Bart Penders

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

The amount isn't really normal. That's why I felt it was worth mentioning. The practice itself has become rather standard though...

In a sense, we have completely replaced a lot of scientific processes with the power of statistical methodology and essentially outsourced part of our scientific thinking and practice to statistical inference. And now we're confronted with the risk of the same thing happening with AI.

I know I don't complain about academic working culture as much as I should - but here is my contribution for today: 77 emails in a single weekend, outside of office hours, is not particularly healthy. Only a handful of these are from other time zones, and most are just from inside my own institute.

International Women's Day is the perfect moment to remind myself and others that I owe my academic development to two absolutely amazing female mentors. I can only aspire to their level.

White yellow flower

Red flower

Timeline cleanse... Spring has arrived in our garden!

Good morning to you, too!

I was asked to rank a bunch of polygenic risk score (PRS) studies, which are all in genetic epidemiology, whereas I am in STS. Yes, I wrote one commentary on the rhetorical structure of PRS study reports. No, that does not mean I can do PRS, or reasonably assess PRS studies. 2/2

Out of a morbid curiosity, I participated. I was asked to rank all sorts of vague qualities of studies (novelty, innovativeness, etc.). The studies I was asked to rank, were - so the invite claimed - matched to my expertise based upon my publication record. They were not. Not even close. 1/

The mirage of AI deregulation One of the most interventionist approaches to technology governance in the United States in a generation has cloaked itself in the language of deregulation. In early December 2025, President Donald Tr...

🧵 Trump administration AI policy is widely described as deregulatory. This description is misleading. What's happening is not the absence of governance but its rearrangement--intensive state intervention operating through mechanisms we don't typically call regulation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The model of unpaid academic labor required good jobs with ample unstructured time.

Duke University Fueled by creativity, informed by scholarship

:-)

Leuk! - Uitgeverij Ten Have Hét boek waarmee je onbekommerd plezier gaat hebben.

Plezier kan een daad van verzet zijn, een politiek wapen, betoog ik in Leuk! Laat het je niet afpakken door mullahs, Trumps of Netanyahu’s.

www.uitgeverijtenhave.nl/boek/leuk/

Curious to see how those flavours find their way into your words :-)

Constructive intersections with John Law's "Making a mess with Method" [https://methods.sagepub.com/hnbk/edvol/the-sage-handbook-of-social-science-methodology/chpt/making-mess-with-method1]

*who*, not that

For all, predefined lists of projects are available for students to choose from, but also for all of them one can depart from this and pursue one's own topic and find a supervisor that allows that. 2/2

Here it depends on the programme. Some MSc programmes are two years, others are one year. MA programmes are nearly all one year. The long programmes have a whole year for a Master's thesis, the shorter ones usually 2-3 months. 1/2

So, mathematical witch trials?

So I believe that they believe that the prose does not matter. I also believe that it matters a lot, also to them...4/4

Those who say that all they need from a paper are the tables and the figures, clearly align themselves with the first view. The qualities of the text are invisible to them. Which is not the same as irrelevant. 3/

Science’s moral economy of repair: Replication and the circulation of reference Responding to the so-called reproducibility crisis, various disciplines have proposed – and some have implemented – changes in research practices and policies. These changes have been aligned with ...

I've written a bit about the distinction between writing as reporting and writing as research. In the first, knowledge-making is imagined to happen before the writing and in the latter, knowledge-making and writing overlap. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 2/

I've been thinking about this. There have been a number of replies pointing out exactly this in different words. And I agree with all of them. I think it has to do with the imagined disconnect between the knowledge represented through a text and the text itself in some fields. 1/

Trust in Numbers A foundational work on historical and social studies of quantification

Where does Trust in Numbers flip into Distrust in Numbers? And do those who trust numbers so much they start to distrust numbers, no longer trust their own number-trusting? Or are they blind to their own distrust of number-trusting?

Well, tbh, it is mine, but it served mostly as a prop for a conference on Technological Refusal. I have noticed that my thinking processes have been shaped by the immediate editability of text so much that I have difficulty doing without it. It is no longer on my desk - but it is still standing by.

Anna hat Max gebeten, ihr beim Bau einer Legoburg zu helfen. Weil er aber alle ihre Steine anlutscht bevor er sie zu einem Raumschiff zusammenbaut, will sie doch nicht mehr das er mitspielt. Ich vertrete Max und erkläre dem Erzieher, dass Anna Max weiter mitspielen lassen muss.

Value-aware nutrition science: building credibility through reflexivity - European Journal of Nutrition Purpose Values can influence various aspects of scientific research, including research questions, methodologies, interpretations, and applications of scientific knowledge. Instead of pursuing value-f...

Exactly! We recently made this case for nutrition science specifically (paper annoyingly not OA): link.springer.com/article/10.1...

NL has publicly available pay scales. Associate profs salaries start at 78k€ (bottom of scale 13) and end at roughly 100k€ (top of scale 14) www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/salarisschalen

While I'd be happy to accept that title, this is part of a thread summarising others' positions, and it is not my own.

Next academic year's teaching will consist of group conversations around a fireplace, with a glass of cognac.