Bill Harder, PhD

A screenshot of a retweet from the author which reads “my initial gut reaction was that Foucault should be played by @VinDiesel, but then I realized that Dominic Toretto would never advocate being critical of the innate and hidden political power of institutions like… FAMILY.” The original tweet the author is referencing says “Foucault and Chomsky debate movie needs to happen” with a photograph showing Henry Cavill cast as a hound Chomsky and Diesel cast as a young Foucault.

Three-year anniversary or my greatest piece of short-form writing ever. I am no longer on the garbage fire of X, so please accept this screen shot in its memory. #Foucault #Chomsky

Recent Faculty Scholarship | Goucher College

A roundup of some recent Goucher College #facultyscholarship.

[Full disclosure: I had nothing to do with selecting the key art for this website.]

www.goucher.edu/news/faculty...

#HigherEd #LiberalArts #Faculty

Yes! I literally never had fall allergies before moving to DC and now almost two decades later it feels like the fall is worse than the spring for me.

As someone who just did an unplanned 30-minute explainer on the government shutdown, this is your periodic reminder that sometimes you’ve got to call an audible and throw out the lesson plan. #HigherEd #Faculty #Teaching&Learning.

So thrilled to celebrate these exciting new #GoucherCollege #faculty projects this afternoon. Really excited to hear about this wide ranging research. #scholarship #liberalarts

Mark this moment as the unequivocal return of the thought police.

Listen, I don’t know anything about the upcoming Marky Mark film “Play Dirty,” but it seems gross that they are happy to play the hell out of the Sampa The Great song ‘Final Form’ in the trailer while never once using the chorus which loudly proclaims “Black Power, Louder!”

I don’t need a 3 min ad for a show disguised as a ‘presenter’ for you to shame an award winner to for taking an extra 3 seconds. The bit feels gross #emmy but what else would I expect from a gutless capitulating network like @cbsnews.com (cbs get a Bluesky account so I can yell at you, cowards).

A full house of Goucher faculty and staff engaged in a discussion of first gen college students

So lucky to have @sonjaardoin.bsky.social join us at Goucher College today to talk with Faculty and staff about supporting #FirstGen college students.

Only the most recent example of why I am and always will be a vocal and committed advocate for #DCstatehood. It is an imperative.

Imperial President at Home, Emperor Abroad American foreign policy in an age of unrestrained executive power.

America now has the foreign policy of a personalist dictator. New piece from me in @foreignaffairs.com

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

And again, they were about 15-20 times as large as the April 2009 Tea Party protests, so I'll sit back and wait for 15-20 times as many stories from political pundits explaining that this was a decisive rebuke to the sitting president that Changes Everything.

Honestly there were more people lined up at the opening of the new #Rockville #TraderJoes earlier this week. And that was 8:30 am on a Thursday. #MoCo @themocoshow.bsky.social

Today, I opposed the OPM's proposed "Schedule P/C" rule that kills due process rights for thousands of federal employees. Instead of emphasizing empirically the harm this rule will cause (see great insights from @donmoyn.bsky.social), I focused more on legal and constitutional grounds. (1/2)

Ridiculous way to frame the story. Brown in no way disciplined the student. It says so in the article:

"Brown eventually cleared all three students of wrongdoing ... the university followed a standard procedure for students accused of conduct violations, and that this case was no different."

A stack of 4 worn books in front of some plants on an office windowsill. The books are: "The Woodworker's Bible", "Manual of Traditional Wood Carving", "The Complete Woodworker", and "The Encyclopedia of Woodworking Techniques"

A small example is the gift of woodworking books from a colleague preparing for retirement. It says something about the unique 3d space of a teaching & learning center that causes an artist to decide the best home for a few well-loved woodworking books is with the political scientist across campus

It can be unsettling as I’ve struggled with balancing my own identity as a Political Scientist & a Faculty Developer. But, it can also be freeing in unexpected ways that allow us to shed disciplinary trappings & engage with colleagues in ways that may otherwise be rare in the modern academy.

It’s tentatively titled “ #FacultyDevelopment as a Home for the Critical #LiberalArts Renaissance Person: or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being a Generalist.” It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

I’m prepping for a talk I’ll be giving in a few weeks about the way Directing a #Teaching&Learning Center—and being an academic administrator more broadly—can cause us to complicate our view of our own academic professional identities. #HigeherEd #FacultyDev [Thread]

Goucher and our university-based retirement community are getting some national attention on @npr.org's @marketplace.org! Love to see the work we've been doing to create meaningful co-generational learning experiences getting noticed. #HigherEd #LiberalArts

Update: turns out in the original 1982 book Steven King even got the 2025 year correct.

A Reality Show Where Immigrants Compete for U.S. Citizenship? D.H.S. Is Considering It.

Can’t believe that it is going to turn out that the only thing the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film “The Running Man” got wrong was thinking that we would be at this point in the hellscape by 2019 instead of 2025.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/u...

Letter to Faculty on Self-Censorship and Boldness (opinion) In a letter to fellow faculty, Nolan L. Cabrera argues that self-censorship is not a strategy for self-preservation.

“Bending the knee and precomplying will not stave off these attacks.

Acquiescing to censorship will not stop the threats.

Only engaging in collective, bold, public, strategic struggle & disruption has the potential to do so.

We did not pick this fight, but this is the fight that we are in.”

The Goucher Symposium: A Celebration of Learning & Scholarship

Today is the day: Goucher Symposium featuring more than 150 presentations of undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative works. One of my favorite days of the year. Thanks to all of our excellent students for sharing their incredible work with us! #LiberalArts

blogs.goucher.edu/symposium.

A property map showing four buildings each labeled with a number 1 through 4. The legend reveals that the building labeled "1" is in fact "Building 4", "2" is "Building 3", "3" is "Building 1", and you guessed it "4" is "Building 2"

Prepping my #datavisualization slides tomorrow's class means it is once again time for my favorite annual activity: finding new awful charts to include. What a beauty!

Beating a dead horse here, but higher ed is an incredible source of American soft power

The international students we educate at places like my institution, Harvard Kennedy School, bring their educational experiences to their home countries in ways that greatly enhance US interests

Massive, Unarchivable Datasets of Cancer, Covid, and Alzheimer's Research Could Be Lost Forever Days before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that 10,000 HHS staffers would lose their jobs, a message appeared on NIH research repository sites saying they were "under review."

The incoming NIH Director has repeatedly stressed the importance of open science and open data.

Now petabytes of NIH-hosted research data are about to be lost on his watch.

www.404media.co/nih-archives...

Predatory and gross.