Julia Shatz

🚨🚨 My dear friend and fellow academic, the Palestinian American sociologist @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social has been taken by the Cook County Sheriff near Chicago. They have not mirandized her. Please signal boost. All eyes on Broadview for Eman and the community she was defending 🚨🚨

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

The idea that an instructor can and *should* be fired for daring to teach something not explicitly mentioned in course catalog is the pinnacle of the "students as customers" idiocy that's been steadily destroying American universities for decades now.

You're taking a class, not buying a product.

And the text of the bill is here: leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCo...

These are the Senate Education Committee members, if you want to voice your views on the bill before their hearing this afternoon: sedn.senate.ca.gov/members

3. Most concerningly, the bill repeatedly conflates being Jewish and being Israeli, which risks seeing any criticism of Israel as antisemitism.

2. The bill allows anonymous complaints. Combined with the above, that will lead to a proliferation of bad-faith complaints, in addition to the legitimate ones.

1. The bill does not define “antisemitism” and instead leaves it up to whoever adjudicates complaints to apply whatever definition they think appropriate. This will chill teaching, writing and learning about Israel/Palestine.

Californians! A revised version of AB 715 was released last night, a mere 24 hours before a scheduled Senate Education Committee hearing. While the new version removes some of the worst problems of the previous one, there are still major concerns. 🧵

In the wise, wise words of my five-year-old, “if a machine told me something that my brain knew was wrong, I’d just turn off that machine”

GPT-5 insisted to my sister that the word “strawberry” has 2 r’s in it. PhD-level stuff. Definitely worth my kids not having an inhabitable planet when they’re older.

Awesome that we’re burning down our kids’ futures for this.

Opinion | California Democrats Are Fighting Trump’s Battle for Him

Californians, AB 715 is a threat to public education. Call your state reps, unions, etc. If, like me, you are a Jewish Californian who does not want to be used as a mascot for an assault on free speech, does not want to be pitted against our Palestinian friends and neighbors, tell them that too.

Matt Walsh's imaginary professor: "good morning student-comrades. today we learn how to bayonet a white Christian capitalist while taking trans hormones"

actual average professor: "folks, I am begging you, please do the reading for tomorrow this time. it is five pages"

Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.

Ms. Rachel is braver than the troops.

So well deserved!

Thanks for absolutely nothing, Columbia and Harvard. Two of the wealthiest universities with the most cultural clout in the world, but rather than fighting, they laid down like doormats and let the government walk over them to destroy the rest of the sector.

The Trump administration is using claims of antisemitism to cripple universities--along w/ independent media--because they are centers of resistance to authoritarian rule. And the ADL is applauding this assault on liberal democracy. What a shameful moment in American Jewish history.

ICE Arrests Pro-Palestinian Activist at Columbia Mahmoud Khalil, who recently completed a graduate program at Columbia, has legal permanent residency, his lawyer said.

The United States government just disappeared a lawful US resident because it didn't like his speech. You should care about this because it shouldn't happen to anyone, but you should also care because it could happen to you. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/n...

The Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem has been raided by Israeli security forces. Mahmoud and Ahmad Mina have been taken to custody. Anyone who’s visited Palestine knows how serious this is for freedom of speech and cultural organising in Palestine and Israel.

Cal State unveils artificial intelligence tools for students The dawn of AI has brought visions of higher education innovation – and worries that the technology could create new problems for students and faculty.

During the takeover of the federal government by an unelected billionaire, the impending elimination of the DOEd, and a devastating 8% budget cut to the country’s largest public university system, the CSU is paying $17million to OpenAI to give all my students ChatGPT.

edsource.org/2025/cal-sta...

Come see my colleague’s amazing and amazingly relevant work!

The University has had a budget deficit for several years. It is attributable to a variety of factors – cost of personnel, price increases for supplies and utilities, inflation – but the main reason is declining enrollment. Student tuition and fees, combined with enrollment-based funding from The California State University, are the major sources of revenue in the university budget. Sonoma State’s enrollment has dropped 38% since its peak in 2015. Remember that to close budget gaps, over the past two years the university has employed a variety of methods – including voluntary employee separations, strategic personnel reductions, academic and operational streamlining, shared services, hiring freezes, and prudent use of reserves. Unfortunately, the actions taken so far, difficult though they have been, are not enough. Further steps must be taken to

fully close the budget gap and ensure Sonoma State’s financial capacity to best serve its current and future students and adapt to a changing higher education landscape. The financial options have now narrowed to a small set of actions – elimination of programs and departments, non-renewal of faculty contracts (both tenured and adjunct), and more layoffs of staff and administration. Consequently, today, approximately 46 university faculty – both tenured and adjunct – will receive notice that their contracts will not be renewed for 2025-26. Additional lecturers will receive notice that no work will be available in fall 2025. Four management positions and 12 staff positions also will be eliminated. Additionally, several academic departments and programs will be combined, downsized, and/or eliminated as follows:

Programs identified for elimination: Administrative Services Credential in ELSE; Art History BA; Art Studio BFA; Dance BA; Earth and Environmental Sciences BA; Economics BA; Education Leadership MA; English MA; French BA; Geology BS; German Minor; Global Studies BA; History MA; Interdisciplinary Studies BA; Interdisciplinary Studies MA; Philosophy BA; Physical Science BA; Physics BA; Physics BS; Public Administration MPA; Spanish MA; Theatre Arts BA; Women and Gender Studies BA. ● Departments identified for closure: Art History; Economics; Geology; Philosophy; Theater/Dance; Women and Gender Studies. ● Program mergers: Ethnic Studies (current departments of American Multicultural Studies, Chicano and Latino Studies, and Native American Studies) will be

Sonoma State announced faculty layoffs and program closures today. Targeted programs are mostly humanities and social sciences

Like all CSU, SSU is an institution that serves first generation and minoritized students. California has chronically underfunded the CSU and has billions in reserve.

Cameron, Ariz. Living on one of the largest swaths of land in America without electrical power, Thomasina Nez's entire life is a scramble to complete basic tasks. To take a hot shower, she must wait for buckts of water to come to a boil on a small propane stove outside her wood framed roundhouse. To make meals, she relies mostly on canned goods because unfridgerated produce rots qucikly in the Arizona heat. Its a struggle to stay warm at night, because she refuses to use her coal-powered heate after its fumes killed her two dogs.

A fierce battle for electric power is being waged across the nation, and Nez is one of thousands of people who have wound up on the losing end. Amid a boom in data acenters, the energy intensive warehouses that run supercomputers for Big Tech companies, Arizona is racing to increase electricity production. In February, the state utility board approved an 8 percent rate hike to bolster power infrastructure throughout the state, where data centers are popping up faster than almost anywhere in the US But it rejected a plan to bring electricity to parts of the Navajo Nation land, concluding that electric consumers should not be asked to foot the nearly $4 million bill.

I know academics who use AI regularly, for work and play, and I'd really like them, and universities, to tell me how they contend with AI's bottomless appetites for power and water.

Is asking ChatGPT to interpret a Xmas song or making it write your syllabus worth this to you?

We're pleased to call for nominations for the Grace Abbott prize, honoring the best book in English on the history of children, childhood, or youth (broadly construed) published in 2024: www.shcy.org/news-announc...

BREAKING: The AAUP condemns today’s faculty arrests at NYU.

“This crackdown on NYU faculty is part of a distressing pattern of repression of pro-Palestinian speech on college campuses nationwide.” — AAUP President Todd Wolfson.

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www.aaup.org/news/aaup-co...

Public universities, especially in non-"revenue producing" departments, are simultaneously being starved and worked to death. The UMass history department replaces maybe 1/2 the people who retire or leave, while the work load increases for those who remain.

I wrote a book on the execution of the Rosenbergs for Cold War spying – and a recently declassified document has convinced me that Ethel was innocent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 for conspiring with the Soviets. A newly declassified memo debunks the government’s case against Ethel, and her sons want their mother exonerated.

From my brilliant colleague, @loriclune.bsky.social

theconversation.com/i-wrote-a-bo...