Rad Pedagogy

As part of an AI committee at my university, I spent this weekend trying out Claude (Opus 4.6) for writing, and I have to say, far beyond its hallucinations and the usual complaints, it is a baffling experience cognitively. I want to be more precise in my evaluation here than I usually am about AI.

Made a little zine for the panel called "Writing With Humans as Collaborative and Collective Practice" and you can have one if you attend

Tomorrow morning at 10:35 in Room 308 at #AWP26, you will like it

Panel is called "Teaching Writing Despite 'AI': The Noncoercive Rearranging of Desire" & includes @eireannmor.bsky.social , Arisa White, @shanayoungdahl.bsky.social & me

PSC/CUNY supports the SJU-AAUP chapter at St. John's University and condemns their administration's outrageous attempt to undermine the union and collective bargaining agreement. (1/3)

Only thing I have to say about BS about white men in academia "not being able to get jobs b/c of women and POC" is organizing a labor union will always be a better option than racism and sexism. But I guess that doesn't work for entitled men who think they're smarter & better than everyone already

great thread that pretty much nails the relationship between systematic lying and institutionalized hatred of poor people as consummated in those special hells known as phd programs.

Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education - Public Books We are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education.

"We envision a resistance that is...a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction."

"How to Resist AI in Education" by me & @cnygren.bsky.social
www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...

Hélène Cixous, The Art of Criticism No. 7 “There’s a feminist discourse that women can't do it all. This is what many women experience, and it’s very difficult. But I am not like that.”

“At Vincennes there was no hierarchy among the students or the teachers⁠—none at all… It was a place of freedom, wisdom, equality. It was a marvelous, joyous, alive place. I was in charge of appointing the first thirty-six professors… ‘Would you like to join a university of dreams?’”

what they did yesterday afternoon by Warsan Shire • Read A Little Poetry "later that night / i held an atlas in my lap / ran my fingers across the whole world / and whispered / where does it hurt?"

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

(from warsan shire “what they did yesterday afternoon”)

someone should invent a thing that's like a university but it's goal is to facilitate learning

My employer, Dartmouth College, today boasts it's 1st Ivy "to launch AI at an institutional scale." It is doing this by partnering--"more than a collaboration"--with Anthropic, a company that stole the books of many faculty, me included, which many of us are suing.

Protect Academic Freedom, Our Faculty, Our Communities Faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members: The UNC System is preparing to cave to political pressure from the Heritage Foundation, the Oversight Project, and the James Martin Center by ...

Sign the petition linked below to support higher ed workers at the UNC System in their fight against the requirement to create a searchable repository of all university syllabi, which will endanger students and instructors by inviting political actors to attack free inquiry across UNC campuses.

The New School faces identity crisis amid planned layoffs, reorganization The storied leftist university faces a $48 million deficit.

Yeah shit’s fucked up at The New School. It’s true. I’m living it. It’s a microcosm of what’s happening everywhere in America. gothamist.com/news/the-new...

Resist transactional education, resist fascism: “Authoritarians may take many things from us, but they cannot take our minds (unless you let them). … You are more than a future source of profit, and humanity's survival depends on all of us understanding this.” ⬇️

Protest and Pedagogy | Home Charlottesville's Black Freedom Struggle and the Making of the American High School

📚 *New* from UGAP's Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South series, 'Protest and Pedagogy' reveals how Black teachers and students in Charlottesville turned classrooms into sites of resistance during the 20th-century freedom struggle.
#BlackHistory @ugapress.bsky.social

Everybody should read this book by friend of the pod David Backer!

AI powered drones from US & Israeli tech companies--as well as the 2000 lb bombs & all our other lethal military technology. It's hard to look into these faces & not feel the horror of what we have done.

historians...Not to mention the artists. Who did you think the Palestinians were? With their 10 Universities, 98% literacy rate & more PhDs per square mile than most places on earth. So many. Taken out by 2/

This scholasticide was intentional. The world lost astounding minds. I'm so grateful for this tribute, but it could be an hour long & still not include everyone--philosophers, poets, literary scholars of all periods in world literature , physicists, biologists, mathematicians,1/

AGAIN!!! Support your public libraries. LIKE ACTUAL POLITICAL SUPPORT. I do not want to hear "I looooovveee my public library" from people who don't actually pay attention to whether they are being adequately funded and sustained, lol...

Article title: The NYT wrote more about Harvard last year than all community colleges combined

I posted three main figure from the article below

www.vox.com/2014/7/23/59...

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

“The math is brutal and the juxtaposition stark: millions for OpenAI while pink slips go out to longtime lecturers. The CSU isn’t investing in education—it’s outsourcing it, paying premium prices for a chatbot many students were already using for free.“
www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

Killing Abortionists: A Symposium - First Things Paul J. Hill, convicted of killing an abortionist and his security guard in Pensacola, Florida, has advanced the following rationale for his action: “Whatever force is legitimate in defending...

p.s. Here is the link to the First Things roundtable.

In conclusion: consider literally *any* counterfactual scenario where a liberal or left or queer or POC or Muslim (or or or) academic attempts “irony” in the way George did when discussing lethal politicized violence. How does that go for them? Do they get a puff piece in the Chronicle?

Nobody called for RG to be fired. But they were baffled as to how the same adults firing staff over their personal social media posts (esp. after other politicized deaths) could take him seriously as a guru of “civil dialogue,” much less pay him thousands to lecture undergrads about it.

“Oh, it was sarcastic!” was obviously not a satisfactory answer for them.

Once I assigned this roundtable + failed to add sarcasm tags to George. Big accessibility fail! Many students read him literally.

They were horrified: Why are these higher ed ppl platforming + celebrating (lavishly!) a guy who *affirmed in writing* the vigilante executions of gynecologists?

The piece — which was part of a roundtable published a couple of months after the murder of physician John Britton in FL — was almost certainly intended to be read as ironic.

He was satirizing people who say they are “personally” anti-abortion but won’t impose this position on others via law.

#OTDIH: 21 years ago today the conservative Catholic magazine First Things published Robert P. George’s “pro-choice” moral justification of the vigilante murder of abortion doctors.

Stop ethics-washing this guy.