Greg O'Brien

I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking. "Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead."

“History shows us that the right to literacy came at a heavy cost…those oppressed recognized that literacy is liberation. To my students & to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write & think when others once risked their lives & died for the freedom to do so”

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

“Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers will immediately leave his role as an instructor at Harvard while the University investigates his ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey E. Epstein.

“His co-teachers will complete the remaining three class sessions of the courses he has been teaching”

Holiday Sale Happy Holidays from the University of Nebraska Press! Great books make great gifts, so for the rest of the year, until December 31, 2025, our entire catalog is available for 50% OFF. This sale includes over 4,000 books, so there’s something for everyone. Just enter 6HLW25 in the promotion code field of your shopping cart and click Add Promotion Code when making your purchase. Shop Now!

Happy Holidays from the University of Nebraska Press! Great books make great gifts, so until December 31, 2025, our entire catalog is available for 50% OFF.

Read this. All of it. "The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the MBCI [Mississippi Choctaws] a grant in 2020. The grant was a significant boost to the project. However, as the department was nearing completion of the dictionary, the Trump administration terminated the award."

I audibly muttered "ugh" with a start date in the 1750s. I fear the first night rush to get to 1776 without sufficiently focusing on 1774-1775 also suggests an old-school "glorious cause" will shape the remainder.

AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

UVA Faculty Senate calls for Rector, Vice Rector to resign immediately On Friday afternoon, faculty senators voted 41-17-2 to pass a resolution calling for the immediate resignation of Rector Rachel Sheridan and Vice Rector Porter Wilkinson.

Former University of Virginia President Jim Ryan is speaking out about his resignation under pressure from the federal government.
https://www.29news.com/2025/11/15/uva-faculty-senate-calls-rector-vice-rector-resign-immediately/ 

U.S. Hemp Roundtable We are the nation’s leading hemp business advocacy organization paving the way for the advancement of the hemp and CBD industries through education and action.

Fight back against the change in the Agricultural bill sneaked into the reopening craptastic legislation

hempsupporter.com

Jim Ryan tells all on his forced resignation Glenn Youngkin inadvertently cajoled former UVA President Jim Ryan to go public with what happened behind the scenes leading to his resignation in June.

Glenn Youngkin inadvertently cajoled former UVA President Jim Ryan to go public with what really happened behind the scenes leading to his forced resignation in June, and it doesn’t look good on the governor or his MAGA appointees to the UVA Board of Visitors.

augustafreepress.com/news/jim-rya...

my takeaway from this letter is that glenn youngkin, rector sheridan and their flunkies on the board are deeply dishonest people who are engaged, with the trump administration, in a mob-style shakedown against the university of virginia

Johnny Cash giving a one finger salute

Me

I’m back.
substack.com/@sarahkendzi...

If you have to get permission to teach in your area of expertise from people who are definitionally not qualified to adjudicate your expertise then you are no longer working at a university.

You’re working at a state propaganda factory.

And state employees stuck with no raises while they raised our health insurance costs.

This has gotten lost: Abigail Spanberger won big after vowing to RESCIND Glenn Youngkin's executive order directing local cooperation with ICE and voting AGAINST the anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act. Yet she gained bigly with working class.

New piece laying this out:

newrepublic.com/article/2030...

If releasing the Epstein files would end your presidency, then your presidency must end. It’s that simple.

Sarah Kendzior | Substack Author of THEY KNEW, HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT, THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY and THE LAST AMERICAN ROAD TRIP.

Not sure why one of the most incisive observers and critics of modern American life has been suspended from Bluesky, but it is clearly mistaken and needs to be fixed.

substack.com/@sarahkendzior?

In the Feb 2022 blitzkrieg Russia quickly occupied 120,000 km² of Ukraine in just one month at a cost of 17,500 casualties.
Since March 2022, Russia lost 48,000 km² and suffered over 1,100,000 casualties.

Russia will be defeated so long as the West arms & funds Ukraine.

After faculty raise concerns, UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor says university will not sign Trump's higher ed compact Lee Roberts called the "preferential treatment" proposal a clear infringement on academic freedom.

UNC-Chapel Hill's chancellor says the university will not sign on to a higher education compact from the Trump administration.

www.wunc.org/education/20...

James Lasdun · American Berserk: Serial Killers in Seattle For a period beginning in the 1960s and ending around the turn of this century, the preferred form of the homicidally...

‘After environmental regulations were finally enforced and leaded gas phased out, crime in general plunged and the so-called “golden age of serial killers” came to an abrupt end.’

James Lasdun on Caroline Fraser’s exploration of the links between pollution and murder.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

So proud of Jewel and this project!

Sandwich guy is free!

me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you?

students: no AI

I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion

Good news from my long-ago place of residence

“What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.” —Mike Davis

Young whip smart democratic socialist!!This feels right!
No more illiterate 80 yr old convicted felons who are not dealing with a full deck & are stuck in the past. Its 2025 & we have work to do. No more oligarchs buying favors. No cutting off SNAP. No $40 billion to rich buddies in Argentina

i want to repeat this: mamdani and spanberger have run similar campaigns tailored to their respective electorates and it is maddening to watch political journalists attempt to create some broad contrast where none exist

Here's how people in North Carolina are coping with the SNAP freeze “My biggest worry is keeping food on the table for my children,” said one North Carolina parent of the SNAP freeze. “Parents like me are doing everything we can to survive, and sometimes it becomes a ...

580,000 kids, 151,000 seniors, more than 46,000 military veterans, 1.4 million citizens across the state. 80% of SNAP households in NC have jobs, poverty-wage jobs.

cardinalpine.com/2025/11/03/h...

Do they think people will blame Democrats? I say try it and find out.

Happy Halloween! It is the end of my series of spooky Commonplace early American history, so here is our Salem Witch Trials subject page. Articles and reviews from Mary Beth Norton, Benjamin Ray, Carol Karlson, and more. More Salem content coming next week! 🧙‍♀️🗃️
commonplace.online/topic/salem-...