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Dave Addison

@daveaddison.bsky.social
823 followers 435 following 169 posts

Historian of Late Antiquity. British Academy Postdoc at University of Liverpool. Hispanophile, Leodensian. www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/david-ad…

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Cover of Jamie Kreiner's book, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
There's some old school heat in Gregorian Reform (mainly in French)
French article title reading: 'De quelques assertions fausses, outrancières ou déraisonnables. À propos de la réforme "grégorienne" et de la méthode historique'.
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Pharos is at least partly funded by Paul Marshall, acc. to this useful piece. www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-p...
Chart showing the donations of Paul Marshall, including £700k to the Pharos Foundation, via the Sequoia Trust.
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
They had a very weak attempt at a rebrand in 2022!
The FT's 'How to Spend It' rebrands as HTSI, with alternative readings of the S given as 'style', 'surf', 'save', etc.
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
This is a truly wild ride. A professor of economics claiming that AI is working class liberation. Hmmm. wonkhe.com/blogs/ai-sha...
And here is where the class dimension becomes unavoidable: wealthier students have always had access to human “AI” – private tutors, professional editors, writing coaches. The university’s AI policy effectively punishes working-class students for accessing the free version of what wealth has always bought.

The defence of this model often claims that “writing and idea development are interconnected.” But this argument privileges a specific type of complexity, the kind that aligns with Western academic traditions. It dismisses other forms of knowledge as lesser. Bob Marley was not a great writer in the academic sense, but he demonstrated through song that he was capable of profound philosophical thought. No-one listens to Redemption Song and thinks it would be better as a peer-reviewed journal article.

The university’s insistence that writing and thinking are inseparable is not a pedagogical truth, it is epistemological imperialism that has mistaken the technology of one culture for universal human cognition.
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
See also this from his faculty page
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
Wild stat in the FT: Coventry University spend 12% of *all* annual expenditure paying fees to middle-men who recruit international students 🤯
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Hmmmmm. www.lbc.co.uk/article/brit...
Peter Kyle: "too often people go to university to 'explore research and knowledge'".
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
More about old fashioned Victorian liberalism than neoliberalism, I think!
A Google Ngram showing the frequency of the phrase 'dark ages' in books archived by Google from 1600 to 2022. There is a large spike in the middle of the 19th century.
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Eye-opening stuff here from Clifford Ando on Chicago
"The cost of servicing its [Chicago's] debt is now 85 percent of the value of all undergraduate tuition."
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
Apparently Clyde Pharr translated the Theodosian Code to own the libs (a healthier response than many today ...)
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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
From Julia Smith's new piece on J.M. Wallace-Hadrill (among other things) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...:
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