Andrew Frayn

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On my way to strike and picket this morning at (checks notes) Edinburgh Napier University, over (checks notes) redundancies in the institution barely a year after Prof Nolan's departure...

IMPORTANT pls RT

My online novel seed-story.com is loading sporadically/not at all

The servers belonged to Google Creative Labs Sydney (now apparently defunct)

If anyone reading worked there/knows someone who did pls get in touch urgently so this pioneering work of digital literature can be saved

Just a few hours left for this, but it's plenty of time. Even just answering the "overall do you agree" question can be meaningful. Speak against this endless cruelty.

UK friends, this is the kind of utter awfulness the present UK government is proposing re immigration and rights of settlement. Please please take some time today to respond to this (link in this thread below). This cannot pass.

Meanwhile, today staff at Edinburgh Napier are on strike because of job losses, "voluntary" already enacted, and compulsory being pushed through.

I've not done age verification here, but an email (initial dot surname at Napier etc) would be great - thanks.

This sounds very interesting, but the link suggests it's only open to St A's PhDs? (Requires a login to register)

Strike week at Edinburgh Napier. Our first two of 10 days of strike action happen on Tuesday and Thursday. Fighting against management's refusal to rule out compulsory redundancies. Our university has no debt, we have reserves and have already lost too many staff.

Against amnesia about the history of English literary studies, racism, and a brief note on #tolkien, occasioned by reading Collini, a thread on Sir Israel Gollancz, the first Jew appointed as a Professor of English literature in the UK.
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NB: The UK govt owns the Student Loans Company, via which it directly funds most home students’ university places.

Framing graduates as indebted to this ‘company’ for the rest of their working lives is an accounting trick that both punishes the pursuit of education and undermines its public value.

Also this bsky.app/profile/chan...

👀

Meanwhile, at a school and university near you, AI tools that have yet to be tested on the types of students and subjects you teach are being rolled out to/in them without robust discussion and analysis. It's a major, shameful failing of the management of education systems.

The British Labour Party has broken with even the most basic social democratic values... There are loads of public services I don't use and some I hope never to have to use but I want them to be there for those who need or want them. You'd imagine *the Labour Party* would understand that...

On almost everything – fraud, polarisation, radicalisation, misinformation – evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers.

But that issue gets zero political attention, and is a total non-starter. Nothing good will come of it.

There is money for "education" if and only if that money is being directly funneled to corporations. Anything involving actual learning, however, well there's no magic money tree

Not the most important thing about this article, but an unusual choice of illustrative image @tennispodcast.bsky.social

An email in a Gmail inbox, subject line "Photo booth query", whose sender appears as "ICE helpdesk"

I just feel like this is not the ideal thing for the Max Spielmann photo booths helpdesk to show up as in one's email inbox

I turn 50 this year. My father wasn’t born yet in 1946.

I succeeded by hiding mine amid a pile of maths or physics textbooks and was complimented on my book-hiding skills by Guy Garvey from Elbow, who was also in the group. (2/2)

Classic beginning of term/state of things dream last night: I was at a (?semi-) derelict version of my secondary school with a group of people. We were playing a game, which was to hide a box full of copies of what we were teaching among the ruined, deserted buildings. (1/2)

So many of HE’s problems are the product of these efforts to generate market structures that just simply don’t work because the conditions that markets need to work really aren’t there, and all they do is create uncertainty (and financial problems) for students, staff, and institutions.

How the financial problem is described is not neutral. It reflects and reinforces a particular way of understanding what a university is and how it should function. If the financial situation is framed as a classic demand-and-cost problem (i.e., demand is insufficient, prices are constrained, and unit costs are too high), then the university is, implicitly, being treated as a ‘service provider’ operating in a competitive international education market where students are customers. In that frame, the obvious actions are to emphasise tight cost controls and to strengthen output-focused performance metrics, targets and incentives such as promotions based on publications in highly rated journals, income generation or teaching satisfaction scores. If the same financial situation is framed instead as a system-level shock that threatens the conditions under which teaching, research and public service can flourish, then a different picture of the university comes into view: a ‘living knowledge ecosystem’ serving a public mission and facing financial constraints partly beyond its control. Within that frame, the responses appears quite different. Attention turns to protecting core capacities, reducing harm to the most vulnerable parts of the system and working with others to share risks and resources. In both cases, the numbers in the spreadsheets are the same. What differs is the story told about the problem, and the underlying image of the university that story presupposes. At present, the former factory-like framing is the most common. With it, the danger is that, under a narrative of financial constraints, universities take actions that emphasise governance practices that reshape behaviour so deeply that, over time, what remains may still be called a ‘university’, but no longer acts like one.

Three short paragraphs, and you've got the whole mind-bending mess that is #UKHE finance & governance neatly laid out.

This is why it's all so exhausting: our managers declare there's only one static frame, while we know their framing is part of the issue.

💡 www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/01/10/w...

Look no further than an English or other Arts and Humanities degree
#EnglishCreates excellent careers

The camel nearly ended me

Don't know I'm afraid!

Scottish universities PhD students in English and associated subjects, please come along to this a week on Friday! Signup at link in quoted tweet.

Scottish universities PhD students in English and associated subjects, please come along to this a week on Friday! Signup at link in quoted tweet.

How likely is ‘likely’? Does ‘likely’ have a higher probability than ‘probable’? I put together a quick quiz so you can see how you interpret probability phrases, then see how you compare with others: probability.kucharski.io