Lilly Irani

I wonder when all the national media is going to start breathlessly reporting every day on how all the rollbacks of equity programs, scholarships, and social justice centers on college campuses at behest of this admin makes black, brown, trans, and queer folks feel unsafe

Worker-led newsroom in San Diego for news *relevant* to diverse San Diego, not just about us.

He's making dehumanizing teachers as workers okay so he can justify defunding the university or overturning due process to fire them.

He's also not getting that the student centered language has whole literature on standards, rigor, collaboration, boundaries, and the terminology is pushed by admin

Great point! If I knew a network of possible donors, where should I direct em?

I subscribe. Jacobin doesn't do local reporting and watchdogging. They don't really make new facts. They do narrative analysis. It is not the same thing.

Your turn, California!

A “certain amount of rights” for the “host body”🫠

UCLA will negotiate with Trump over $339 million in medical and science grant freezes UCLA and University of California officials said Monday that it will negotiate with Trump over $339 million in medical and science grant freezes.

Trump the job killer is also making cite lab animals' lives more cruel: "Wakimoto and UCLA leaders also said other UC campuses were offering to help, including by taking care of lab animals that may need aid."

www.latimes.com/california/s...

Fascinating. Microsoft emailed me to say it was raising the price of Microsoft 365, but when i went to cancel it offered me me the old price — without all the AI bullshit.

It’s forcing AI on everyone and making them pay more for it, then only telling them they don’t have to if they try to cancel.

I learned of this rigorous form of engineering from a software engineer in Berkeley who was studying civil engineering, etc. is it called safety engineering? I have a lot of respect for this.

I am also a once engineer who takes ethics, craft, and integrity seriously (I worry professionalism can be a little classist, but I don't know how your friends mean it so no insult intended).

My hope is if we can get admin to stop speaking for the university by organizing faculty ourselves to speak on our behalf, we might democratically find our way to a university that scholars on campus and off can agree is useful and worth supporting.

I'm in this work because I want to meet people like your friends who want to think about the issues their engineering work raises that they won't get support thinking about on the job. I want to say "hey, you know stuff, and I've been thinking /working about this for 20 years...let's talk."

...seem committed to keeping education expensive while making classes bigger and bigger. And certainly some professors do need to examine some of their own ideas about gatekeeping and weeding out that lead them to make grinder classes that crush students' souls. ..

I have adopted a lot of pass fail projects with lots of feedback and scaffolding and asking the students to develop creative visions in response to the social science analysis of tech in society we learn about. Encouraging creativity is so important to me. But the regents in charge of unis...

I think higher education should be made very low cost or free. Community colleges are much better embedded in the community, in my personal opinion. What do your small sample want to see different?

I don't blame people for feeling that way. I know my students and those I organize with the don't feel that way. The university needs to change too, but not the way Trump wants to turn it into a weapons research Christian School.

The British media outlet ITV also went on a Jordanian airdrop and simply ignored the Israeli government’s illiberal demands:

www.itv.com/news/2025-08...

contradictory class locations | Bookmarker A quote from Left Hemisphere: Mapping Contemporary Theory by Gregory Elliott, Razmig Keucheyan

You're not entirely wrong though. Olin wright called these a contradictory class location that had aspects of management and labor, but *most* faculty are very low down the chain closer to pure worker than admin. bookmarker.dellsystem.me/note/1888

As teachers, we are both workers with a lot of classroom autonomy (maybe, where academic freedom is strong) and low level management. For funded researchers, we are definitely playing someone else's game -- we aren't the owners or top level managers that strongly influence or make the rules

Not according to according Eric Olin wright's class analysis. If we don't make the rules, are following another's orders, but and just exercising oversight and helping coordinate everyone doing and learning their jobs, we are labor. Irl, foremen are usually in the same union as workers.

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

AI is not a tool like a hammer. AI is a service run by a few corporations who stole half the materials and is literally uninvested in customer support.

The private sector wants to sell the government data about said MAGA person. I don't think they've really thought it through, unless they are investor or tech owner class.

I'm really sorry to hear of this and her decisions sounds very healthy. :( UAW, a union representing many phd researchers, is fighting the research cuts.

What's going on with science funding and campus budget cuts makes it really clear that faculty are at best foremen, not owners, in the knowledge factory.

Research from 2022 that every Democrat apologist should chew on:
“We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right.“

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Fighting Billionaires’ Control of the Media, Individual News Vouchers

Journalism supplies a public good (benefits people beyond those who pay for it). The market alone under-supplies it.

Here's a consumer- and citizen-first vision @deanbaker13.bsky.social for supporting it.
cepr.net/publications...

We are all worse off with the loss of journalism as a public goods. Public goods like clean air don't make a profit, don't run out through use, and we need them.

No anticipatory compliance. Fighting fascism requires us to muster our courage in all these small moments. We can do it!