Thomas S. Davis

From the Tehran Times - photos of the school CHILDREN killed by an AMERICAN tomahawk cruise missile. The headline: TRUMP, LOOK THEM IN THE EYES

(Ht @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social )

You gotta get the ones with noise cancellation. The other ones also fell out of my ears, but these stay in and also help me ignore every single conversation in a cafe that I have zero fucking interest in (which would be all of them...).

And just to be clear: I'm referring to the DOGE people like Justin Fox & Nate Cavanaugh, not the folks whose grants were terminated, which is insane. I have been trying to imagine the headspace of someone who canceled a grant on violence against women in the Holocaust "because it is DEI." Gross.

Gonna read this when I don't feel like I'll scream loudly and scare off anyone waiting for office hours...

What I am seeing from within my university's (coercive) "AI Fluency" initiative, is growing student pushback. As the profs in this piece note, students grasp that they are being deskilled & enlisted into something without their consultation or consent (faculty too!).

That's fair. I watched two of those depositions and it was pretty clear to me that these young men knew what they were doing was part of a right wing ideological program and attacking "DEI" was part of the allure. It'll be interesting to see who, or what else, comes out.

The more we hear about all of this, the more batshit it seems. I'd push back on the "these kids" language. Nathan Cavanaugh owned (& sold) multiple tech businesses & was connected already w/ the Silicon Valley world that got him to DOGE. They are willingly part of an ideological project.

Getting in early on crypto spring break parties.

AAUP-OSU statement on Ted Carter’s resignation as OSU president: “The students, faculty, and staff of Ohio State deserve so much better than the failed leadership that has been inflicted on this institution over the years. The repression of free speech, the dismantling of diversity, the lack of accountability to survivors - the list goes on and on. We demand a more transparent presidential search that involves the input of faculty, staff, and other university stakeholders.”

Well, well...

"The president recently disclosed to trustees that he had an inappropriate relationship with someone seeking public resources to support her personal business and offered to resign. "

This definitely isn‘t how I imagined “mid-career” during those late nights of pitchers & method discussions at Frank’s….what a dumb fucking century.

Speaking from the frontlines of “AI fluency,” I can tell you that it is the same dumb plot on repeat and, thankfully, a lot of students seem to hate having AI forced onto them.

“The work is original…”

We had a scenario last semester at Ohio State w/ BlackTom AI, which could log in to Canvas, take proctored exams, & evade the detection tools we have. I have made my classes mostly analog, but our individual solutions won’t repair the decades of institutional & systemic failures. It is grim.

In what feels like a fever dream, it turns out my old band will be playing Gilman St in May as part of a short west coast tour. If anyone on here has Bay Area recs—food, bookstores, practice spaces—I’d love to hear them.

I’ve decided that folks hitting reply all are generally signaling that I don’t need to pay attention to their emails. Instant delete.

Our local NPR station WOSU did a much better job with the headline. Of course, this is a professor at the Chase Center, which was established by state law & is supposed to be the anchor for "viewpoint diversity" and "civility." The stories write themselves...

The degree to which both of these people are so completely full of shit, name checking things they have no understanding of, free associating “deep thoughts” & yet so perfectly confident in their half-assed knowledge, helps clarify why the entire elite class is so desperate to get us all on ChatGPT

All of this!!! For example, Ohio State (not an Ivy but big deal R1) has...

Wexner Medical Center
Wexner Center for the Arts

These are named after Les Wexner, who made his money on Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie, etc. + employed Epstein as his financial manager for 20 years + bankrolled his abuses.

I am planning Thursday’s class on climate anger as a form of political anger ( & using a wonderful piece by @doctorvive.bsky.social ) & thinking through different methods for analyzing emotion, extractive violence, & historical specificity and I think this is basically my whole pedagogy:

This is the full version of that brilliant talk you gave in London, no?

I’ve never seen a play that batshit. Amazing.

20th/21st century literature, Environmental Humanities, and historical surveys of Brit or Am lit 1800 to the present. Ready to do whatever whenever!

O-H ICE-OUT!

Reviews of my no tech, analog seminar were all positive: “this class gave me room to breathe,” “I loved not having screens in class,” “writing in our attention notebooks gave me space to think,” “this was the most immersive class I’ve ever taken,” “I felt like I could think freely,”l loved Sebald.”

It is worth noting that so many of these universities mandating AI are in states that liquidated DEI programs & made them illegal. Just in case you were unclear about the trajectory of “intellectual diversity” in higher ed, this is what it looks like.

If you enter a prompt they give you free coffee. It’s gone now thankfully

For reference, the “prompt and pour cafe”: www.reddit.com/r/OSU/commen...

We are under one of these impossible demands & I can tell you that one of the outcomes is backlash from undergraduates who will tell you (& Reddit & the school newspaper & anyone who will listen to them) that they don’t want the uni forcing AI on them (including the pop-up ChatGPT cafe on campus).

My employer is referenced in that Chronicle piece. We were put under a similar ridiculous mandate; there is a lot of talk that the administrators pushing this are padding their own CVs for future jobs. I could go on about the widespread confusion it has caused & the backlash from students.