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

This is a very basic and absolutely essential point that virtually nobody, even within the university, ever raises. We’re on the brink of a massive loss of disciplinary skills and knowledge — a loss that we are, by and large, choosing, without even discussing it as anything more than a market shift.

submitted 12 hours ago • 6 comments

One columnist, a professional pundit, is living in a paranoid delusion. The other, a sociologist, is living in America.

submitted 3 days ago • 365 comments

I really enjoy frog wrestling. Don't even try to tell me it's fake.

submitted 3 days ago • 13 comments

They're going to fucking wreck the university with one of the best hospital systems in the goddam world

submitted 6 days ago • 118 comments

The public really needs to understand this. Every university system in the world rests on public funding, there has never been an alternative model at any time in history. We have universities for literally the same reason that we have roads and armies.

submitted 10 days ago • 56 comments

This should be a lesson to universities that they can keep trying to repress dissent but it’s never going to be enough —because it was never going to be enough.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

i’m sorry, i’m tired of this shit. there was no pronoun policing. i have encountered exactly three or four land acknowledgments in like ten years, and the most you’ll hear about “intersectionality” is in liberal nonprofits. this is just freefloating resentment masquerading as analysis.

submitted 12 days ago • 439 comments

Governing boards and alumni for institutions like this are politically + economically well connected. They have agency here—to defend academic freedom + civil liberties against the New McCarthyism while also rejecting bigotry, antisemitism included. The key issue is whether they decide to use it.

submitted 13 days ago • 2 comments

Thank you to the Atlantic Magazine for a decade of articles falsely telling us that the true, generational threat to freedom of speech was college kids rather than Republican elected officials.

submitted 13 days ago • 6 comments

This administration is literally destroying US science. The NSF REU program is a foundational pathway for building the next generation science workforce. I say as an REU alum.

submitted 15 days ago • 7 comments

this ‘jurassic park’ story 😭

submitted 17 days ago • 45 comments

You can't uphold something by scrubbing mentions of it from your website, courses, trainings, and programs.

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

This is exactly correct. Manipulators don't care about ethics or the perception of being ethical or not. They ask only one question about strategy: will it work? Persuading for democracy is much harder than doing propaganda for autocracy.

submitted 21 days ago • 2 comments

"Institutions of higher education should stand for something: freely chosen and meritorious academic missions, values, and priorities. They should not dilute their policies and curricula under external partisan pressures." My latest, on institutional neutrality via @chronicle.com shorturl.at/gAdLj

submitted 26 days ago • 2 comments

Many contenders.

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

The thing about advance compliance that people need to learn is that whatever you do to placate these guys will never be enough. They'll keep adding new things that you must do because they now know you're a pushover, and at the end of the day, they are just bullies that get off to cruelty.

submitted 24 days ago • 11 comments

Legendary hater Charles Darwin

submitted 26 days ago • 52 comments

Does it, though?

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion in 2021, ProPublica found in a first-of-its-kind data analysis. The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester.

submitted 26 days ago • 7 comments

LLMs make you stupid but make you feel smart. Microsoft's own research tells you this. Even if it works perfectly and solves massive problems, it still makes you stupid. Why would you want that?

submitted 27 days ago • 18 comments

Fund universities. Fund the liberal arts. Or, resign yourself to a world where political writers don’t know who FDR is and citizens carry signs saying “Get government out of my Medicare.”

submitted 28 days ago • 8 comments

"Fraud" is the new "DEI"... is the new "groomers"... is the new "stolen election"... is the new "parents' rights"... is the new "big government"... is the new "personal responsibility"... is the new "welfare queens"... is the new "states rights".

submitted 28 days ago • 1 comment

1/ I am seeing a lot of comments on the slashing of NIH support along the lines of “universities should just spend their huge endowments.” I’m the last person to cheer on the institutional stratification rising endowments have contributed to. But let me explain why this is not a solution.

submitted 28 days ago • 46 comments

The Trump administration has just announced that all college financial aid programs, scholarships, prizes, housing, and graduation ceremonies that help Black or Latino students are now considered to be illegal. The Education Department accuses colleges of discriminating against white students.

submitted 30 days ago • 222 comments

[flipping through my CD binder]

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

Some higher ed organizations who are loudly circling the wagons against federal funding cuts were oddly silent or circumspect about the earlier attacks on CRT and DEI. I wish there was a better understanding that these attacks are coming because we failed to repel those.

submitted 35 days ago • 112 comments

One of the many reasons MAGA hates Universities is that moms and dads send their christofascist indoctrinated kids to Unis and they... wake up. Not because of profs, but because they are surrounded by diverse students who push them to see the horrors of their upbringing.

submitted 37 days ago • 21 comments

One of the most basic moves for right wing politics is to yoke a legitimate complaint with indefensible positions using language that obscures the difference. Please stop falling for it.

submitted 38 days ago • 1 comment

In addition to the administration’s hatred of knowledge and racism, sexism, and ableism, tenure-track employment was one of the last good jobs with robust labor protections and lots of independence. Attacks on higher attempts to destroy the very idea of labor (and intellectual) independence.

submitted 39 days ago • 3 comments

💯 I don’t think many Americans understand just how accurate the word “infrastructure” is here. University research networks have been critical to making many US industries and professions as successful as they are today—and globally competitive.

submitted 39 days ago • 0 comments

This is a great point to emphasize: the most likely outcome of reducing grant overheads is an immediate tuition increase to offset the lost revenue. The costs will be borne by college students. It will also increase the debt load of an average student. Just running full speed in the wrong direction.

submitted 39 days ago • 0 comments

the fucking enforcement arm of the federal government is launching a war on integration an effort to push tens of millions of americans to the bottom of an arbitrary hierarchy of value and yeah, it pisses me off to see nominal allies say “oh yeah maybe they have a point”

submitted 40 days ago • 224 comments

this is the "merit" two-step. first, you strongly imply or state outright that the presence of anyone who isn't a straight, able-bodied white man is unfair "DEI," then you argue that just because an institution is all-male and lily-white doesn't mean there is discrimination. that's just merit!

submitted 40 days ago • 433 comments

My university library is assembling a list of resources for disappeared US government #data. Check it out: subjectguides.library.american.edu/data_rescue

submitted 41 days ago • 25 comments

An unelected billionaire is illegally seizing control of the US government apparatus and carrying out a flurry of crimes as part of an unprecedented authoritarian power grab that directly violates several laws and the US Constitution. Say it plainly. It’s fact.

submitted 41 days ago • 34 comments

The juxtaposition between imperial / white supremacy nostalgia and the attack on actual history departments is jarring. We are not going to STEM our way out of this.

submitted 41 days ago • 1 comment

Democratic governments are transparent, open, and "cognitively responsible"--meaning that they want to share information and be held accountable for their actions. This ain't that. Show me how you communicate and you tell me everything about your political theory.

submitted 42 days ago • 0 comments

If you didn't get a chance to grab any of the CDC data before it got nuked, some absolute heroes are on the case. archive.org/details/2025...

submitted 45 days ago • 0 comments

I want to spell out the basic reason it’s so dangerous for Elon to have control of the U.S. payments system. It may seem like a technical matter, but the dynamics are simple. 1/x

submitted 44 days ago • 166 comments