iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 9h

all brought to my attention by EHPP grad Mateo Ruiz: "$.5B of this gift is flexible funding. I hope some of it goes to... a fully staffed Tartan Scholars program, real outreach to Black, Latino, and female students, and fair treatment for custodians, professors, & staff who keep this place running"

mateoruiz09.substack.com

My Heart Is in the People

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) announced a $3 billion gift, and I’m… confused?

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 9h

"This year, Carnegie Mellon welcomed 1,865 first-year undergraduate students to its Pittsburgh campus. Only 23 self-identified as Black... Only 99 students identified as Hispanic or Latino" absolutely gutting reporting from the tartan the-tartan.org/2026/09/28/b...

the-tartan.org

Black, Latino enrollment at 11-year low

This year, Carnegie Mellon welcomed 1,865 first-year undergraduate students to its Pittsburgh campus. Only 23 self-identified as Black. According to this year’s 15-day census…

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

NSF has reduced the research budget for all atmospheric, ocean, and earth sciences by ~80%. 80%! A lot of us will not be conducting new research or training new students for the foreseeable future.

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Proud today of CMU students for continuing to stand up and speak out against injustice and to fight for their rights of free expression on campus

photo of the front of CMU's fence, traditional site of student expression, which expression has recently been under attack by the CMU administration. it has been painted to read "FREEDOM BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE -MALCOLM X"

photo of the back side of the fence, it has been painted to read "STOP PANDERING TO FASCISTS"

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

idk I guess I just think that my institutional email should not just randomly log me out at unpredictable moments during the workday hitting "send" on an email to a student should not result in the page reloading to a login, what are we doing here

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Brett Karlan @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I find the view that philosophy is supposed to just pump out the maximum number of true propositions (and that LLMs can help with this) completely anathema. This is a humanistic field where we engage in collective inquiry together. LLMs destroy the collective trust at the base of that

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

this is the first time I've noticed this: google scholar now has a built-in link to have gemini summarize research publications for you thanks, I hate it

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

overheard on the quad: one student telling another student that, "I plan to have all of the work due before midterms for that class done by the end of this week" idk what that is but it sure isn't learning

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

first day of a new teaching semester and grappling with the growing rage and sadness I feel at what this unchecked technology is doing to our students, to their futures and to all of our futures. we are doing unimaginable harm to an entire generation and their ability to think and to resist

And I hate what it is doing to the minds, and the happiness, of the young. Going into schools, I meet thousands of children a year and every day I become more certain that, if justice for all is to be our organising principle, AI is not for children and not for young people. It risks becoming an iron curtain that comes down between a young person and their potential for thinking, for experiment and conquering frustration, for stamina and for invention – and thereby, between the young people and their freedom. It risks halting learning before it can take flight.

Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. One found that after just “10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it”. An MIT study showed that test groups who used ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels”. We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.

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Kate Jackson @katejackson.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The search for AI ROI continues. University admin gave a presentation to faculty senate on AI. They begged us to discover use cases for them. All they have is a bespoke Ai tutoring agent and hopes and dreams for improved internal operations All senate had to offer was complaints about cheating

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

chat is it good if the semester hasn't even started yet and I'm already feeling late-term levels of overwhelm and exhaustion

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Do I use that day for more content or save it for overflow/end of term debrief and other questions for the ages

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

🙋‍♀️ professor here. smut counts. so do audiobooks. so do graphic novels. reading is reading and should be encouraged in all its forms.

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Frank Bowman @frank-bowman.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I'm now emeritus & thus have less skin in game. But this is a huge deal. Long-form essays are not merely means of assessment. To write is to organize thought. To write a long essay is to organize & express complex thoughts & arguments. A populace tht cannot do this is intellectually crippled.

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

don't mind me, just over here completely revamping a course I've taught every year for 13 years in a row to move all writing to hand-written, in class assignments I'm so tired

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Lindsay Beyerstein @beyerstein.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Himpathy is the WaPo using this photo of Graham Platner as he's poised to exit the race over alleged forcible rape.

Graham Platner staring soulfully but manfully off into the horizon surrounded by his true love, the sea, which is indifferent to consent.

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Somehow only discovering the work of Cynthia Willett in the year of our lord 2026 and a little mad about it, actually

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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Just a note that if your administrative staff are the ones who “really run the department/university” they should be paid more than you.

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

"88% of men reported an academic career as their singular priority" I think this is the most important datum. cis men in academia make academia their life, & they often have caretakers around them to make that possible. but I read that and feel sorry for them. what an impoverished life it must be.

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Carolyn Dicey Jennings @cdj.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

For cisgender women and individuals with non-normative gender identities, the path is characterised by higher ‘invisible labour’ in teaching and a more taxing institutional climate, requiring them to be more resilient and multi-faceted to achieve similar employment outcomes.”

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Truly cruel and reprehensible stuff from the NHS. For all their talk about "harm" this shows that NHS has no actual interest in the well-being of these kids. I don't even know what else to say.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 06/06/2026

I hope that people are aware that one of the primary political objectives of this ascending right-wing effort to remake higher education through things like the Vanderbilt Report, the Chicago Principles, and the AEI Future of the American University project is to crush the academic labor movement.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 06/06/2026

The Chronicle's dominant position in the higher ed media ecosystem is one of the biggest problems that we face. Endless right-wing grift, just like the New York Times.

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Colleges will under-hire, expend zero time or resources to expand a major, and sink money into expensive boondoggle programs that send students into other pathways and then turn around and say the market has spoken so they’re shutting down a major.

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Jeff, formerly of MN and MA, still God of Cookies @diasporaminnesotan.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

The drive for more and more publications is another example of the management class fucking up higher ed. Measurable outcomes: you MUST publish a certain number of articles every year. Just keep churning them out. It's rationalization: productivity is making more, and productivity is good.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Historical research does not need to be done faster or in greater volume for any social or intellectual purpose whatever; if anything, it needs to be done more slowly and deliberately than at present, by people allowed the training, time, space, and resources to do it that way.

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

This is what makes it so egregious that CMU has not communicated to our students or faculty about this AT ALL. I spoke with a student today who knew nothing about it. Students deserve to be informed about what is happening with their data.

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

The best part of the canvas outage is the part where our central administration has not communicated even a single word to faculty or students about it, just absolute crickets 🙃

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University of Hertfordshire UCU @uhertfordshireucu.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

On Friday afternoon before the Bank Holiday, colleagues in the Humanities department were called to a meeting on Tuesday. They were informed that the University Portfolio Review had decided that English Language, English Literature, Philosophy, History & Creative Writing UG degrees would close

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Messages you love to see on Canvas on the day seniors' grades are due

This website is under heavy load (queue full

We're sorry, too many people are accessing this website at the same time. We're working on this problem. Please try again later.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

the best part of post-tenure academia has been having the career space to slow down. the damage done by the contraction of tenure track positions + poor security/working conditions of non tenure track faculty + quantification of academic contributions is incalculable

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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Just gonna call them “Homogeneity hires.”

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

The main place this graphic goes wrong is suggesting there's a discrete endpoint to the panic, as if I'm incapable of crying while in the midst of a multi-day panic attack

"The creative process" as illustrated by a horizontal bar representing the progression of time

Work begins, followed by a long stretch of "fuck off", a shorter stretch of "panic", then a very short amount of time devoted to "all the work while crying" immediately before the deadline

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

currently at the "smashing my head repeatedly into a wall" stage of the writing process

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Joel S. @joelhs.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the answer to this is "No."

From "The Atlantic": "Had President Trump, we wondered, possibly been reading or at least thumbing through—just maybe—the works of … Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?"

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warrior cop @wyattprivilege.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Dear Professor [Insert Name] I write to apologize for the use of AI in my latest assignment. That wasn't just against the rules, that was disrespe

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

I have had TWO students email me to ask if it would be alright to enroll in one of my classes next semester and then only attend half of the meetings bc one of the days conflicts with another class. I have never in 18 years of teaching had a student ask me this before, what in the world?!?

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Jeff Lazarus @jlazarus.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

It's not hyperbole in the least to say Musk purchased a six-month shadow presidency for $280 million and used the power of that shadow presidency to 1. Steal the government’s data, 2. Permanently damage the state’s ability to regulate his businesses, and 3, kill non-white people.

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Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

God almighty, never in my life did I imagine something like this could happen—but RFK Jr’s MAHA movement keeps surprising us😢 Tobacco is the world’s number 1 cause of premature death & the tobacco industry is one of the most repulsive & cynical industries on earth www.statnews.com/2026/04/22/n...

statnews.com

Former tobacco executive joins CDC senior leadership, raising concerns over industry influence

Naming a former Imperial Brands executive for a CDC job is the latest example, advocates say, of tobacco industry influence in Trump administration.

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

The expansion of surveillance on college campuses is extremely worrisome, curious to know if the Penn State @aaup.org chapter is organizing around this

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Having students use paper to complete tasks is in this sense to help them understand how to disentangle a single focused thought task from the machine ensemble of our ubiquitous modern information systems.

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Reading student essays and getting a little verklempt. Sometimes you get real lucky with the makeup of a class and the students who land in it. This semester has been one of those and I'm really gonna miss the care and thoughtfulness that these students brought to a course on some tough topics 🥲

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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

also, the focus on "majors" is a way to cut programs that actually enroll fine, but students pick other things because they are told to by ... their parents media advisors admin college counselors general vibes ... but they still take the classes because they actually want to learn.

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