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Mathew Abbott

@mathewabbott.bsky.social
249 followers 318 following 61 posts

Philosopher & NTEU Pres, FedUni. New pubs: Eco-Marxism & the Anthropocene: doi.org/10.1177/07255136251401907 Marx’s naturalism: doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2025.25541… Critique of posthumanism: doi.org/10.1177/07255136241256980

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Reposted by Mathew Abbott
Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
"At a total process efficiency of around 8%, we would need more than doubled all electricity generation in a year,to pull 1yrs worth of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Direct air capture is not efficient enough, nor will it ever be efficient enough that we can just keep emitting CO2 like we have been"
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Politics Theory Other @poltheoryother.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
📣 NEW EPISODE 📣 - @leninology.bsky.social on this year's wildfires. We talked about the scale and extent of the wildfires, how they compare to recent years, and the threat of the "weather whiplash" effect - with heatwaves and wildfires being followed by severe flooding:
patreon.com
Interregnum - Living in the Pyrocene | Politics Theory Other
Richard returns to talk about this year's wildfires. We talked about the scale and extent of the wildfires, how they compare to recent years
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Evan @evansmithhist.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
I wrote a book about the history of debates about free speech, academic freedom and protest at UK universities. It covers how, since the 1960s, there's been continued debate about the limits of acceptable speech on campus and if hateful ideas should be excluded. www.routledge.com/No-Platform-...
routledge.com
No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech
This book is the first to outline the history of the tactic of ‘no platforming’ at British universities since the 1970s, looking at more than four decades of student protest against racist and fascist...
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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 07/08/2026
‘Chauvet cannot have come out of the blue. But it’s not unreasonable to think of the line of illusionism preceding Chauvet as happening in a rush, relatively speaking, over hundreds of years, not millennia – evolution by jerks.’ T.J. Clark on the Chauvet cave paintings www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
lrb.co.uk
T.J. Clark · Night Visitors: Miniaturised Universe
The world exceeds us. It comes to us out of darkness. The cave is the universe, the nightly presence of that unknown...
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 09/08/2026
"One of Anthropic’s defining pieces of research appears in a paper entitled “On the Biology of a Large Language Model”. This is highly misleading: LLMs do not have any biology at all, because they are not alive. But in reading Anthropic’s paper one is invited quietly to forget this;.."
The field of machine learning frequently employs biological language to describe LLMs: “neurons” and “neural networks”, “training” and “pruning”. Generative AI systems, says Anthropic’s Olah, are grown more than they are built. One of Anthropic’s defining pieces of research appears in a paper entitled “On the Biology of a Large Language Model”. This is highly misleading: LLMs do not have any biology at all, because they are not alive. But in reading Anthropic’s paper one is invited quietly to forget this; the word “metaphor” does not appear in the article.
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Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Very important and harrowing read about our world on fire.
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Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
1/ 🚨New piece out co-authored with Ben Shread-Hewitt on the EU's adaptation framework and the risk of a 3°C world. Planning for 3°C doesn't make it survivable. But it makes it seem so. Here's a 🧵on some key points. Thanks @climate-risk.bsky.social for publishing this article.
strategicclimaterisks.substack.com
How the EU adaptation framework vastly underplays the risk of a 3°C world
Planning for 3°C doesn't make it survivable - but it makes it seem so
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Mathew Abbott @mathewabbott.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
new piece by Richard Seymour www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/all...
parapraxismagazine.com
All You Fascist Liberals — Parapraxis
On Political-Libidinal Doubles Richard Seymour
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Ingmar Rentzhog @ingmar.wsocial.eu · 22/07/2026
What’s happening in our oceans right now will affect every one of us. I wrote a long-read article in Forbes explaining why. If you want to understand what the graph below really means for your future, I recommend reading it. www.forbes.com/sites/we-don...
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Wim Carton @wimcarton.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
"The solar geoengineering techno juggernaut rolls on, with what seems to be a complete disregard for what the damage might be to the planet, and despite several important assessments from leading scientific academies." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
‘Termination shock’: trust our expert warnings on geoengineering’s planetary risks | Raymond Pierrehumbert, Julia Slingo, Michael Mann and Valerie Masson-Delmotte
Do we really want to play dice with our planet?
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Mathew Abbott @mathewabbott.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
open.substack.com/pub/unquietg...
open.substack.com
The Neoliberal Counterrevolution Against the Social Wage
On Melinda Cooper and Elizabeth Humphrys
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NTEU @nteunion.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
NTEU members at Federation University have kicked off their bargaining campaign for fair pay, job security and a real say in decisions that impact staff.   When staff have a voice, universities work better for everyone. Sign up to be part of bargaining at your university: betterworkplaces.nteu.au
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Overland Journal @overlandjournal.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
“The final trick of OR is that it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language.” Grace Roodenrys reviews Toby Fitch, brilliantly.
overland.org.au
Transubstantiations: Toby Fitch’s Or - Overland literary journal
The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional c...
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Mathew Abbott @mathewabbott.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
“The flaws with Miéville’s argument have less to do with his engagement with idealism than his leap into metaphysics, which does open the door to the mystification of the natural and historical world that modern scientific theory has done so much to counter.” spectrejournal.com/naturalized-...
spectrejournal.com
Naturalized Dialectics – Spectre Journal
In response to China Miéville's argument for metaphysical idealism, Joshua Nicholas Pineda articulates an antireductionist and naturalistic view of materialism.
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DK Renton @davidkr.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
Thanks @jacobinmag.bsky.social for this lovely review- "Renton is as secular as they come [yet] ...we can trace back Renton’s desire for a culture of forgiveness, the repair necessary to radically change our world, to a particularly Jewish notion about what is necessary to truly right our wrongs"
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Liesbeth Corens @onslies.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
“those with power in society are deeply intolerant of any space in which exceptions are possible, in which something could happen” newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...
What makes universities particularly valuable as a ‘space for exceptions’ is the same thing that makes people hate them. The perception is that students and academics do nothing all day but doss around and mull over the meaning of life. It’s not really true – academics work on average far more than their contracted hours, while many students have developed concerningly puritanical tendencies – but, in my view, things were better when it was truer: people not only had a better time, but probably did better and more interesting work, when they were less pressured and given more slack. Even within the instrumental logic of capitalism, it is at least sometimes recognized that giving people adequate time and resources, and a measure of freedom from the obligation constantly to justify their existence – leaving them alone, basically – can be beneficial to their performance or ‘productivity’. On the other hand, there are those who would like to eliminate all slack from the system. The objective is a world in which we are seamlessly shuttled from one managed (and, ideally, exploitable) activity to the next – with no break or chance to look around us – from cradle to grave. The death of the university will bring that world a step closer.
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Ben Tarnoff @bentarnoff.com · 21/05/2026
Very interesting review that explores Muskism as a "global class project"
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Agon Hamza @agonhamza.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
New episode out! Sianne Ngai on ugly thoughts, ugly feeling, aesthetic categories, gimmick in capitalism, and more www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAeQ...
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
On radical Kant in the 1960s: "It's hard to conjure these leftwing students’ fascination with the arch-bourgeois Prussian philosopher except to say that theirs was no ordinary Kant, but the Frankfurt School’s Kant—a Kant mired in contradictions, whose unpacking promised to disclose something true"
journals.uchicago.edu
Angela Davis and Critical Theory, from Kant to Abolition | Polity: Vol 56, No 2
This article recovers Angela Davis’s archived dissertation project, “Towards a Kantian Theory of Force,” from 1969, and places it in conversation with her mature work on prison abolition. It begins by...
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 09/05/2026
A bunch of extremely beautiful pictures of wind farms in China - all photographs by Weimin Chu e360.yale.edu/digest/china...
a photograph of a large wind farm in China a person is standing on a mountain in the foreground and there are several large wind turbines in the background in a sort of dooney type desert situationa photograph of wind farms in China there is cloud in the background and light brown ground in the foreground there's more subst taken from very high up and there is a lake in the far background alongwards and mountainsa photograph of a wind farm In with the wind turbines on the edges of the mountain sort of traditional Chinese style house in the foreground and rolling mountains in between botha beautiful photo of a wind turbine with fog in the foreground in China and mountains in the background
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Alexander Billet @ubupamplemousse.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
A recent review for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social of AJA Woods' book The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. The book is really quite good and I think should be read by anyone who takes culture seriously.
lareviewofbooks.org
Red Specters and Right-Wing Fever Dreams | Los Angeles Review of Books
A. J. A. Woods’s new book explores how the Right’s obsession with Cultural Marxism emerged from the backlash against the 1960s.
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Natasha Heenan @natashaheenan.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
My attempt at thinking through climate repair as a latent possibility emergent within (but by no means guaranteed by) the overshoot conjuncture, in issue 3 of @the-breakdown.bsky.social
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Cominsitu @cominsitu.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
The keynote by @abenanav.bsky.social from our planning conference last December is now online. Enjoy! youtu.be/_fOKi05_Ddo
youtu.be
Aaron Benanav: "Rational Choice in a Multidimensional Economy"
YouTube video by Critical Theory in Berlin
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Nick Evershed!? @nickevershed.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Treasury modelling shows Morrison's job-ready graduates program means one in four humanities students will take more than 25 years to fully repay their student loans. It also increased the amount of debt held by the gov that will never be repaid www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Chart showing HELP debt payback times for various degree categories under the job-ready graduate scheme and pre-JRG. Under the JRG arts students now face much higher payback times, with a quarter having a payback time over 25 years
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
I missed this a few days ago: "On Friday, May 1, 2026, Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee officially declined an invitation to attend the 14th International Writers Festival in Jerusalem, delivering a forceful critique of the Israeli state and its intellectual community." iol.co.za/entertainmen...
iol.co.za
Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee withdraws from Jerusalem Writers’ Festival over Gaza crisis
Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee has declined an invitation to the Jerusalem Writers’ Festival, citing the ongoing Gaza conflict as a reason for his withdrawal.
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Stephanie Convery @gingerandhoney.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
If you'll permit me, a thread: On the weekend, former Age editor Michael Gawenda had a crack at @jeffsparrow1.bsky.social via The Australian. Jeff's supposed crime was organising and publishing an anti-genocide letter in 2023 while editor of Overland and senior lecturer in journalism at UniMelb.
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Andy Fleming @slackbastard.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
UQP staff urge university to reconsider “Bila” cancellation [APR 27] www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/202...
booksandpublishing.com.au
UQP staff urge university to reconsider “Bila” cancellation | Books+Publishing
Purchase a subscription to view job ads and other premium content on Books+Publishing.
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Mathew Abbott @mathewabbott.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
Nancy Fraser: “This form of philosemitism barely conceals its underlying antisemitism. Far from accepting Zionist Jews as genuine fellows, it converges in the end with the open antisemitism of those who marched at Charlottesville in August 2017.” newleftreview.org/issues/ii158...
newleftreview.org
Nancy Fraser, Gaza as World Event, NLR 158, March–April 2026
The global reverberations of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, understood as world event—an epochal turning point which serves to reveal the changing nature of the times. Philosophical reflections on the ...
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Budget Motel Abyss @budgetmotelabyss.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
My book is now available online for those of you who have institutional access to such things brill.com/display/titl...
brill.com
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journalspectre.bsky.social @journalspectre.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
@karenkyng.bsky.social reviewing @vcwills.bsky.social 's Marx's Ethical Vision ( @academic.oup.com ) for Constellations. bit.ly/41KTpPi
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Cominsitu @cominsitu.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
New episode of the @ktbberlin.bsky.social podcast CRITIQUE OF AI - featuring @rainermuehlhoff.bsky.social @annanosthoff.bsky.social @bildoperationen.bsky.social @mttpsq.bsky.social and introduced with @robin-c.bsky.social criticaltheoryinberlin.de/en/podcast/p...
Critique of AI podcast
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Benjamin McKean @blmckean.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
“Musk’s business model is built not around steady production or long-term profitability, but around the continuous projection of outsized promises—of technological breakthroughs, planetary salvation, financial windfalls. These claims generate asset price inflation through the harvest of attention.”
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Mathew Abbott @mathewabbott.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
My paper on metabolic rift is out in @histmat.bsky.social! The piece develops the notion of self-consciousness implicit in the concept of rift. Against Moore & others, I argue that overcoming dualism requires accounting for human distinctiveness, not relinquishing it: brill.com/view/journal...
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Rafiq @rafiqcopeland.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
I hope I’m not snitch tagging the wonderful @omarsakr.bsky.social into more controversy by sharing his excellent poem on this topic, ‘Bluey in the Genocide’.
‘Bluey in the Genocide’ by Omar Sakr. 

We watch the cricket episode
All laconic drawls and summer
Games, a dedicated pup learning
To play while his father is away.
His name is arusty, he’s a star
At bat. My son laps it up, as do I
Until the end; the scene shifts
And there is the distant dad
In combat fatigues, and I learn
Even in this cartoon world
There is a desert full of dogs
Soldiers and guns, and somewhere
Out of frame, Arabs being put down
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Aidan McGlynn @aidanmcglynn.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
This looks interesting (not out yet):
cambridge.org
The Political Wittgenstein
Cambridge Core - Twentieth-Century Philosophy - The Political Wittgenstein
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 22/04/2026
There's a graphic in the new Ember report showing what happens if current demand and clean power growth rates continue: fossil fuels plateau by 2030. I think it highlights something kind of important, but probably not what you think
a chart showing a fossil fuel plateau
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Kristin Grogan @kristingrogan.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
rest well jh prynne, the / mere & lovely centre, of the earth
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Jeff Sparrow @jeffsparrow1.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
I wrote for @crikey.com.au about some parallels between repression now and in the past
crikey.com.au
Red flags and 'the six-word phrase': Queensland protest arrests are part of an Australian history of crushing dissent
Australia has some form when it comes to criminalisation of symbolic dissent, stretching back almost a century before Queensland starting arresting citizens for pro-Palestine chants.
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Mathew Abbott @mathewabbott.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
My article Coming Round to Ourselves is out in the new Thesis Eleven. It gives a Hegelian-Marxist account of how the domination of labour is now expressed in Earth. It extends an idea in Benjamin: our task is not to master nature but rather our relation to it. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Mathew Abbott @mathewabbott.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
“The leader of the Frankfurt School’s second generation had little useful to say about two of the most urgent concerns confronting us: humanity’s headlong race towards an ecological cliff and the accelerating global spread of neo-fascist movements.” www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/h...
versobooks.com
Habermas's Sins of Omission
“One should not speak ill of the dead”, so the adage goes.  But philosophers aren’t bound by conventional wisdom and when the deceased is a serious philosopher of the first order, an honest reflection...
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Amy Remeikis @amyremeikis.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
A data analysis by @ettemedia.bsky.social shows just how insane the Australian campaign against Randa Abdel-Fattah has been. www.ettemedia.com/exclusive-me...
ettemedia.com
ETTE-SCLUSIVE: Data exposes The Australian’s campaign against Dr Randa Abdel- Fattah
A sweeping data investigation reveals what appears to be a sustained, coordinated media offensive by News Corp's The Australian targeting Palestinian-Egyptian academic and author Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah...
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Digressionsimpressions @nescio13.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
On the Ideology Critique of Pacifism in Anscombe and Schmitt (with a few remarks on Strauss) open.substack.com/pub/digressi...
open.substack.com
On the Ideology Critique of Pacifism in Anscombe and Schmitt (with a few remarks on Strauss)
As regular readers know, I have a soft spot for Anscombe’s (1961) “War and Murder” In: Walter Stein (ed.), Nuclear Weapons: A Catholic Response (London, 1961), pp.
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Quinn Slobodian @quinnslobodian.com · 15/04/2026
Oceanographers, simultaneously the most mild-mannered and the most terrifying people you’ll ever meet
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Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf @rahmstorf.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
New study finds the "canary in the coal mine" for the #AMOC: a consistent decline of the western overturning circulation, down from 20 to 15 Sv during 2004-2023 at 26° N. 🌊 AMOC "could be at or near a critical tipping point, potentially leading to its collapse". www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Meridionally consistent decline in the observed western boundary contribution to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
Western boundary observations in the Atlantic suggest a meridionally consistent decline in the ocean overturning circulation.
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Economic thought @economicthought.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Article: The Red Thread of Humanity: Review Article of Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy, (2025) by Christoph Schuringa, by Alec Hinshelwood doi.org/10.1093/cpe/...
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robin manley @robinmanley.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Qui Parle is inviting submissions for a special issue on renovations of humanism and new directions in the thematic of the subject. Please consider submitting, and share widely! I am coediting the issue, and would be happy to answer any questions.
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Andy Fleming @slackbastard.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
Aside from anything else, FWIW, on the 'US-Israeli war on Iran—and beyond', I recommend listening to the latest episode of @thedigradio.bsky.social 'Economic Warfare' w/ Aslı Bâli, Esfandyar Batmanghelidj & Nicholas Mulder thedigradio.com/podcast/econ...
Albanese pushes for ‘more certainty’ on objectives and de-escalation of war against Iran

Albanese says he wants the de-escalation of war and more certainty over the US’ objectives over the war against Iran.

"About the way Donald Trump is prosecuting this war, I want to see more certainty in what the objectives of the war are, and I want to see a de-escalation.

At the beginning of the conflict, the objectives were outlined as one, stopping Iran getting a nuclear weapon – agreed and clearly has been achieved; secondly, degrading the opportunity that Iran has for engaging in military action, either overt or through its proxies in Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis – clearly there has been substantial degrading of Iran’s position. The third was regime change, and I think that, very clearly, history tells us that regime change imposed from outside is very difficult."
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Alice Grundy @alicektg.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Just 1 example of the kind of thing unis are getting for their massive spend on consultants. ANU spent $6k on a "non-significant meeting" with a reputation management firm at which apparently no one took a note. That's more than a tutor gets for a semester's work thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...
thepoint.com.au
ANU spent $6k on a 'non-significant' meeting. Then why do they pay tutors even less for a semester?
Last year the Australian National University (ANU) was getting some bad press, so they engaged a company called Bastion Reputation to help with the media fallout from restructures and the heavily crit...
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Yung En Chee @yungenchee.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
The scale of Australian universities managerial & governance surrender/capture is ASTOUNDING "Twelve of the 14 universities had council members, who had substantive roles as consultants from firms such as Ernst & Young, PwC, KPMG, Deloitte, McKinsey, and Boston Consulting Group"
abc.net.au
As universities cut courses, spending on consultants and contractors nears $2b
Consultancies have been accused of infiltrating universities and wasting scarce public funds on questionable advice about cutting courses and jobs.
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