iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Dani Wenner

Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

RFK Jr is funding a grotesquely unethical study on newborn babies in Guinea-Bissau; ethicists, pediatricians, clinical trial experts, & infectious disease experts are calling this horrific trial The New Tuskegee. It is unethical to withhold a life saving intervention from half of newborns FFS.

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

77 words is probably too many words for one sentence huh

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

You really felt it necessary to make this reply to every interaction with my post. The fact that white enrollment is down as a percentage does not in any way mitigate how outrageous it is to have 23 Black students in an incoming class of almost 2k nor the impact on those students' lives

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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

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 · 01/10/2026

"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 · 13/09/2026

alas our institution uses gmail (yes really)

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

imagine spending upwards of $60k a year to go to college and just decide you'd rather not learn anything

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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 · 26/08/2026

yep they pulled them all up over the summer, I can't remember what the reason was but we did get an email about it (possibly threats to the building? I really don't recall)

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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

I've somewhat overstated the shift but every writing assignment is at least getting *started* with handwritten in-class work. comparing those in-class products to final products is of course a dramatic increase in the amount of work necessary to grade the final product I hate this timeline so much

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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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Dani Wenner @daniwenner.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

who is even editing for ppa? i did not think that journal was ever coming back

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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

flourishing as measured by h-index

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

is being able to depend on the people around you to pick up the slack and do the care labor that you eschew in favor of your career a privilege? yes is devoting your entire life to that career and never developing other goals, interests, and communities a model of flourishing? absolutely not.

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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

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