Michel Estefan

Student today: “You look tired, professor.”

Me: “Correct.”

Exhibit A:

Episode 74: The Trustees (with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd)

Fantastic episode if you want to understand why the Right has such a fraught relationship with American universities.

Highly recommend the podcast overall—and conservatives especially might enjoy it (you know, viewpoint diversity and all that).

open.spotify.com/episode/1ADs...

Outcome: workload unchanged, home chores off the charts, AND the little autonomy I had gained now that kids are older has been annihilated. 🤦

#PuppyBlues #help

I deserve an award for empirically disproving rational choice theory.

Faced with persistent social pressure from a tiny but determined human in my home, I made an emotionally driven decision to acquire a puppy.

Thank you for joining us @mestefan.bsky.social, @kylethegreen.bsky.social, @shamuskhan.bsky.social, Jonnie Lotesta, Myron Strong, and @lisawade.bsky.social

This is tomorrow! Join us!

I'm doing a thing with my #UCSD colleagues in Revelle College! Join us next Wed at noon!

#DuBois #HigherEd #Teaching #Pedagogy @ucsandiego.bsky.social #Revelle

MIT is first school to reject Trump administration's agenda in exchange for funding benefits "With respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology president wrote in a letter.

👏

Essential reading by @sivav.bsky.social

Videos on Sora 2 of Bob Ross playing Call of Duty… Ai is definitely going to destroy the world, but at least we’ll all go in a total ASMR lull. 😴

The argument presented by Allen is both politically naive and historically erroneous. Accepting a compact *for higher education at this point in time* is suicidal. A 🧵

Operation: “Logic is Classified” — authorized by the Committee on Unquestionable Decisions.

The classroom can be an energizing, dynamic space when you cultivate it as a moral community—one bound by shared commitments and incentives. (And yes—accessibility is always built in. My students with disabilities thrive under these same principles.)

#LoveMyStudents #UCSD #HigherEd #Harvard

Apparently, that’s radical these days.
The result? They read, think, and learn—together.

Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Faculty Say

While Harvard debates why students won’t come to class, my UCSD students fill the room.
I grade attendance. I don’t podcast. Laptops stay closed. We do pen-and-paper quizzes every week.

Looking for a guide to teaching theory? See @mestefan.bsky.social's newest Reflection with First Publics, where he introduces 7 principles that you can adopt in any classroom.

🚨🚨red alert, UC colleagues🚨🚨

President Milliken is telegraphing the university’s surrender to the administration’s demands. “Ensuring that UC remains” is administrativeese for “we are giving them all they want”

In my new piece at @firstpublics.bsky.social, I share 7 principles to help them push through and find the motivation to keep going.

Read here 👉 thesocietypages.org/firstpublics...


#TeachingSociology #SocialTheory #Pedagogy #HigherEd #FirstPublics

Social theory is as hard to teach as it is to learn.

The hardest part? When students do everything right—read every page, show up every time—and still feel theory won’t open up for them.

Global academic freedom group warns Trump is dismantling US higher education Report from Scholars at Risk counts some 40 attacks against academic freedom in the US in the first half of 2025

“A global academic freedom group has warned that the Trump administration’s assault on universities is turning the US into a “model for how to dismantle” academic freedom.”

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Every recipe: “Only 20 minutes!”

Me: “Cool, so… two hours then.”

This is a really interesting take by a scholar of religion on the religious rather than scientific character of RFK Jr’s take on health.

Your Brain on ChatGPT with Nataliya Kosmyna

Nice summary and conversation about the MIT Media Lab study on Ai, students, cognitive-offloading, and learning.

#Ai #Pedagogy #HigherEd #Learning

As a sociologist, I see even more at work in his example: competencies the social sciences and humanities uniquely foster when done well.

Definitely worth your time.

#LiberalArts #HigherEd #TeachingExcellence

In this speech, he makes a charismatic case for the value of a liberal arts education. His focus is on cultivating the capacity to give reasons for persuasion.

X

and over time they proved to be right on the mark, well ahead of what the teaching-and-learning literature was recognizing back then.

YouTube video by Jeffrey Kaplan The most important skill college students should learn

I worked with Jeffrey a bit back when we were grad student teaching consultants at UC Berkeley’s GSR Teaching and Resource Center. Even then, he stood out as a brilliant instructor—his views on teaching struck me as unorthodox and incredibly creative,

AI cooling plants can have serious negative effects on local communities—something we should worry about and address. But at a broader scale, the total water they consume is minuscule and environmentally negligible.

Is AI water usage going to destroy the world? (No) #AI #DataCenters #ArtificialIntelligence #FactCheck #environment #Weather @DecodedProgramming This guy thinks whether anomalies are caused by water... TikTok video by Quick Thoughts

Here’s a fascinating, data-driven look at AI and water usage (at the link below). The key point:

www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8SWYrpw/