🧵It's worth saying that some of what went on in the Arday case has to do with the completely insane way that hiring operates in British universities. As someone who recently went through a couple of years of applying for jobs, I have some expertise in what goes wrong: The first issue is that hiring processes are in no way robust. In most other countries, applying for an academic appointment means that you make a dossier of materials including a full academic CV, samples of recent publications, research statements about current projects and future

🧵🧵🧵The "Critical Theory" Thread 🧵🧵🧵

All over the internet I'm seeing people complaining about universities teaching 'critical theory'. Most of these people don't have even the slightest clue what critical theory is, so I'm going to lay it out as simply as I can. The easiest definitions are not actually very hard, even if it produces lots of quite thorny problems.

Lots of the people who argue against teaching critical theory say that academics should simply be interested in 'facts'. They diagnose that the university is instead overrun by

🧵Lots of what has happened with Arday is continuous with all of the other plagiarism and academic misconduct issues in Higher Education. People who are not teaching in HE generally do not have a sense of what we face, so I'll try laying it out. When I have to mark a 4000 word essay, my university gives me 45 minutes to do it. In that time I have to read the thing, consider it carefully alongside, write a couple of hundred words of comments, mark it against various 'learning outcomes', and I try to do in-line comments too. This in general is just about

THREAD: Gonna say it again: what a lot of us do in higher education, at least in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, should be very cheap. Yes, we have professional salaries, like teachers and nurses, but beyond that the things I normally actually need are very simple:... For most of my teaching I need a room with chairs and tables. For lecturers, I need a lecture theatre. A photocopier is really handy. So is a projector. But I can do without those things. And also I need an office, where I can keep books, file documents, and give tutorials.

THREAD: I don't believe in the 'student experience'. This is an ideological term that does not actually refer to anything. The UK is an extreme outlier, globally, in centering its Higher Education provision on this concept (and indeed using the concept as the basis for regulating the sector.) Things I do believe in are: teaching, learning, student welfare, pastoral support, research, and so on. But these are not an 'experience'. I also think students should sometimes be satisfied, but because of the nature of being a student and learning, the process

THREAD: The collapse of higher education in the UK is misunderstood by almost everyone involved. We are told it is because of volatile international student markets. The truth is more to do with real estate and capital investment. Here is what is going on: in places like the US when a university wants to build a new building, its senior leaders spend time courting donors. Mostly campuses are built on the back of specific capital funding drives. The UK is different (partly because there is less philanthropy). Senior leaders in UK Higher Education rarely

This week I finally slayed the final boss off hand-knitting. This thing – which has 659,016 stitches (no mistakes) - has taken me three years to knit, through conferences, faculty and trade union meetings, and the rest. It has moved house with me five times, from Kansas City MO, to Roanoake Virginia, to London, then Edinburgh, and now Cellardyke. No wonder it took me so long. It’s in silk bought from a mill in China. The pattern is based on a ‘prize shawl’ knitted in Shetland about 115 years ago, using the proportions they used and their border design,

🧵For nearly 30 years successive UK governments have dedicated themselves to increasing house prices. This has been how politics worked: for the 50% of people who are home-owners, they get an annual pay-off/bribe from the government in the form of equity in their home to carry on voting for them. Not many other policies have mattered. And of course that additional equity has been effectively a tax free hand-out to the richest part of the population. It has been achieved through a variety of means: limits on home-building, sell-off of council housing that

THREAD: What is happening in UK universities is astonishing. Right now about quarter of universities are laying off staff. Almost all universities expect to make a loss this year. And the entire thing is happening in an effort to deceive the population about migration statistics. It's true that migration to the UK is high right now. We have a government with a headline policy of reducing immigration. But the only way they have found to do it is to try to discourage international students from taking up places in UK universities. Why this makes no sense:

Completely appalled by Jürgen Habermas’s statement on the war in Gaza (). The belief that supporting whatever the Israeli regime and army do will protect Germany from its past is itself antisemitic. Saying that the mass slaughter of Palestinians and the 1/normativeorders.net/2023/grundsatz… Destruction of Gaza is “justified in principle” is bad enough. But to claim to do so “in solidarity with … Jews” is horrific. It silences the voices of Jews who have dissented from this terrible violence. It attempts to make them morally culpable. Meanwhile, not a thought is 2/

We, the people of the world, stand accused of extremism, because we believe in the rights of Palestinians to determine their own lives, free from fear and violence, in a land they can call their own. Our leaders, who accuse us, believe in the bombing of a captive population. 1/5 A population where half of the people are children. It is difficult to imagine a situation more extreme, more dehumanising, more awful than what Israel, supported by the leaders of the world, are imposing on Gaza. Against this we are surely moderates, who struggle for peace, 2/5

It is such a shame that the deep public criticism of OFSTED is happening only after its terrible work is completed. Most of the British public do not understand what it was for and what it was doing. The timeline of Ofsted is that of the privatisation of most of Britain's schools under the academies programme. Schools used to be run and owned by the state, and with teachers all on a fixed national payscale. The role of Ofsted over the last 25 years has been, one by one, to accuse schools of failing in order to offer

THREAD: It is frankly astounding how much love this idiotic thread is. This "explainer" on antisemitism manages to suggest that Jews in the first half of the 20th century were wealthy and that "European Jews did benefit from whiteness, which is why they were given Palestine". Ok,

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let's talk about what's right and what's wrong here. Firstly there is no "one" antisemitism. The story that the author gives explains a particular strand of thought that is a mainstay of quite a lot of antisemitism, in which Jews are modelled as secret controllers of the world

A thread on this misconception. Let's start with two reasons this question comes up in the first place: firstly, there is a tendency in recent(ish) criticism to understand Adorno as a mere critic of ideology. This is particularly present in the American academy, where he is most

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often taught as a sort of grumbler who simply laments the excrescences of modernity, diagnosing cultural phenomena as deceptive in one way or another. Secondly, Adorno's own criticism of Heidegger is oddly pitched - especially in the late work (Jargon of Authenticity and the

THREAD: Wow the antisemitism in the Labour Party these days is wild. So a Jewish member of Haringey Labour Party, whose parents and grandparents fled Nazi Germany, and whose other relatives were murdered in Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, was due to give a presentation about Jewish resistance in Poland for Holocaust Memorial Day. Before the meeting she gets phoned up by her non-Jewish MP @CatherineWest1 and asked not to speak. Then at the meeting she is attacked again and a third of the meeting walk out. The attempts to silence Jews talking about a genocide

THREAD: The Sue Gray Report gives a really good illustration of how the British State approaches issues of wrongdoing by powerful people:

1) Powerful people do not own up to what they have done. Instead they say "we'll have an inquiry".
2) Someone is appointed to lead the inquiry, who is invariably drawn from exactly the same class and social stratum (that is, posh) as the people who did something wrong in the first place.
3) The journalists play along. Instead of asking about the initial wrongdoing, they focus on the inquiry and its timeline.

Does anyone have any work going that can be done remotely. I'm leaving my job at the end of the month so I can spend time with my partner, but need some income. Can do writing, copy editing, data entry and audit, university level marking, research, grant application writing, etc. Spent the last 5 years running an archive that focuses on social movements and radical culture 1960s-present. Also just submitted a PhD on german critical theory, metaphysics, aesthetics, literary theory, Marxism and psychoanalysis. Know my way around German classical philosophy.

THREAD: Genuinely find it astounding that there are people on the left who in one breath will say they are surprised by the rise of the internet far right, and then will spend time banging on about "culture wars", spend their energy bemoaning "wokeness", getting obsessed with "cancel culture". Certainly there are some problems of left authoritarianism around, which can be challenged. But if your way of challenging them is (a) borrowing a bunch of far right memes because you can't think of any better way to make your criticism, or (b) creating groups

THREAD: Let's talk about that Wes Streeting speech. I first met Wes in 2004, as my student union president. That year, Cambridge planned to shut down its architecture department. Radical students and the academics union mounted a campaign and kept it open. Once victory was... assured, the student union organised a rally outside the Senate House, where Wes claimed all the credit. It was also the first time I heard his speech about growing up poor, in a council house, and being essentially a working class boy made good. That might have been a fair...

THREAD: The policing system in Britain is predicated on arbitrary violence in general, and sexual violence in particular. The Wayne Couzens case is not the exception but the rule. He is exceptional only in that he carried out what each police officer threatens in every arrest. 1/ That threat is exacerbated where people resist arrest or refuse to follow police orders. Afterwards you’re much more likely to get roughed up, strip searched, and violated in custody. This is one of the main reasons people follow police orders. The police will try to say that 2/

Anatomy of the covid passports story: for a year every public health person explains why vaccine passports are a bad idea, because it will lead to exclusion and blame of minorities and those who won't or can't get vaccinated... Late last year Tony Blair backs covid passports through his 'Institute for Global Changs'. This isn't a surprise, since Blair works closely with Israeli government, who spend their time looking precisely for policies in which bio-security measures can be imposed precisely in