Rachel Fish

I'm looking for advice for a friend writing a tenure statement, please. What are best practices for addressing disruptions to research from Covid, attacks on higher education, etc?

So, any other news yesterday?
Anything important?

Trump Education Department outsources more responsibilities, continuing proposed wind-down | Arkansas Advocate WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration took more steps Monday to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, announcing two additional interagency agreements with other departments that ...

Trump Education Department outsources more responsibilities, continuing proposed wind-down arkansasadvocate.com/2026/02/23/r...

I recognize that given the availability of “AI” transcription that this model is unlikely to take off more broadly at this moment. But it is a good reminder that we can have nice things! It’s not impossible.

Her data and analysis suggest the model is helping patients and workers get more of what they need from the important social aspects of medical care, and it’s also more cost effective, than having the MDs do it, and they can still have the benefit of talking with the patient w/out taking notes.

In @allisonpugh.bsky.social ‘s book, The Last Human Job, she discusses a clinic for patients with complex care needs that has expanded the role of medical assistants to do a variety of tasks that center connection with the patient, including staying for appts with MDs and scribe in the appt.

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

Photo of a white hand holding the new hardcover book, “In Sickness and in Health,” by Laura Mauldin. Background is a grey couch.

@lauramauldin.bsky.social ‘s book arrived! I am so excited to read this important work illuminating the politics of caregiving in an ableist society.

ICYMI: The US is currently holding three times as many people in immigrant detention as were detained in the Nazi concentration camp system in spring 1939 — six years into the Third Reich, and just before the start of World War II.

Call. Your. Senators. Right. Fucking. Now. It’s ok if your voice shakes while you leave the voice mail. If you cry. If you cuss. If you’re inarticulate. Just get the message across.

bsky.app/profile/jaso...

All of the insults that employ intelligence as an insult (stupid, idiot, dumb, r*tarded etc) also have baggage like m*ron because they’re all rooted in the concept that mentally disabled people either shouldn’t exist or are a drain on society and not capable of being productive or useful.

In Sickness and in Health An urgent and deeply affecting account of America's failure to provide meaningful support to its chronically ill and disabled citizens and our resulting...

Amid all that is happening, I urge you to pre-order my new book. As our systems further collapse and the state chooses to spend its funds terrorizing communities rather than investing in our collective care, we need to bear witness 1/5 www.harpercollins.com/products/in-...

The risks of AI in schools outweigh the benefits, report says A new report warns that AI poses a serious threat to children's cognitive development and emotional well-being.

"The sweeping study... found that using AI in education can 'undermine children's foundational development' and that 'the damages it has already caused are daunting.'"

They include limiting kids' cognitive, social, and emotional developmen, and increasing inequity.

www.npr.org/2026/01/14/n...

I really want ppl w/o Minneapolis connections to understand

You might've heard that Mpls public schools went hybrid bc so many families are in hiding. Well, a coworker just told me that today, during his kid's hybrid class, a kid's apt building was raided onscreen

*Everyone has stories like this*

Congrats! Can't wait to read!

Censorship Arrives on Campus In her debut column, “Echoes in the Quad,” higher education policy scholar Dominique J. Baker explores how the political oppression of the McCarthy era reverberates in the stifling of academic freedom...

It would appear I am now a columnist at Inside Higher Ed. My first piece focuses on McCarthyism, censorship, and our current moment in higher education. This is an essay I started nearly 6 months ago so I'm glad to finally share it with y'all.

www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

There are so many things wrong here, but I can't stop thinking about how generating new research project ideas is one of my favorite things I get to do for my job. Why would I want a machine to do that for me?

I also received one of these emails - my paper has been fed into an LLM without consent, and now they want me to evaluate the "ideas" the LLM generated for next projects... "If you find these ideas valuable, you are welcome to pursue them with no obligations — they are our gift to you." Gee, thanks!

Lest anyone for a single moment thinks this latest coup is a somehow a dramatic breach of long-term US foreign policy.

The other thing about normalizing gAI use in higher ed is that we are teaching our students that they cannot trust their own creativity, their own thoughts and brains, their own skills without having it reshaped/shellacked/transmogrified by LLMs. We’re setting them up for failure and dependence.

Ive been blocked by some pro-gAI academics on here who think Im "ableist" for refusing to allow gAI in my classrooms, but the thing is I do fundamentally believe that we make a moral statement when we decide to teach students that they must rely on this kind of theft to read, write and think.

Behold: the first-ever list of news outlets that have banned generative AI in their reporting. As of today, this is literally information that you cannot find on Google.

My goal is to fill the starter pack, so please send over suggestions with supporting evidence!

go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Most daycares and private preschools won’t enroll children with disabilities. Especially for low income families, Head Start is their *only option*.

LLM use in scholarly writing poses a provenance problem Nature Machine Intelligence - LLM use in scholarly writing poses a provenance problem

It’s good to see papers start to address LLMs as structural plagiarism — provenance, more hidden than the original words or training data. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

so far tonight msnbc has interviewed two students from brown university that are also survivors of separate high school shootings.

insanity.

That and the attempts to force AI despite few people wanting it and LOTS of people trying to figure out how to get rid of it. This isn't a desired technology. This isn't like when people lined up in excitement for iphones; it's like when the phones all came loaded with unwanted U2 albums.

I was informed the Department of Education was shutting itself down and yet they have been making a dramatic blockbuster-style preview of their new ideological project? youtu.be/bUNVdCduGKg?...

This tech is destructive of human creativity and intellect. It is burning the planet so people can avoid thinking. Administrators who embrace it are hastening their own demise.

Agreed. Higher levels of accommodations reflect the ways that our schools are not accessible places for many students. Privilege and inequality matter in terms of access to diagnosis, as well as the social and cultural capital to advocate for accommodations.