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#academia

41 posts38 participants1 post today
Continued thread

What could this look like?

The most direct way for #highered and #academia to hit back is through military contracts and biotech.

Basically, R1 schools would need to halt all cooperation with the government and starve them of tech transfer and technical competencies they need to maintain national security and compete with rivals.

Ask Americans, would they like to see China vault head ahead of them and assume the mantle of global hegemon because Trump wanted to own the libs?

I am saying it once more.

If #academia and #highered do not QUICKLY develop a coordinated strategy of resistance, then MAGA will pick them off one by one.

“Half of this stuff you can’t just do and the other half is insane,” said Joseph Howley, a professor of classics at Columbia. “If the federal government can show up and demand a university department be shut down or restructured, then we don’t have universities in this country.”

#uspol #democracy

apnews.com/article/columbia-un

Usually the Harvard Crimson isn't bad but this time they let some professors write for it.

" To our knowledge, no major university leadership has publicly denounced the attack on Columbia or Mahmoud Khalil."

Good observation! #academia, at least in the US, never was "independent centers of ideas and often prominent centers of dissent". Youth are. Academic institutions have a long and storied history of repressing student dissent.

thecrimson.com/article/2025/3/

www.thecrimson.comFirst They Came for Columbia | Opinion | The Harvard CrimsonWe must learn from the past. We cannot remain silent in the face of authoritarian attacks on our peers, even if they have not yet come for us.
Continued thread

Update. "How college presidents are quietly resisting federal attacks on higher education"
highereddive.com/news/college-

"The relative lack of public statements is not a sign of cowardice as some have suggested. It’s that many college presidents have rightly concluded that quiet resistance rather than public protest is a more effective strategy. "

PS: Is quiet resistance working? If so, more power to it. It has to be better than quiet blenching. But does it work better than unquiet resistance? And how would we know?

#Academia #Universities #Trump #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

Higher Ed Dive · How college presidents are quietly resisting federal attacks on higher educationMany leaders of institutions favor behind-the-scenes resistance over protests and op-eds, the Council of Independent Colleges’ president writes. 

A bit of a #academia query - has anyone successfully moved their #zotero library from windows to Mac without breaking all their citations in existing documents (say… my thesis)?

I know exporting and importing definitely breaks things, and I’m too skint to pay for the online storage option.

Random glimpse of #academia. These days I am away doing a #science show for kids in two languages I am not fluent in (French and Dutch), which consists of three 12 h working days. So I got up at 4 AM to double check preparations for next week's class of new #paleontology course we were required to develop this year. Only to find out that my co-teacher was ALSO editing the course documents at the same time - us both making sure that the course schedule is buttoned up for delivery for the students. And I know ALL my colleagues stay up late into the night to deliver the best quality #highereducation and #teaching

The cuts to higher education are virtually always misplaced.

When I transitioned from cognitive to computational neuroscience, I found myself in a bit of a bind. I had learned calculus, but I had progressed little beyond pattern recognition: I knew which rules to apply to find solutions to which equations, but the equations themselves lacked any sort of real meaning for me.

So I struggled with understanding how formulas could be implemented in code and why the code I was reading could be described by those formulas. Resources explaining math “for neuroscientists” were unfortunately quite useless for me, because they usually presented the necessary equations for describing various neural systems, assuming the presence of that basic understanding/intuition I lacked.

Of course, I figured things out eventually (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about it), but I’m 85% sure I’m not the only one who’s ever struggled with this, and so I wrote the tutorial I wish I could’ve had. If you’re in a similar position, I hope you’ll find it useful. And if not, maybe it helps you get a glimpse into the struggles of the non-math people in your life. Either way, it has cats.

neurofrontiers.blog/building-a

Neurofrontiers · Building a virtual neuron - part 1 - Neurofrontiers
More from neuronerd

"Pro-Palestinian students, staff and faculty accused UCLA of prioritizing efforts to tackle antisemitism while avoiding equal focus on reports of racism and bias against Arab Americans, Palestinian Americans and Muslim Americans, saying the university was overreacting in fear of the Trump administration’s threats to cut funding."

latimes.com/california/story/2

Los Angeles, CA - April 28: Pro-Israeli and Palestinian demonstrators clash in a demonstration, nearby where pro-Palestinian students have maintained a tent encampment for days at UCLA on Sunday, April 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles Times · UCLA launches effort to fight antisemitism as Trump says more pro-Palestinian activist arrests aheadBy Jaweed Kaleem

Ed department sends letter to 60 institutions, warning of potential violations and "enforcement actions."

Harvard
Brown
Stanford
Princeton

BUT ALSO

Middlebury
Swarthmore
Pomona
Wellesley
.
.

Liberal arts colleges will not be spared. We teach the habits of mind they deem traitorous.

Don’t panic. Organize.

#academia #liberalarts #democracy

cnn.com/2025/03/10/us/departme

CNN · Department of Education investigating 60 colleges and universities over antisemitism claimsBy Karina Tsui