Eric Hayot

"Good piece," he whispered, the phrase a ragged prayer on his lips. "Please become a turgid member of my Patreon for only $5 a month."

Jessica Merrill at Columbia is writing a book about this and just had a piece on diachronic narratology (in time travel stories) come out in Narrative...

@tim-stillman.bsky.social gauntlet thrown down.

AND POLARITY!! Everyone's always talking about biology this biology that... and they forget about the polarity!

Worst/best rewrite of "that's what she said" ever.

It's the "I was a bit wrong, but... really when you think about it not that wrong because the people I disagreed with at the time were also wrong and remain wrong, whereas I am right both now and also kind of in the past when I was wrong, because woke liberals are always wrong" that is contemptible.

It's like shooting the moon in hearts...

Universities Need a New Defense The authoritarian threat is growing. The old playbook won’t work.

"In every society fallen to authoritarianism, the state goes after the press first+ closes in on universities next.
All of us who live, work,+learn within the university should think of our institution as part of the larger constitutional structure of the nation."
www.chronicle.com/article/univ...

But the truth is, thanks in large part to my travels for Vandal Live, I feel much better about the profession than I did at this time last year, or even last Summer. What I have seen is a professional class neither resigned to getting bowled over, nor with their heads in the sand. Rather...

You're sitting on a gold mine...

www.ebay.com/itm/37537928...

Per Wikipedia: "The band's name is derived from an article the Beastie Boys published in their Grand Royal magazine about a man they hired to acquire classic sneakers."

... So, yes x 100.

Come for the devastatingly accurate analysis, stay to clip the bits about how Instructure is monetizing your intellectual property (and share them with your STEM and business school colleagues, who may care somewhat about that blatant, personal theft), and then ORGANIZE

Just got back to the department and this was the center of the conversation-in-progress in the Asian Studies office; strongly considering de-Canvasifying my spring course (as well as other things I won't post about). Highly recommended, thanks Matt and @ehayot.bsky.social

"...to help turn your humanity into your hu-brand-ity" is really amazing.

and most importantly and most proudly this year, to the teachers, leaders, makers, and haters leading an organized critique and refusal of AI, especially my cohort @ehayot.bsky.social and Krista Muratore, against-a-i.com

Where are your "skills" now that you need them, Liam???? WHERE?????

You're right--I think I was misdescribing your position in the skeets above.

But based on the responses so far the most likely form of reaction seems to be a new understanding of the role EdTech is playing in this whole fight, and an interest in responding to that.

We'll see! My feeling is that many of my colleagues don't believe enough in organizing/unionizing to actually DO it, so maybe this pushes some folks from a generic and useless "belief" into action.

I think it's much narrower than you're making it out to be. But it's also written the way it is to appeal to ALL our colleagues (inclduign people who respond to varying kinds/levels/types of rhetoric). And Matt and I have also different rhetorical relns to those communities, too.

But it's not "life itself": it's civil society. And it's not a moral claim but a historical claim--that something called "the humanities" has actually (in exiting history) served as a wedge for a larger attack on civil society (which includes corporate DEI, but also the VRA, AADA etc.). ...

...then that's what it is. And we don't disagree along the lines that you lay out here. (END, sorry this is interminable)

... and that it's turning folks into aggressive/bad readers. If you think of the goal of that piece as: how can Matt and I write something that helps people (1) understand the institutional/political structure of their professional situation and (2) find paths to action rather than despair...

Anyway. I think that one of the effects of the current situation for all of us is that we're being pushed into sides (pro-AI, anti-AI, pro-humanities/anti-humanities) that are dividing people who otherwise like and support each other and are on the same side about 95% of the world. ...

...and on a quick reread I don't see much in there that you can cite to make it that. You can pick on the "we are all humanists now" but unless you insist on reading that literally (in which case it's false) then, it's a rhetorical claim, doing a certain kind of work, in a piece aiming to persuade.

...the case that humanities scholarship has a special role in this fight. Some people might think so; I don't, but it doesn't really matter in any case. I think you're misreading the piece as an expression of the thing that you've been arguing against for a decade. But it's not that...

...to defend our institutions (as expressions of social goods, b/c public and open; this is a political belief) against OTHER institutions that have/express/organize other values. Again, this is a place for us to act and change. It has NOTHING to do with scholarship. Nothing in the piece makes...

That's why that second half is about EdTech (not AI; I am hostile to Gen LLMs not b/c they are "AI" but b/c they belong to the general EdTech project of primitive accumulation/destruction that aim to turn public goods into private ones). Those of us taking our courses off Canvas are acting ...

...but rather that they have been politicized, and that the correct responses are therefore political (organization, unions).

PART 2: the other thing the piece was trying to do was to give people a way to act to defend public education in their actual classrooms, in their role as teachers.

Goal of the piece was to give faculty in the humanities ways to respond to this political situation in appropriate fields (unions, professional organizations, banding together with K-12, sciences, etc.) so that they can act POLITICALLY. The point is not at all that the humanities are political...