iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Michael Barany

Nina Markl 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @ninamarkl.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

the rest of us also respect students enough as adults capable of comprehending complex issues not to say stuff like this:

Prof Mathieson said the university was
"extremely disappointed" by the decision to strike.
He told the BBC's Radio Scotland Breakfast programme: "I have enormous sympathy with our students and it really irritates me that they are being weaponised in the way that they are by UCU.
"And UCU know that they are targeting students. Of course they can say that they think students are on their side because, I was a student once and we were all anti-establishment, and of course you're going to blame the establishment.

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Lucy Gaynor @lucyjgaynor.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Cuts like those proposed at Edinburgh are cultural vandalism, & the destruction of future opportunities for countless students. Pitting students and staff against each other is callous disregard for the immense work that teaching staff put into educating & encouraging young people.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 28/09/2026

Really galling that the Principal accuses staff of ‘weaponising’ students when the revealed preference of the University’s management has consistently been that they prioritise breaking the union over things avoiding students graduating with empty pieces of paper.

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Plashing Vole @plashingvole.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Best of luck to @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social members going on strike for over a month. Nobody does this willingly - it’s a last resort, unlike that enormously rich university’s slash and burn tactics.

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Dr Vanessa @hpsvanessa.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Cannot tell you how much I hate this & how ashamed & angry I am that @ukri.org have taken this step. We KNOW this sort of gAI is socially biased, we KNOW it favours slopAI output over human-written. Our research landscape is falling apart due to underfunding, & they do this? it's *appalling*

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John Stott @jpsastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I've seen the future and it's bleak. Coming to an inbox near you soon too I imagine. I don't use LLMs for anything I do and never will but it's depressing that I wrote something that no one ever read before it was rejected. 🧪 #academicsky

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 24/09/2026

Work Gets Hard When Context Is Everywhere

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Bart Penders @penders.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Back of the envelope calculations: 3600 years of research time went into the collective application process. The research will fund 3200 years of research. We are 400 research years poorer as a result of this. 1/2

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Dan Hirschman @asociologist.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Another win for the Cornell Chronicle’s email subject line policy of “jam the top two headlines together and hit send.”

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Drew Lewis @drew-lewis.com · 22/09/2026

I know mathematicians aren't big on methods from other disciplines, but I feel like comparatists would have a field day examining this and e.g. the Leiden declaration

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 22/09/2026

ok but some of the chickens have a prize they won a long time ago for stuff completely unrelated to fox management, so we have to trust them on this

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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Wow does the post title bury the lede! I particularly like the pictured comment.

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 21/09/2026

finding out that supposedly-crisis-budget-cutting uni has budgeted £500/yr in tokens for 3rd-party ai models for every academic and i-don't-know-how-much for students, and this is presented as cost-control after who-knows-how-much being burnt on this stuff previously

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 20/09/2026

We have a higher ed system that is premised on the idea that incoming undergraduates have basic reading, writing, study, and math skills which will allow them to learn how to understand research knowledge and ideally eventually generate themselves.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

We’ve lived through the nearly complete systematic unwinding of the postwar public university, which for all its faults, was premised on the idea that not only aristocrats could be intellectuals, & that having non-aristocratic intellectuals was better for knowledge & therefore better for everyone

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 20/09/2026

not only this, but such thinking is financially sustainable at universities at a scale that works, provided you're not setting out to engineer a budget narrative toward academic vandalism

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jbralston.bsky.social @jbralston.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

But what if I told you that thinking isn't always efficient and that learning demands grappling with complex ideas in smaller groups, so you can't just "scale up" something like a course on advanced Arabic or Hegel or Feminist hermeneutics of testimony without losing the learning itself.

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jbralston.bsky.social @jbralston.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Same thing happening at Edinburgh Uni to programmes in history, the arts, Celtic studies and more. Edinburgh is known for having one of the best humanities programmes in UK and world for research and teaching. We also more than pay for ourselves but with consultants, you can always be more efficient

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jbralston.bsky.social @jbralston.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

A few facts. 1) Humanities programmes, despite what you may assume, actually make money for the university and don't lose it. 2) we aren't in a deficit as university and have had a multimillion pound surplus every year.

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Barbara Fantechi @barbarafantechi.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

At the bottom of the membership list of ahmath.org today: "Note: We currently have a backlog of submissions to upload." The Association of Human Mathematics is open to anyone who wants to put clear limits on AI usage in mathematical research. #MathSky

ahmath.org

AHM

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 20/09/2026

I really try to refrain from too much commentary on local academic politics - and boy is there a lot it 🙄 - but I just think based on my own experience is that there a lot of humanities academics who just don’t believe that their research matters or should be supported.

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Kate Louise Mathis is on strike @drmaudbailey.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

'Budget constraints' = fall-out of deliberate prioritization of capital expenditure now laid at the feet of all sorts of staff (other than management, of course) and our specialist programmes www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/blog/depreci...

ucuedinburgh.org.uk

Depreciating the University of Edinburgh into the Ground — UCU Edinburgh

There are four key takeaways from the University of Edinburgh’s 2024-25 annual report, which this post explores: The University continues to make a sizeable surplus. What financial pressures exi...

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adoyleaustin.bsky.social @aliceaustin.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

A university in the city that hosts the National Library of Scotland will no longer provide an opportunity to study Scottish Literature as a stand-alone subject...

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

My (very impressionistic) sense is that it's removing joint degrees in languages that is most likely most rapidly to lead to staff losses and loss of access to degree programmes/research capacity, with then follow-on impacts for students/staff in other SHAPE disciplines who rely on languages.

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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 19/09/2026

Third paper on ≈the same open question within days: this one is the third. The authors blatantly acknowledge their whole plan was to get and dump a ChatGPT proof on arXiv in ONE day to claim a result, and complain about being "scooped" by another group WHICH DID THE SAME THING Do you feel no shame?

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Euan Healey @euanhealey.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Edinburgh University created the first ever Chair in Celtic in Scotland in 1882 (Donald Mackinnon of Colonsay). This is a cultural retreat happening before our eyes where there was once leadership.

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Katherine McDonald @katherinemcdon.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

One of my top writing tips (which I'm sure one of you gave me) is to have a separate document called "cuts" for the bits that don't quite work, so that you can fool yourself that you're not DELETING them you're simply MOVING them.

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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

There are many ideas in mathematics that may be hard to get, but are easy once you get them. Because of this, mathematical understanding does not expand in a monotone direction. Our understanding frequently deteriorates as well. There are several obvious mechanisms of decay.

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Royal Historical Society @royalhistsoc.org · 18/09/2026

We warmly welcome applications to join the Fellowship of the Society. Next closing dates: 5 Oct and 14 December. Fellowship is open to those who've made a scholarly research contribution to #history in all sectors (within & beyond higher education) in the UK/worldwide bit.ly/4iOu51g #Skystorians

bit.ly

Apply for Fellowship - RHS

Closing dates for next applications: Mondays 5 October and 14 December 2026 Fellowships are awarded to those who have made an original contribution to historical scholarship, typically through the a...

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 18/09/2026

'strong language programmes make every discipline stronger' is one absolutely unavoidable lesson of the Cold War university that managers (consultants) have been falling over themselves to forget since then

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 18/09/2026

It’s worse! Not only do they not show any of the workings to the grunts (haha), this bit isn’t actually the cuts, it’s ’rationalising our offering for the future’ or something. Any savings made from these changes explicitly do not contribute to the headline cuts target.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 18/09/2026

So now there are stories travelling like ‘Edinburgh cutting Scottish Literature’, which is a real threat to the reputation of the institution they are supposedly trying to save. Very difficult to have trust in management when it can’t do the basics!

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 18/09/2026

A further observation: the response to the news is widespread horror and solidarity (which we’re grateful for), but it’s also really interesting to observe the gap between how this looks like from ‘the inside’ vs the outside.

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Kate Louise Mathis is on strike @drmaudbailey.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Directly affected staff (like me) found out last week which of our programmes were being axed, so... Information-sharing or consultation with actual staff is prized even less highly than providing a humanities education for students in Scotland focused on Scotland.

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Andy Arthur💃🏰⚓🦌 Threadinburgh 🧵 @threadinburgh.scot · 18/09/2026

Here's my point. There was a time not long ago when Edinburgh's proposals would have literally stopped the presses for an outraged front page on the Scotsman. Now it's dominated by a photo of a posh lady trying shinty. Fair play to Herald for giving it same space as her. (National gonna National.)

Scotsman front page 18/9/26. A posh lady tries her hand at Shinty.

Herald front page 18/9/26. "Edinburgh University's 90-course cull sparks strike action" has the same amount of front page space as the posh lady trying her hand at Shinty.

National front page 18/9/26. Perpetual antagonism between Holyrood/SNP and Westminster.

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Andy Arthur💃🏰⚓🦌 Threadinburgh 🧵 @threadinburgh.scot · 18/09/2026

Have found it hard to find out what Edinburgh University is up to. But that particular institution proposing Scottish Literature be merged into a Scottish & English Lit. joint honours ought to in itself be setting the heather ablaze. But feels kinda like there's just a lot of tumbleweed blowing

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 18/09/2026

trust me the whole thread is like this 🦀

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Bijan Parsia @bparsia.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

As with many areas of employment law, this looks super messy and has relied on good practice in the past to paper over legislative holes. With universities being more aggressive there will be more testing of boundaries. This isn’t great.

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Gav Maclean @gavmaclean.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Absolutely disgusting. When will this vandalism end.

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Nina Markl 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @ninamarkl.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

what’s happening at Edinburgh is really upsetting to me personally (as an alumnus and as a friend to many UoE employees) but should also be really terrifying for the rest of the ‘well-off’ and ‘stable’ and ‘ancient’ and ‘elite’ institutions

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Nina Markl 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @ninamarkl.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

one of *the* selling points of the University of Edinburgh (where I completed both my degrees) is the fact that it can afford to have a wide range of ‘small’ courses and modules and the expertise to staff these incredibly well it’s fucking infuriating how university management destroys what matters

An email sent to all CAHSS staff on September 2 explains: "We have used the institutionally agreed Academic Size and Shape principles and agreed minimum enrolment thresholds to determine
programmes that will close to new admissions from 2027.
"These closures were approved by the College and subsequently by the University Academic Project Board on 19th August."
The email states: "The analysis completed so far shows clear areas of duplication, low student uptake, and courses that may be due for review or retirement. This is the stage that directly relates to workload and staff capacity, and we recognise it will need to be handled with care. Where direct staff impact is identified, disclosure and consultation processes would follow."

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026

AI has exposed the austerity con game in higher ed. For years, we have been told there is no money for students, faculty, staff, capital improvements, libraries. But somehow universities have suddenly come up with the money to pay for AI services??

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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Budgets are strong indicators of what is valued, and they also reflect hundreds of choices rather than one inevitable series of events. (Or you could say, "budgets are moral documents")

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Dr Marie Allitt @marieallitt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

My new role in medical technology research and development is compelling me to read STS things, especially on ethics, equity, and inequalities - any recs? (Assume I’ve read nothing)

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 15/09/2026

"do you have ethical concerns and how do you think they can be overcome?" ok bro that's not how ethics works

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 15/09/2026

absolutely love going over page proofs of an article that took a lot of work and revision and feeling that it is very good and the work was worth it (even/especially when it didn't always feel worth it at the time) #amProofing

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