a year on him):

Tenure-track assistant professor "Early medieval history" (Univ. of Copenhagen) www.hsozkult.de/job/id/job-1...

Every discussion about AI in academia should start with ethics and academic honesty and almost none of them do. Those are really high bars to clear to get to using LLMs, which I suspect is a big reason why advocates skip over those conversations.

"Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas."

The Compact says "Signatories commit... to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas."

What does this mean for units teaching evolution, history, or climate change?
www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/u...

AAUP chapters brought this suit

Definitely. I have had students who write their papers on their phones!

On one hand, rhetorics or urgency can be dangerous, and can lead people to take unpredictable, radical, or ill-considered actions. On the other hand, there's the problem of bringing a strongly worded note to a knife fight.

I'm beginning to suspect that one problem with relying heavily on ebooks for teaching is a kind of "out of sight, out of mind" problem. A student might remember to keep reading a book on their desk, but one that they have to click about on the internet to even see?