@onslies.bsky.social
Historian: mobility & recordkeeping of #earlymodern Catholic minorities. Book: confessional mobility and English Catholics in Early Modern Europe. Also grumpy about the state of UK Higher Education so likely to talk about how it is being failed...(She/Her)
Don't forget to co-sign the petition about the drastic & destructive cuts at Essex University!
What their management is doing, without regard for the impact of the community, should not be allowed to set a precedent for #UKHE
www.megaphone.org.uk/petitions/sa...
Have you ever pulled a student quietly aside and said, “Hey. What you did was really, really good”? You can watch someone’s life changing in real time.
oh, yeah, UK ones are also more and more pre-packaged yet that makes them even less employable in a market that (1) is shrinking wildly and (2) actually needs people who can think expansively and creatively.
Loved this piece: that has the receipts on how ill-directed the pre-packaging is.
(also: hi! I just bought your book & look forward to reading!)
indeed! Taking away that path to self-esteem & confidence is quite key to turning this thing into 'intelligence on a metre' as Sam Altman so nauseatingly put it.
Though I think this framing of this investor is one that finds an ear more easily among policy makers.
"If AI handles the gruntwork, the learning pathway disappears"
along with, potentially, the self-esteem pathway, the deep and lasting reward pathway, the ability to create anything worth someone else's attention pathway (&c. &c.)
Thanks for reading -- and checking it was the right link!
And I do appreciate his take as an investor and one with a focus on growth. That's the language we probably will have to speak to cut through, as it's the one spoken by governments.
On students using AI: "They were getting worse, and feeling better about it"
🤷♀️
(genuinely appreciative of how he's tying this to the longer-term *societal* changes and responsibilities. It's a firm foundation for the need for regulation rather than blind survival-of-the-fittest. And that by an investor.)
Meanwhile, employers demand unis give them pre-packaged graduates they no longer have to train. And unis are judged on how many of those have a high-paying job within 18 months.
We need actual policies that have the long-term health of our societies at heart, not shareholders' profit margins.
Bizarrely, yes... It's written by an investor, but one who seems to have done a lot of reading about AI.
I wish I did. Other than getting our public institutions to take religion seriously and make it part of public conversations rather than treat it as something quaint if not worse. Podcasts, exhibitions, tv where it is acknowledged as a literacy to understand, not a relic of a long-gone past.
Rather unfortunate that our managers had already moved far in reorientating our entire education system towards the immediate performance of 'results' and away from gradual deep development.
www.scottishmortgage.com/en/uk/indivi...
oh yeah, would be wasted energy to try to change the minds of those very much gone in the hatred-makes-money-and-power spiral. But there's quite a lot of people who are dangerously enthralled by them and don't have the alternatives available. They would be the audience of the challenge to these guys
Love how empowering this is in its recognition of scale. You can't change it all, and that's reassuring & a call to change what you can.
When I wrote this a year ago I had no idea how bad things would get. Today, eight years after she left us, I'm trying to follow Ursula's advice: write and worry. Write and act. Worry and keep writing.
lithub.com/the-way-of-w...
Le Guin sat on her local library board, wrote to local papers, marched, got out the vote & "did many, many benefit readings... Learning all this, I thought [Le Guin's Taoist] “way of water” might look a bit like this: the housework or kleggich of a concerned citizen." @julie-phillips.com ❤️🩹
Why is government determined to have plausible deniability about the destructiveness of the #UKHE funding system? Why do they avoid having the data that shows this marketised, fee-based, competition-to-the-death system is destroying research & education?
Might it be because they know it's harmful?
So many students just really want tiny classes where people know their names & they can make friends. They want to have real conversations w real people. They want to have the time & space to build relationships.
Dr Dr has a nice ring to it?
Absolute DREAM of a PhD position! Four years getting lost in the Plantin Press 🤩 #BookHistory #EarlyModern #Skystorians
Ever wondered how pressmen and compositors at the early-modern Plantin Press structured their careers? 📘🕰️
Join the University of Antwerp as a PhD fellow and dive into the rhythms of labour between 1580–1840
Apply by 1 July 2026 👇
#PhDPosition #EarlyModern #PlantinPress #PrintingHistory #Antwerp
Thread based on the US but applies to #UKHE as well. Grateful for this neat dissection so we don't need to lower our IQs and higher our blood pressure with the initial guff.
here’s a student take from an ivy grad. imagine what it’s like for non-ivy students.
🎯🎯🎯
Of interest to the manager who's trying to slam academics four-to-an-office to make 'student space' (undefined what that entails): what makes campus a campus is the ability to interact with scholars. Talk to a student on occasion, and stop projecting this transactional degree factory on them.
“Faculty members have discrete areas of expertise, and those rarely include higher education as an enterprise.”
name me one institution that has for real shared governance, and then you can tell me all the enterprise-level shit faculty don’t know.
(Why does all 'market research' in universities only ever boil down to 'well, there's 20 other places that do this so we now also have to do this. You cannot do the innovative thing because we have to data about how that makes money elsewhere.'? That's a clown-car approximation of market research.)
fuck me for being this person, i guess, but public universities are a civic good and shouldn’t be run like businesses. and if you’re going to insist on running them like so, at least do some market research. students like their professors; they don’t want MOOCs taught by ChatGPT.
Genuinely this. For all there 'WE ARE A BUSINESS NOW, DEAL WITH IT' declarations, university managers are remarkably bad at actually importing the things from businesses that make them work.
Like grounded market research (that doesn't exclude doing something *new* 🙄) and CEO accountability...
The deliberate and conscious siphoning off of an issue which cannot be understood without the broader context, with the result that you're not going to solve anything at all, do the Germans have a word for that? Evading responsibility by pretending to do something you know is useless?