Asheesh Kapur Siddique

What is the DSA proposal for reconstructing the NEH?

Absolutely not.

Opinion: Ohio has put $59 million into civics institutes at five public universities. Now a new bill would give their directors “sole and exclusive authority” over civics courses statewide. The author argues this is a new front in curriculum politics. https://chroni.cl/4A7C8PF

“Resisting the attacks on the academy, and on anthropology, is a critical aspect of the scholarly mission. Misdirected internal debates that disempower the possibilities of creative, collaborative scholarship will only harm us. We have more important shared goals and challenges to address”

Britain's universities are now in chaos. Direct government investment is just 11% of income, and the vast majority of tuition is paid for by the students in loans. A £50bn industry in a devastating tailspin. unison.org.uk/magazine/fea...

We already know this and have for some time. The problem with the endless production of data as revelation is that it is not doing anything. It’s like getting an MRI every year and assuming that does something for your health because you have more information of the same

our institutions have stopped hiring, we've been telling students not to pursue advanced study, and to the extent that humanists have mounted a defence, it's been by pleading our utility as an adjunct of STEM disciplines and professional schools in short, it all worked

Just learned about this book and am looking forward to reading it. www.upress.umn.edu/978145295981...

dying…at the idea of putting APSA in my will

"While these terms are seen by many in higher education as reflecting conservative priorities and framing, the organization says it does not have a political affiliation" The report is from a group in the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Ed network: www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

The collapse of academic history is a part of this trend - if you dig into the original report, "History & Related Fields dropped from a peak of 7,496 [dissertations per year] in 2015 to 3,583 by 2025, a contraction of 52% in a single decade." Which of course mirrors the trend in academic jobs.

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An 87yo in WI charged 17,766 times for $77k. An 89yo in D.C. charged 26,456 times for $429k. A 76yo in CA charged 27,236 times for $578k. There are thousands of examples like these. Republicans are even worse. We shouldn't have to protect our elderly parents from this.

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

As I've dug into this story, I've realized Alpha is just part of a larger terminally online ecosystem that has abandoned public schooling as something worth preserving. That in my view is the big story here, Alpha may live or die, but the Silicon Valley intellectual ecosystem will endure.

My deep dive on the "A.I.-driven" Alpha School, revealing their internal learning and enrollment data for the first time, just as the network expands into public education. There is a big gap between the marketing and reality. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

3 year position for a social scientist working on materialist feminism at UMass, in a really awesome program (Social Thought & Political Economy); deadline 11/15 careers.umass.edu/jobs/lecture...

Speaking of, @bruit.eurosky.social and I have a paper under review right now that addresses some of this. But wealth on the right believes so deeply in their revanchist project they're willing to spend exorbitantly on things that won't generate any immediate profit, because that's not the point.

If Democrats forfeit the critical nature of humanities disciplines, or the disciplines themselves, Republicans will fill the void with bullshit and nationalist propaganda.

Democrats are still stuck in "workforce readiness" and the transactional job training paradigm of the neoliberal university. The Republican Party, conversely, as it's moved toward fascism and authoritarianism, has rediscovered that the things we believe about our country and its people matter.

there are real disagreements over why and how to do it, but eviscerating higher ed has broad bipartisan support

$2.7 billion endowment

“UCLA announced the closure of its daycare centers, following announcements at the University of Nebraska and University of Kansas…At Smith, administrators told parents this is not a ‘budget-relieving’ decision, but…a ‘modern, broader childcare benefit model’ offering greater ‘freedom to choose.’”

Much like the Vanderbilt report, they are surprised to discover the humanities are only partially as bad as their caricature of it, and much like the Vanderbilt report, they might have produced an interesting report if they didn't start by shadow boxing with a caricature of the field

Since I have now heard from a few of you, I feel obliged to note that this report was not done by my team or the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: bit.ly/4zNfH1Y