Congrats to @ncaaup.bsky.social & all who fought against this surveillance policy that would've allowed admin to hijack microphones in the classroom for secret recordings.
This move would've chilled classroom discussion & suppressed students' willingness to ask questions & take intellectual risks.
This focus on majors is driving me crazy. If we only focus on majors, then there will be fewer course choices for students take to fulfill graduation requirements. This defeats the whole idea of the liberal arts that undergirds the mission statements of many college and universities.
Just fyi- Trump claims he ended DEI...but literally last month we won our lawsuit, preventing him from cutting civil rights laws including the commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. www.aft.org/press-releas... . www.aft.org/press-releas...
Yesterday, those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it.
Yes, you read that correctly. The *state* is enforcing a curriculum on college profs, complete w/ the following restrictions:
Report: Staff at Dilley raiding cells to confiscate kids' letters and drawings detailing conditions inside
ProPublica published children's letters and drawings documenting their sadness and suffering at Dilley. And Dilley staff are now retaliating by confiscating kids' letters and drawings.
www.sacurrent.com/news/san-ant...
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MARYLAND Plaintiffs, * * * * * * * * Civil Case No.: SAG-25-628 Defendants. * * MEMORANDUM OPINION On February 14, 2025, the United States Department of Education ("DOE") published a "Dear Colleague Letter" ("the Letter") explaining the new administration's positions with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion ("DEI") principles and federal antidiscrimination law. A few weeks later, DOE issued an announcement that it would require states and school districts to affirmatively certify their compliance with DOE's interpretations of Title VI and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ("SFFA"), 600 U.S. 181 (2023), within ten days ("the Certification Requirement"). Those documents, and whether they created new legal obligations or merely restated existing law, have been the focus of this litigation.
This case illustrates why following procedures is so important. The stringent procedures outlined by the APA are not hollow gestures designed to manufacture the appearance of fair and reasoned decisionmaking; they exist to ensure that agencies stay within the bounds of their delegated authority and exercise that authority within the constraints of the law more broadly. See Nat'l Fed'n. of Indep. Bus. v. Dep't of Labor, 595 U.S. 109, 117 (2022) (*Administrative agencies are creatures of statute."). Still here, this Court takes no view as to whether the policies at issue in this case are good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair. But, at this stage too, it must closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires. Here, it did not. And by leapfrogging important procedural requirements, the government has unwittingly run headfirst into serious constitutional problems. Plaintiffs have shown that neither challenged agency action was promulgated in accordance with the procedural requirements of the APA, and that both actions run afoul of important constitutional rights. Both challenged actions accordingly must be vacated. The administration is entitled to express its viewpoints and to promulgate policies aligned with those viewpoints. But it must do so within the procedural bounds Congress has outlined. And it may not do so at the expense of constitutional rights.
ORDER OF JUDGMENT For the reasons stated in the accompanying memorandum opinion, it is this 14th day of August, 2025, ordered that: 1. Plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment, ECF 66, is granted as to Counts One, Two, Three, Five, and Six and denied as to Count Four; 2. The government's motion, ECF 72, construed as a motion for summary judgment, is granted as to Count Four, and denied as to all other counts; 3. Judgment is entered for Plaintiffs on Counts One, Two, Three, Five, and Six; 4. Judgment is entered for the government on Count Four; 5. The Dear Colleague Letter of February 14, 2025 is VACATED under 5 U.S.C. § 706; and 6. "The Reminder of Legal Obligations Undertaken In Exchange for Receiving Federal Financial Assistance and Request for Certification under Title VI and SFFA v. Harvard" is VACATED under 5 U.S.C. § 706. /s/ Stephanie A. Gallagher United States District Judge
THEREFORE, the Parties do HEREBY STIPULATE AND AGREE as follows: 1. The challenged Agency Actions have been vacated and set aside by the final judgment entered in American Federation of Teachers, et al. v. United States Department of Education, et al., No. 1:25-cv-00628 ("AFT"), and the vacatur and terms of the judgment in AFT apply to Plaintiffs; 2. The challenged Agency Actions will not be relied on in any way by Defendants including by way of seeking to enforce its substance through ED or DOJ civil rights enforcement procedures; 3. The certification demand issued on April 3, 2025 will not be reinstated in substance even if under a different name; 4. The challenged Agency Actions creates no obligation, responsibility, or condition on Plaintiffs in any manner;
NEW: In cases brought by the NEA and AFT, there are now final court orders: Last year's anti-DEI "Dear Colleague" letter is vacated and unenforceable.
DOJ/DOE gave up the fight, dismissing the appeal and case in the Fourth Circuit and subsequently dismissing the the second case with a stipulation.
wealth concentration is already 200% as bad at is was in 2020. think about that
straight out of those Civil War histories where some ill informed white Union soldier got a view of slavery up close and became hyper abolitionist in an instant
Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!
"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."
Daniel Craig: LADIES AND GENTLEMAN DR. TEETH AND THE ELECTRIC MAYHEM
Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”
"By the end of the two-year period, 94% of participants reported they were housed."
A million pilot programs show the same thing: when people are given enough money to afford housing, homelessness ends.
Other supports matter, but housing comes first. Not policing. Not moralizing. Homes.
“You need only know this: Whatever is happening with your data, it is important enough to the most egregiously lawless administration in American history that it be collected and consolidated.” Always read @tressiemcphd.bsky.social (gift link)
Hundreds of people spelled out the distress signal "SOS" on Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis on Friday, Jan. 30.
📷️ Provided by Jeff Schad
You know, yes, this is media diet and Netflix and whatever. But part of college — part of study in general — is understanding that not everything is *entertaining* all the time. And part of that is deciding you care about learning things! (1/2)
Can you imagine trying to learn when your classmates and their parents are disappearing? All of these kids are going to carry trauma for life.
"When universities censor topics involving race, gender, sexuality, power & inequity, they are not protecting students. They are underpreparing them. They deprive students of the intellectual tools to become informed citizens."
— Dr. Leonard Bright, AAUP Texas A&M
How many STEM Ph.D.s were lost from the U.S. federal government last year?
My colleagues @mghersher.bsky.social and @policyhound.bsky.social dug into a recent data release to find the answer. A @science.org exclusive.
www.science.org/content/arti...
Washington Post Opinions @postopinions.bsky.social I "The purpose of entitlements is not to spend as much as possible," the Editorial Board writes. "It is to make sure the truly vulnerable get the help they need without becoming dependent on government handouts. Scrutinizing food stamp rolls is a small step in that direction."
No. No. No.
Punitive processes make narrowly targeted programs *less* efficient and *more* costly. Because more scrutiny requires more bureaucracy.
Punitive processes also make it *less* likely that people will get aid for which they qualify. Because of the roadblocks and stigma scrutiny creates.
I am struggling with what might be a generational experience. The gulf war was pretty politically formative for me. It’s not history so much as memory this time.
It is destabilizing to see almost the exact same gameplan but this time without the guardrails that at the time I took for granted.
bravoandy • 3h Posted before reading the news. Wtf 8.1K Q 335 G 64 → 31 bravoandy • 4h Good morning ! 1.7K Q 151 G5
Saving this screenshot from Threads as a new reaction image
Do other countries have this weird notion that you’re not a “real” representative of the nation if you live in an urban center? Like do the French say Parisians aren’t really French? Are you considered not a real German if you live in Berlin? Or is this mainly a weird American thing?
In conclusion: generational lingo/slang is a real issue. Diverse perspectives matter. And speak up to your superiors sometimes, regardless of where you work. You may make lasting friendships along the way.
I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model
We ran into these issues during the MOOC days and ended up just sort of giving up on enforcement because of this boondoggle. I sincerely hope that every professor sues their outgoing institutions on these very grounds. May the legal morass bog us down for a generation.
Beware natural scientists doing social science
You wouldn't trust an economist doing physics or chemistry or astronomy. So don't trust the reverse
Those of us who study higher ed know that price has been flat for a while. A point is that especially at public research universities (flagship types) have been hoarding enrollments, taking them away from regional campuses, precisely because they’re unable to charge much more per student.
Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things
“At Texas A&M, internal emails show staff are using AI software to search syllabi and course descriptions for words that could raise concerns under new system policies restricting how faculty teach about race and gender.”
www.texastribune.org/2025/12/15/t...
