Jennifer Juszkiewicz, Ph.D.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS: IU fires student media director after he refused to censor the IDS Indiana University directed the IDS to stop printing news.

“Any type of attempt on my end to censor or manipulate any content from a student media outlet is literally against the law. This is First Amendment stuff.” www.idsnews.com/article/2025...

We need a bigger national spotlight on this building raid, fam. Agents dropped from helicopters onto the roof. Citizens and non-citizens alike were dragged from their homes in the night. People who weren't kidnapped during the raid had their belongings seized after the fact. This is madness.

Indiana NPR lay offs - this is my primary way of getting state news.

From the Indiana community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the Indiana community

Indiana State Library - a nonpartisan institution providing literacy and archival services to a state where (esp. in our rural areas) these are desperately needed - has been gutted. Knowledge is being lost. History is being closed. www.reddit.com/r/Indiana/s/...

#AcademicSky

Our tutor training class each week is one of my favorite times. Yes, I have a lesson plan, but the best comments and insights are the ones they share with each other. An ECON tutor sharing a strategy with a CHEM tutor. All of us coming to terms with patterns of challenge across the disciplines.

We are double that, consistently. And it matters. Tutoring is a great leveler: it's to all of our students, as part of their education, at no charge. Lin et al. (2025) have a recent, readable, open-access overview of how effective it can be for both the learners and the tutors.

5 Ways to Provide Tutoring to College Students Despite a majority of institutions offering tutoring services, only one in eight students utilize these resources. Here are five ways to provide or incentivize use of tutoring services.

For reference, according to InsideHigherEd, the national average for percentage of students using tutoring services is around 13%. www.insidehighered.com/news/student...

A chart of usage since 2022 (3 academic years). Key takeaway is that 30% of students were supported by tutoring in the areas of biology/MCAT, BUAD/ECON, Chemistry, Modern Languages, Nursing, Physics, Psychology, Speech Language Pathology, Social Work, Sociology, and Writing.

Today I made this chart for our Provost. It made me stop and reflect. It shows, in a numerical way, that our peer tutors are exceptional, that faculty support at SMC is genuine, and we are normalizing grounded peer tutoring, despite AI, despite the pandemic, despite isolationism:

This is really niche…perfect for #AcademicSky … and I know academia is facing myriad full-on attacks … but I don’t think anyone has really grappled with how such drastic cuts to grant programs will impact faculty evaluations or promotions.

A particular vein of the argument regarding AI use:

This is a genuine marvel of technology affecting our daily lives, a triumph of computational skill and knowledge applied efficiently and effectively.

And the techbros hate it.

Just think about that. Please think about that.

The trends are nearly all negative for overall safety, quality of life, and access measures for Indiana, especially for counties without a major metro center.

iyi.org/resources/in...

a good part of me thinks that in addition to everything else, the reason they are scrubbing these stories is they do not want disadvantaged kids to believe they can aspire to anything other than their designated “black” or “hispanic” or “woman” job

ALA vows to defend intellectual freedom and access to information against political threats In response to results of the 2024 United States election, the American Library Association vowed to continue its defense of the core values of librarianship in the face of political threats.

Further to librarians — www.ala.org/news/2024/11...

Hey, #hoosiersky, esp. Muncie and Kokomo, your rep co-sponsors this bill. You think our state education chaos is bad enough, without the federal DOE, it will be 10X worse. Reach out to Rep. Spartz. Save the DOE.

Kairos 29.2: Ball and Eyman, Getting Your Work Read: Ethically Circumventing Paywalled Publishing Practices A short guide for authors about how to share their academic work legally and ethically, regardless of where it was first published.

“The first step, though, is to be informed about how these systems work, what your obligations are under copyright law, and to be willing to advocate for rights to your own work.” - Cheryl Ball

kairos.technorhetoric.net/29.2/disputa...

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

“I’d come home after all day playing soldier and I’d paint a picture, and I could paint the kind of world that I wanted. It was clean, it was sparkling, shiny, beautiful, no pollution, nobody upset — everybody happy in this world.” —Bob Ross

Images of Minnetrista in Muncie, IN, where Ross filmed.

Yes, and Cotton’s Library et al.

“You have to take responsibility for what you’ve written.”

Retired professor Max Westler responding to Adriana Trigiani’s question about why he had his students had to read their poetry aloud in public to people they didn’t know.

(Saint Mary’s Literary Festival, 2019)

An image of the alarm/snooze app.

And this is the previous photo:

An image of the alarm/snooze screen.

This is the most recent photo on my roll - a screenshot I apparently took this morning. And how is your day going so far?

Rob Nelson, who currently holds the title belt for best commenter on my Substack, has some interesting insights on using AI in his teaching here. The point about the teacher not always being best feedback provider is worth ruminating on.

Indiana teachers battling right-wing bill to dissolve public school districts INDIANAPOLIS —The Indiana State Teachers Association is battling a right-wing state House Republican’s bill to dissolve public school districts where more students are attending charter and private sc...

The Indiana State Teachers Association is battling a right-wing state House Republican’s bill to dissolve public school districts where more students are attending charter and private schools or being homeschooled, combined, than attend public schools. www.peoplesworld.org/article/indi...

Knowing this helps me sort why I’m frustrated or energized by a given moment. Or, sometimes, horrified, when what I love (careful thought) is used for evil.

a group of women in dresses are standing next to each other on a stage giving the peace sign . Alt: The three Schuyler sisters from “Hamilton” singing “I want to see a mind at WORK!”

My joy is watching people think carefully or seeing evidence of people’s thoughtful care.

Tried to explain to the 10yo that yes, the inside of your nose can feel frozen because your snot freezes. “But what if you don’t have any snot?” Fair point, kid; I have no idea.