Hoe kan de academische wereld omgaan met de nieuwe politieke werkelijkheid in de Verenigde Staten? Daarover bogen zich vrijdagmiddag bestuurders, docenten, onderzoekers en studenten van de Universiteit Leiden in het Kamerlingh Onnes Gebouw. ‘Geef je niet bij voorbaat gewonnen, verdedig de academische vrijheid.’
Update. The Association of American Universities (#AAU) defense of US higher ed is a bit better. It doesn't focus narrowly on the economy.
https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/press-releases/meeting-moment-facing-americas-research-universities
But it ends on a jarring note of #nationalism.
"America cannot afford to pause for one second in our race with #China and other competitor nations – nations who are doubling down on their investments in university-based research into crucial emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing."
I want US research to be #OpenAccess, and fully available to China and every other country. BTW, I want the same for Chinese research and research from every other country. Taking the nationalist argument seriously makes it an argument against OA, which also makes it an argument against current federal policy (#NelsonMemo) and against the interests of all US universities. Let's remember that science is international. Let's defend open access, not nation-limited access. And let's defend US universities because they're universities, not because they're in the US.
Update. "As #Universities Yield to #Trump, Higher Ed #Unions Are Fighting"
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/labor-unionization/2025/04/04/universities-yield-trump-higher-ed-unions-fight
"Many college and university presidents have kept silent. But unions representing higher ed employees have stepped up to the plate. They’ve protested in Washington, D.C., and on their campuses, organized open letters and filed a flurry of lawsuits against the Trump administration. Union leaders say they are filling a void in an existential fight for higher ed’s future. They wish others would join their resistance, but their unified strength in numbers may protect their members from federal retaliation in ways that higher ed officials aren’t."
Another day, another example of me asking a grad student to do something , and them finding the files where I got halfway thru it myself a month ago, that I had forgotten I did... At least I left them a well labeled directory, a readme file, and the R code, so they could take over from where I left off. 
»...the problem with entitlement and privilege is not that some people have it, it’s that other people don’t.«
https://davidgraeber.org/papers/anthropology-and-the-rise-of-the-professional-managerial-class/
All across #academia we get resources for the one big project and we write our grant reports and then we RUN THOSE SUPPLIES INTO THE GROUND because we have no idea when or if we will ever be able to convince someone to give us the funding to get an upgrade. We continue to use equipment regularly that Apple, Google, Best Buy, etc. would not give you the postage to return let alone a buy back rate to bridge the inflation gap for the already 3 years out of date upgrade we wish we had 2/?
Good points from Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford Law prof:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/gutting-dei-wont-save-us
(#paywalled)
"As lawyers across the political spectrum agree, the government cannot make giving up a constitutional right a condition of funding…Civil-rights laws do not permit the executive branch to run an extortion racket by withholding funding approved by Congress and then dictating terms for its return. Quite the opposite: Civil-rights laws require a careful, program-specific assessment to identify any violations, after which the Department of Education must give notice of its concerns and try to secure voluntary compliance. Only if such efforts fail may the department begin enforcement proceedings, which require it to submit a report to Congress 30 days before withholding funding. Even then, funds may only be withheld from the specific programs that violated the law. For example, the government can’t withhold grants from a medical school because of violations in the history department, much less, as in the case of Columbia, suspend a host of unrelated grants and contracts because of vaguely defined violations."
#Academia #DEI #Funding #Trump #Universities #USLaw #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter
New academic publication!
The Elgar Encyclopedia of Queer Studies includes a chapter by me on Neuroqueer Theory.
Elgar's academic tomes are good but absurdly expensive; I recommend pirating this one as an act of queer subversion.
#queer #neuroqueer #lgbtq #academia #neurodiversity
https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/elgar-encyclopedia-of-queer-studies-9781803922096.html
“…the Trump administration is not acting in good faith in its purported antisemitism concerns, nor is it following the law in its approach to universities. President Trump offered praise to a white-supremacist rally that included chants of ‘Jews will not replace us,’ publicly dined with Holocaust deniers, made common cause with Germany’s Nazi-descendant AfD party and invoked tropes about wealthy Jews. The true motivation behind his attack on universities is suggested by Vice President JD Vance’s declaration that the ‘universities are the enemy.’” —Larry Summers, economist, professor at Harvard University #HigherEd #academia #universities #education #AntiEducationRepublicans #AntiSemitism #Trump #TrumpAdministration #Columbia
Any #science / #academia people out there have comments on this article? --
2025-04-02 How to Judge a Basic-Research Proposal [jamesgmartin.center]
I started reading it and then promptly realized I might not know enough about how things are usually done, what certain generic-sounding phrases might mean in practice/context, etc.
When peer reviewing, only submit a two-sentence "accept" that provides nothing of substance in the case where the paper is better than anything you've ever read. In other words, do the damn work you agreed to do.
The editors thank you.
@TSindelar is this called 'overhead'?
<ducks>
> Sublimating the Grief of the Left Behind https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/04/01/yes-academic-job-loss-really-different-opinion
Meanwhile, in the #BadEconomy.
#DavidAsch is right: "Colleges Face a Prisoner’s Dilemma. If we don’t band together, we’ll all get skewered alone."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-face-a-prisoners-dilemma
(#paywalled)
"What is surprising is that these #universities, all facing the same challenges, and forewarned of them, are largely facing them alone. The absence of a meaningfully coordinated defense might have been predicted from the “prisoner’s dilemma,” a classic game-theory framework that reveals why rational actors often fail to cooperate against a common enemy — even when doing so would benefit them."
PS: Law firms too. Nonprofits too.
#Academia #PrisonersDilemma #Trump #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter
Passing on information from a friend:
Incoming En-Gender conference, focused on gender and resistance. Online on August 21-23, submissions by April 30.
New Top Tens today and we have a new leader!
Psych!
April Fools!
It’s still @andreatosato.bsky.social & @chrisodinet.bsky.social with over 4000 downloads, and other stuff about new technology is massing near the top.
#Genetics #Genomics #Cancer #Academia #AcademicChatter
Interested in cancer genetics? Don't want to fly somewhere to here about it? Next week the American Society of Human Genetics is having an online-only digital symposium on cancer genetics.
https://www.ashg.org/product/2025-spring-symposium-emerging-frontiers-in-cancer-genetics/
I think it's also worth up to 6 #CME credits if you do continuing medical education.
Critical Thinking: The Other National Deficit
My wife bought me this t-shirt for my birthday several years ago, perhaps just before I retired from a career leading a team of researchers who conducted administrative policy studies at a large public university. Toward the end of my career, the university participated in a national test of college learning outcomes called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Ideally, the CLA assesses the knowledge and skills of entering freshmen and then reassessed their knowledge and skills four years later to measure the educational value added in a true pre-post test. But, because we were in a hurry for results that could be published on a public dashboard to be used in a re-accreditation visit, we instead tested samples of entering freshmen and graduating seniors who had similar high school percentile ranks and SAT scores. Results showed the critical thinking skills of our graduating seniors, compared to entering freshmen, showed slightly less improvement than the national average for graduating seniors at other universities. University leaders were concerned about this finding and were discussing ways to improve at the time I retired. (1/8)
#CriticalThinking #Education #HigherEducation #Academia #Information
#Misinformation #Disinformation #News #Journalism #SocialMedia #Internet #AprilFoolsDay
In February, the Canadian Association of University Teachers published this brief provincial breakdown of funding for post-secondary education. It includes two striking graphs on declining provincial funding vs the growing share paid by tuition. Ontario, where I teach, is obviously the worst of an increasingly bad bunch.
