Frances Garrett

I’ve been doing this this year. The students actually seem to love it.

The ‘Crisis of the Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing. All of higher ed now suffers the attacks of politics and technology.

This was published in the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s. If you work in education & were, reasonably, taking a break, maybe you missed it.

Don’t miss it.

How does the brain learn? And why don’t we teach that way? Neuroscience shows traditional teaching is not enough. Instead, an experiential approach can return learning to its natural order

What does neuroscience suggest about how students learn best? Mussab Aswad explores how brain-aligned, experiential learning builds deeper understanding and real-world capability: https://ow.ly/cgqc50XSkq8 #HigherEd #AcademicSky #EduSky

It’s 2026. Is the University of Toronto really closing a popular program designed around non-Eurocentric lifeways, modes of knowing, and teaching practice?
Learn more at pathuoft.net/blog/
#contemplativestudies #bpmh #contemplativescience #buddhism #uoft #truthandreconciliation #mentalhealth

The Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health program is an internationally recognized minor at the U of T. 2026 is our 20th anniversary. Over 1,000 students take our courses yearly.

Why is the University proposing to close this popular program? Please add your name: www.change.org/p/protect-th...

An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.

“If we don’t have freedom of attention, we can’t have true freedom of intention. And if we don’t have freedom of intention, every other freedom is illusory or impossible.”

open.substack.com/pub/buddhism...

UNTIL IT’S DONE, Ep. 4: Sylvia Rivera

In the 1970s, queer New Yorkers had been pushed to the margins of NYC. Our trans neighbors faced immense cruelty. But in Sylvia Rivera, they found a champion.

As we combat Trump’s politics of darkness, her legacy can light the path forward.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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Faculty, Rejoice: Gmail Can Now Translate “Deanspeak” We are thrilled to announce that Google Translate has recently added “Deanspeak” to its suite of language-detection tools. In addition to offering ...

Now, instead of reading the latest email from the Subdean for Academic Affairs and Climbing Wall Management, simply click on the ADMINISTRATOR LANGUAGE DETECTED icon to reveal the message in simple English and determine the threat level to your department, program, or mental health.

Race, Caste, and the Challenge of Karma: Cultivating Black Buddhist Perspectives While Buddhism has been adopted by people who suffer from racial oppression, it remains difficult to reconcile traditional Buddhist approaches to karma with projects to counter systemic injustice. Thi...

Starts tomorrow (Friday): Race, Caste, and the Challenge of Karma: Cultivating Black Buddhist Perspectives.
csr.princeton.edu/events/2025/...

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A few points for the left A few thoughts as the flames of fascism rise up all around, consuming people and planet.

The great @jksteinberger.bsky.social provides some excellent pointers in this essay. Please read it (and follow her): jksteinberger.medium.com/a-few-points...

This looks amazing!

the university's violence just becomes clearer and clearer. thank you again @amyrwong.bsky.social for such a deep and generous read of dear elia ❤️

Rethinking the Inevitability of AI

This looks like an important counterpoint to the AI enthusiasm we’re being showered with at U of Toronto

This is such a clear presentation of climate colonialism - an outstanding resource for any audience