nicholasallott.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

To repeat: "A country so stupid it actively trashes one of things it's good at and famous for."

submitted 22 hours ago • 8 comments

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

submitted 22 hours ago • 19 comments

Today's university slashing and burning is Edinburgh, where about 10% of the budget will be cut. There'll be another case every single day until UK govts actually do something. A country so stupid it actively trashes one of things it's good at and famous for. www.bbc.com/news/article...

submitted 1 day ago • 13 comments

THIS. It remains mad that a wordpress page run by a little branch is somehow the best info the Department for Education has about the destruction of #UKHE. DfE impact assessment 33: www.legislation.gov.uk/ukia/2025/33... Commons briefing: commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-bri...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

universities are a key source of UK soft power and yet both Tories and Labour alike would rather keep international students out and see the sector in terminal decline www.theguardian.com/education/20...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

We have a massive academic base on Bluesky, we can lobby unis to quit X. The French are leading on this, others can do it too. 3 more French unis quit Twitter: Université Paris-Saclay @univparissaclay.bsky.social Université PSL @psl-univ.bsky.social Sorbonne Université @sorbonne-universite.fr

submitted 5 days ago • 8 comments

The tragedy of our universities in deep recession is that, for all the caveats, they produce exactly that connectivity, that sense of place, that attachment and even love that everyone is saying they want. You'll miss it all once it's gone.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

We had heard about the challenges posed by motherhood within academia, but what about the previous stage? @ecfreewoman.bsky.social & I wrote our story for @science.org on how the academic system makes it almost impossible for women to even plan for a family ❤️‍🩹: www.science.org/content/arti...

submitted 89 days ago • 6 comments

Two Weeks In The Death Spiral Of Cardiff University, by an anonymous academic. This is truly shocking read. The Cardiff executive board should hang their heads in shame. voice.cymru/two-weeks-in...

submitted 5 days ago • 31 comments

It matters that scientists speak out against what is being done to US science. Staying silent is neither "objective" nor "staying out of politics". Silence now is political - it supports the status quo, says "nothing to worry about". We need to sound the alarm. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

submitted 5 days ago • 34 comments

"Musk is a key figure within a US administration that is attacking science through executive orders that have systematically targeted the scientific community, cut funding, restricted research and silenced scientists" My op-ed in @resprofnews.bsky.social www.researchprofessi...

submitted 5 days ago • 9 comments

New paper out today! 🤖 🎨 We test text-to-image generators (DALL·E 2/3) and show a consistent failure to compositionally represent syntactic structures. We provide the first direct comparison between child language comprehension and artificial models🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

New British Future research finds 61% of the public would prefer current levels of international student migration to stay the same or increase. Only 27% would reduce or stop student migration, which makes up around 40% of total UK immigration [Thread]

submitted 10 days ago • 2 comments

A plea for small faculties - this is not a purely theoretical issue for me, because the independence of our beautiful faculty in Groningen is under threat, but here I focus on the theoretical arguments: crookedtimber.org/2025/02/16/s...

submitted 10 days ago • 2 comments

Two important reminders from @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social: -The Trump admin and its lackeys do not have have the majority of the public supporting them. -The number of people who ARE happy with the Trump admin will almost certainly shrink as time goes on. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/they-are-a...

submitted 12 days ago • 12 comments

Tally heading towards 1500. Please keep going - share and sign.

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

This is a useful (but day-ruining) post on the current situation (it’s a self-coup), including a list of likely outcomes (civil war is possible, but unlikely). Also, @liberalcurrents.com is clear-eyed and becoming part of my daily reading rotation. www.liberalcurrents.com/is-it-a-coup/

submitted 13 days ago • 28 comments

"What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition." www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

🧵"So this is how liberty dies..." Trump’s first 3 weeks have been a relentless flood of actions. It's incredibly hard to keep up. I’ve gone through 69 actions & mapped out the pattern - showing how they fall within 5 broad domains consistent with authoritarian states 1/9

submitted 13 days ago • 522 comments

Useful - helps to make sense of the apparent chaos

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

The incomparable Kate Lister (@k8lister.bsky.social): "I am old enough to remember when it was important for a university to just have a history department and somewhere to study literature, and I’m not that old."

submitted 13 days ago • 2 comments

Curious about information structure in linguistics but slightly confused how topic and focus work? Here is my 10min introduction to the field: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwfI...

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

First person testimony from a former, senior Foreign Office official. Over the past decade, Britain played an active role in the creation of two world-leading, man-made humanitarian disasters. First by the Saudis et al in Yemen, and then by Israel in Gaza www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

Don't forget, Birkbeck lectures are normally after 6pm so this would be an ideal job for a philosopher who likes sleeping in

submitted 20 days ago • 1 comment

🚨 NEW FEED FOR ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY ON 🦋! 🚨 PhilSky＋ includes all posts tagged with #PhilSky or #PhilosophySky PLUS posts from over 150 philosophy-related organisations and groups AND posts from 1300+ philosophers (and growing) that use common #philosophy hashtags. bsky.app/profile/did:...

submitted 22 days ago • 2 comments

A petition in support of the School of English, Communication, and Philosophy at Cardiff, who are being threatened with job cuts that would be devastating for staff, students, and the university

submitted 22 days ago • 2 comments

What enormous damage the marketisation of universities has done, to staff, the debt-laden students, to the generation of knowledge. One more #Financialisation www.theguardian.com/education/20...

submitted 25 days ago • 8 comments

Hugely successful export industry, instrument of soft power, vector for levelling up the regions, throttled by 1) culture war against 'bogus' courses 2) class element of 1) deeming only much smaller cohort as worthy of uni, 3) racism-motivated animus to foreign students and dependents 4) paralysis.

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

My dad was tortured by the Gestapo for 4 days and thrown in a concentration camp for being in the Norwegian Resistance. Growing up, he would tell me things he learned in the Resistance. I thought, I'm never going to need this stuff. Here's some of those things #Thread

submitted 99 days ago • 464 comments

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

submitted 31 days ago • 31 comments

Yesterday, in protest of Harvard University's response to the genocide in Gaza and deepening repression of campus activism against it, I submitted a letter of resignation from my job there. Here is that letter.

submitted 34 days ago • 87 comments

Interesting thread. For what it’s worth, I think it’s important to distinguish between our not understanding the causes of utterances - mostly true - and their being uncaused, which is a wild (imo) claim Chomsky has sometime made.

submitted 32 days ago • 1 comment

JOB ALERT! Come work with me! 34-Month Postdoc Position here at the Center for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in my project "Paths to Polysemy" Job offer here: www.umk.pl/en/jobs/?tas... Please repost & share widely!

submitted 33 days ago • 2 comments

ok let's see how reach works here. five fully salaried PhD researcher positions available at my institute (IKOS, University of Oslo). individual project, topic and discipline(s) open but must connect to research we're already doing here. deadline Feb 24 2025. www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

submitted 79 days ago • 0 comments

‘In 2021, Niall Ferguson described Trump as a “demagogue and would-be tyrant”. Last month he was dancing to “YMCA” at Mar-a-Lago.’ Jan-Werner Müller on the ‘anticipatory obedience’ on display in the run-up to Trump 2.0: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ja...

submitted 37 days ago • 4 comments

The only 'Blue Monday' article you'll ever need theneuroscienceofeve... It's #BlueMonday again. And this is all you'll ever need to read to know the 'truth' about it Which is that it's a ridiculous marketing stunt that got way out of hand and impacted me more than most people