Mercer Gary

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!!

The University of Texas-Austin is beginning a process to eliminate the Black Studies, Latino Studies, and Gender Studies departments in the College of Liberal Arts. This is a grave threat to the educational liberty of students, faculty, staff, and the people of Texas. 1/

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The media coverage does not reflect this AT ALL.

"American civil society has more than enough financial and organizational muscle to stop this authoritarian offensive. But it requires collective resolve. And it requires leadership, which has been in painfully short supply."

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Generative AI, in both form and content, and whether looked on favourably or critically, seems to embody a collective hopelessness about the prospect of human learning and creativity, if not human knowledge altogether. It’s as if climate change had fans.

Thank you, UPenn AAUP, for your powerful response to the administration's "invitation" (correctly renamed "threat") to join their academic compact. #academicfreedom #defendhighered @aaup-penn.bsky.social @aaup.org

Discretion Is Not the Better Part of Academic Freedom In a free society, we strive to eliminate the punishments that make discretion a rational choice—and not glorify discretion as a virtue when it is actually a vice.

Academic freedom will not survive by encouraging professors to censor themselves more.

“Too much of the response to the Trump admin’s repression has been driven by fear & cowardice. We need to fiercely support #academicfreedom as a fundamental right for all.”

— @johnkwilson.bsky.social

‚“Ode to Billie Joe” is known as a sad song. But its sadness lies in the absence of mourning. Death came and people shrugged. If they grieved, they grieved alone.‘

A culture of resistance should cultivate compassion, against the tyranny‘s insistence on cruelty and apathy, which normalizes horrors.

What Happened to the University’s Commitment to Free Expression? Charley Kirk, uAlberta, and Me | Centre for Free Expression I was shocked when the University of Alberta administration informed me, one of its law professors, that I was being placed on non-disciplinary leave for my social media comments in the wake of Charli...

"Why would it bow to antidemocratic pressures by placing a professor on leave without their request, consent, or involvement? That any university would do this is beyond comprehension and is cause for alarm about the future of academic freedom in Canada."

Why Hospital Policies Matter in States That Ban Abortion Our first-of-its-kind data analysis found that a seismic split emerged in how medical institutions in Texas' two largest metro areas, Houston and Dallas, treated miscarrying patients — and in their ou...

The rate of sepsis in Houston surged 63% after Texas banned abortion.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where hospital leaders empowered doctors to intervene before patients’ conditions worsened, it rose 29%.

(Published May)

was out for beers the other day and was trying to describe doing a vendor inventory and interlocutor said "oh if i wanted to do that i'd just point chatgpt at my work email and tell it to pull all the invoices"

Getting close to 50k views and I'm wondering is it just everybody is scared to say this and pleased I did? Because if there's so many of us who agree, trust me I'd know if 1k people disagreed with me let alone 50k, why are we letting AI ruin our universities?

Together we can turn back the tide.

‘Unbearable’: How ICE Is Locking More Immigrants in Solitary Under Trump A mother of three said she hallucinated after weeks in an ICE segregation cell in Louisiana. She’s one of thousands now facing the psychological toll of isolation.

"From December 2024 to the end of August, the number of people who spent at least a day in solitary increased by 41%."

"August was the peak, with over 1,100 placements in segregation that month."
#Louisiana #Florida #Arizona #Washington #USA #Incarceration #Deportation #EthnicCleansing

I would definitely encourage educators to find a new LMS and move away from Canvas surveiling and stealing your work. Now that they have AI built into the LMS it's even worse.

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

The people whipping up panics about "academic freedom" rarely speak up when academic freedom is actually imperiled.

This is absolutely chilling.

We can do good things!

Opinion | We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health

9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American."

It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...

AAUP President Denounces Planned Cuts at the University of Oregon The AAUP stands with the United Academics of the University of Oregon in protesting the administration's plan to slash multiple departments and programs and fire faculty.

AAUP President Todd Wolfson denounces planned academic cuts at the University of Oregon, laying out several concerns.

@uauoregon.bsky.social

🧵

It's important to note here that we're not just talking about faculty & university staff. 100s of U.S. colleges are in towns or small cities where they form the major industry & lifeblood of the community. Loss of students -> loss of rent $, restaurant $, bars, bookstores, gaming stores...

The media is completely ignoring that Brown University just agreed to a full bathroom ban and defining trans people out of existence. Even worse, when they mention it, they're describing it as a sports ban. This is not just a sports ban.

The media is hiding what's happening here.

Most accurate description I have seen:

Note also that the lawsuit alleges that because race and class are correlated, providing free tuition to lower income students is also racial preference.

They just want a pure aristocracy of inherited wealth

Our Bodies, Our Decisions: A Response to Andrew Sullivan’s NYT Essay In a recent New York Times, author Andrew Sullivan, a conservative British-American political commentator and former editor of The New Republic, argues that the trans movement has gone too far, pro…

Our Bodies, Our Decisions: A Response to Andrew Sullivan’s NYT Essay nursingclio.org/2025/07/16/o...

Democracy dies in the shadow docket.

Let’s talk about Professor Jonathan Caravello, who teaches math and philosophy at CSU Channel Islands. He’s been detained by the feds based on events at a protest in Ventura County on Thursday.

/1

www.pacbiztimes.com/2025/07/12/c...

Philosophy professor & US Citizen Jonathan Caravello has been brutally detained & effectively disappeared for trying to help a legal observer remove a teargas canister from under their wheelchair during an ICE raid on a California farm.

…is a sentence I've now had to write. What… in the actual fuck

Publication process meant I couldn’t address the most recent odious barriers to gender-affirming care, but I do make the case that while DTC telehealth is highly ambivalent and cause for concern, like the project of self-care more generally, its resources are not negligible, esp. now.

I have a new paper out! “Direct-to-Consumer Telehealth and the Ambivalence of Self-Care”
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...