Rad Pedagogy

Like student evals, citizens snitching on each other will be felt most by PoC, women, LGBTQ folks, migrants. A lot of mediocre white ppl (ie, men like Kirk w/o college degrees saying Black women’s brains don’t work) will engage in what @profkori.bsky.social calls “know your place aggression”

snitch culture can keep them from getting to learn. Sometimes a student who never takes a professor’s class will snitch (to admin, donors, Congress or some “watchlist”) that they feel too uncomfortable to TAKE a prof’s class bc of their writing! And so they keep ANYONE from taking their classes.

People missing an important point about folks getting fired for whatever they said about Charlie Kirk: Americans are being conditioned to be snitches on their fellow citizens who don’t toe a party line on what is “allowed” to be expressed. And employers are going along. It’s the new secret police

‘You just have to learn to play the game’: survival, resentment and resignation in women academics’ narratives of precarity This paper discusses precarious academic labour and its implications for gender and interrelated inequalities, drawing on narrative interviews with temporarily employed UK women academics. It ident...

"The academic career is framed as a privileged but high-risk venture that ppl knowingly choose to embark on so they must endure the consequences or find a way to cope, thus obscuring deliberate adoption of biz models that [deprioritize] investment in staff + render large sections of the workforce 🗑️"

I saw the greatest minds of several generations destroyed by Immanuel Kant

“There is a lot of uncertainty for the multilingual community in my school … Can I get my kid to school without being stopped by law enforcement? Is mom or dad going to be home when I get home?”

“You don’t need me to believe it’s useful, you just want me to be polite about it.

But […] I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

As a special practice for the "I can't believe we're supposed to do our routine, capitalism-maintaining things" crowd, of which I am one, let's *do something today that is not one of those things* & that's freaky even for us. (What this is will depend on what your own freak baseline is.)

In the iconic words of Jodi Melamed, AAAB: All Administrators* Are Bastards.

*by which we mean high level VPs et. al. as opposed to the mid-level folks doing the thankless poorly compensated labor of keeping institutional life afloat.

Liberal arts folks are always like “Yay!! We got a Dean / Provost / President with a humanities background!” not yet grasping that this background often makes them more, not less, strategically positioned to murder all our programs.

#AcademicSky

Virginia Tech Humanities for Public Service Major How one interdisciplinary department created a new major to better serve its students’ career ambitions

ftr, *this* is who they're shutting down. from ACLS:

VT Religion and Culture is truly such a gem of a department and is absolutely stacked with amazing and kind scholars. I’ve benefitted immensely from the generosity of my colleagues and know how much we all have given to our teaching and service. The shortsightedness of this decision absolutely blows

It is pretty noticeable that even as mainstream opinion on Israel and Gaza finally shifts, you don’t hear the Responsible Adults apologizing for punishing all the college kids protesting the atrocities. Quite the opposite in fact!

The Religion and Culture department at VA Tech is a standard-bearer in humanities research. It’s full of rad people doing actually interesting things.

This is a devastating loss, seemingly driven by a dean hungry to flex power regardless of the consequences to people and pedagogy.

#AcademicSky

“We must remember that, no matter what happens, the fascists are the enemy, and that only fascists are responsible for their violence. Whether crime is up, or a protester threw something, or someone entered the U.S. illegally—our enemies don’t care if any of these things are true when they pursue their violence, and we must be equally uncompromising about whether any human being should have their fate decided by a fascist, authoritarian government.” - Kelly Hayes

"We are witnessing authoritarian consolidation—not the rise or threat of fascism, but its enactment. Many people are understandably voicing alarm. In fact, it’s clear that alarm is all some people have to offer, including Democratic leaders." organizingmythoughts.org/you-must-pro...

You Must Protect Anyone Chased by the Fascists "We have to define the politics of opposition."

If you're trying to make sense of what's happening in D.C., orient yourself in this moment, and figure out what to do next, you may want to read my latest piece.

Taking Action in Higher Ed Taking Action for Higher Education is a workbook to assist university workers in assessing personal risk and making decisions about how and when to take action to resist fascism.

I just posted a free workbook that aims to help university workers better understand when and how to take risks in the fight against fascism in higher ed.

halperta.com/shalperta%20...

Absolutely not. Because of the organization of the enterprise of AI in education around the aims of finance capitalism, "teaching AI" will result in the erosion of the educational enterprise and its further organization around capitalist, neo-liberal ideologies.

need some syllabus inspiration? check out this super thoughtful all-class final project! down with grades! up with building muscles for the futures we want to live in!

"What if the person who took the average number of turns got the A?": @schooldaves.bsky.social stopped by our latest episode with some tips on grading for communism!

#pedagogy #edusky #academicsky

A graphic urges school supply donations for kids with incarcerated parents in Cook County Jail. It highlights that over 5.7 million U.S. kids have experienced parental incarceration. School supplies are shown at the bottom.

Please consider a donation so that parents currently incarcerated in Cook County Jail can still give badly needed school supplies to their kids. bit.ly/Back2SchoolChi

What the Columbia Settlement Really Means

The Columbia settlement is an “astonishing transfer of autonomy and authority to . . . an administration whose disdain for the values of the academy is demonstrated anew every day.” New @knightcolumbia.org analysis of the Columbia settlement, just published. knightcolumbia.org/blog/what-th...

The principle itself is laudable. But until + unless strategies to “defend academic freedom” attend to the structural + material conditions or labor, they will functionally remain plans to (deputize subordinates to) defend the academic freedom of the professorial 1%.

#AcademicSky #EduSky

Graduate students, contingent faculty, and support staff usually know what “academic freedom” is + what’s at stake because they have experienced their own universities denying it to them—whether via subtle threats, anti-labor propaganda, or SWAT teams invading their campuses and kidnapping them.

The plan must include paying them living wages, supporting their right to collectively bargain, practicing actual shared governance, & being ready to take real material risks in solidarity with more vulnerable + targeted colleagues.

No, none of that is in the list.

#EduSky #AcademicSky