iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

When you hear a fantastical story about AI, you should ask yourself, "How does this serve the political project of AI?" Because, as others have pointed out, that's what AI really amounts to: a political project.

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

For MSNOW, I wrote about the Trump administration threatening to strip colleges of their tax-exempt status as part of its larger segregationist agenda.

ms.now

Opinion | Trump’s next high education target: schools that help Black students

Victor Ray: American universities must stand up to Trump's plan to re-segregate higher ed

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Chad Topaz Queer DEI Race Traitor @chadtopaz.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

That time your "philanthropic" foundation quietly scrubbed "racial justice" from its website? Yeah, I tabulated that. Foundations weren't even direct targets of Trump's anti-DEI orders — yet many cut DEI language anyway. The Wayback Machine remembers. Updated preprint: doi.org/10.31235/osf...

The Retreat from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Language Change on Large U.S. Foundation Websites, 2019–2025

Chad M. Topaz,
Benham Cobb,
Frances Lu,
Aniya Smith,
Nathan Zekarias

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many US organizations, including large private foundations, publicly foregrounded language related to DEI. Beginning in 2023, a series of legal and political developments shifted the institutional environment: the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), state-level anti-DEI legislation, and Executive Order 14151 (2025). Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we construct a longitudinal corpus of archived web pages from thirteen large U.S. private foundations with established DEI vocabulary and track the frequency of sixty-seven DEI-related terms from 2019 to 2025. Among eight foundations with paired 2023 and 2025 data, six reduced their DEI word intensity; most terms present in the paired corpus declined, with race-related terms contributing the largest share of the drop. The aggregate decline on the full sixty-seven-term index is marginal (exact Wilcoxon p = .074, one-sided); evidence is stronger on the dictionary’s definitional core, the diversity-equity-inclusion triad and its variants (p = .031). The decline concentrates in the 2024–2025 window containing the January 2025 executive orders: eight of nine foundations fell (p = .020), with scattered movement earlier. Qualitative comparison of archived pages illustrates three pathways of retreat: elimination of equity framing, substitution of technical for justice-oriented vocabulary, and reduced prominence through site redesign. These patterns suggest institutional isomorphism operating in reverse—convergent abandonment amid shared political pressure—though our descriptive design cannot identify the mechanism. The findings establish an empirical baseline for tracking organizational communication about equity under political pressure.

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lucyannablues.bsky.social @lucyannablues.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

@tressiemcphd.bsky.social @jpygold.bsky.social an example of where there is going-WVU was an R1 institution, a bud of Jim Justice took over as president & immediately cut research, literally turned a stellar language program into duo lingo classes, and hired people to counter “woke” indoctrination ⬇️

West Virginia University was taken over by ultra conservatives, and the above class is a result of their destroying a renown university and turning its curriculum into a joke-1 student enrolled in Woke Ideology class

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Spencer Bagley @sbagley.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

This is a stunning piece of visual journalism. I almost didn't click because I thought I already knew how bad it was. I did not know.

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Jonathan Feingold @jpygold.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

new draft for anyone who felt the DNC autoposy might've missed something or feels the university distrust narrative a bit misses the mark. w @isaackamola.bsky.social. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

MAGA’S BLUE STATE STRATEGY: HOW DEMOCRATS AND UNIVERSITY LEADERS HELPED THE REACTIONARY RIGHT WEAPONIZE ANTISEMITISM AGAINST HIGHER EDUCATION JONATHAN FEINGOLD* & ISAAC KAMOLA** CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 102 I. THE BLM BACKLASH .......................................................................... 108 II. FROM “CRT IS RACIST” TO “DEI IS ANTISEMITIC” ............................. 111 III. THE DEMOCRATS OBLIGED ................................................................. 116 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................... 130

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Vanessa Sun @vanessainstem.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Currently hosting the Weather & Climate livestream to show Americans about the weather & climate research currently at risk of being defunded federally. Tune in to check out some cooool science talks!! 😃 @wclivestream.bsky.social

Selfie of author of post, with a view from the chest up. She is posed with a side ponytail, and has a hand framing (below) her chin. Her t-shirt spells WHOI with coral and says Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution below. Pinned to the top right are a Pride Progress rainbow flag pin and a heart pin with the transgender flag colors. She is wearing black raincloud acrylic earrings with raindrop and lightning attachments dangling below the cloud.

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

I just got back from the @bjsociology.bsky.social conference (which was great) but I was disheartened to hear from American colleagues who are self-censoring or in departments capitulating to right-wing propaganda. And it wasn't just red states or public colleges. www.chronicle.com/article/near...

chronicle.com

Nearly One-Third of Faculty in Red States Say They’ve Censored Their Research

A new survey of 4,000 academics looked at the effects of state laws barring “divisive concepts” and federal grant cuts.

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Making tenure count, for MSNOW I wrote about my employer, The University of Iowa, creating a center for intellectual freedom. It's a reactionary project built on decades of conservative propaganda about higher ed.

ms.now

Opinion | Beware conservatives promoting “intellectual freedom”

Victor Ray: This conservative lie about schools like mine is furthering authoritarianism

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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

There was ONE ATC in the tower at LGA during last night's crash. ONE ATC, at LGA!, dealing w ALL air and ground traffic, including a plane filling w a strange smell and no gate to return to. The Pentagon wants $200B for a vanity war, but our ATC towers are empty. Budgets are moral documents.

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NPR @npr.org · 07/03/2026

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, is using a broad web of surveillance tools — purchased as its budget has ballooned under this administration — to monitor, apprehend and intimidate the people it seeks to deport and the U.S. citizens critical of its policies.

n.pr

ICE has spun a massive surveillance web. We talked to people caught in it

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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

Reporting on GRFP applications returned without review.

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MAA @joinmaa.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

Today’s the day! The 2026 OURFA²M² Conference is happening today, a free virtual event for undergraduates focused on career resources and connection. Register now and join us: bit.ly/4aqbebv

bit.ly

2026 OURFA²M²

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

The destruction of independent media outlets and the attempts to bring higher education to heel are part of a united authoritarian strategy designed to destroy checks on their propaganda.

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

ICYMI @hebagowayed.bsky.social wrote about the companies profiting from ICE’s ethnic cleansing campaign and why a bipartisan consensus keeps the out-of-control agency funded for our newsletter Group Threat (please subscribe).

groupthreat.com

Tracking ICE's Profits

ICE is extraordinarily costly to working people & grotesquely profitable for the worst among us

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

The scale and speed of state censorship of campus really is amazing. More than half of America's college students attend institutions in states that have passed laws censoring higher education since 2021. From @penamerica.bsky.social pen.org/report/ameri...

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Chad Topaz Queer DEI Race Traitor @chadtopaz.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

A right wing proposal would force public universities to gather/publish standardized test scores (SAT, GRE, etc.) for every faculty applicant across stages of a faculty search, to “restore meritocracy.” 👀 My op-ed today explains one of the many reasons this is nonsense: bad statistics. #AcademicSky

insidehighered.com

Faculty Merit Act Is Meritless (opinion)

A proposal to mandate publication of SAT and other standardized test scores for all faculty and faculty job applicants is statistically unsound.

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Dr. U. Whitcher (U. is for Bear) @yarntheory.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

"According to the academic math jobs listings, there were 150 faculty tenure-track jobs advertised in 2024. There were 70 advertised in 2025. So that gives you a sense of the cuts. Of those 70 jobs, Simons is funding 10 of them."

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

For @liberalcurrents.com fellow @vassar.bsky.social alum @jpygold.bsky.social and I wrote about the Trump administration's gutting of disparate impact liability as another advance in their segregationist agenda.

liberalcurrents.com

Promoting a New Segregation

The Trump administration wants to make anti-Black racism great again.

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 03/12/2025

“The math is brutal and the juxtaposition stark: millions for OpenAI while pink slips go out to longtime lecturers. The CSU isn’t investing in education—it’s outsourcing it, paying premium prices for a chatbot many students were already using for free.“ www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

currentaffairs.org

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself

Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

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Sarah Cohodes @cohodes.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

📣 New NBER Working Paper out today 📣 "The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct" Sarah Cohodes & Katherine Leu

Screenshot of working paper: The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct

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Luis Antonio Leyva @luisleyvaedu.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Our research team's new journal article in AERA Open reports findings from a study of 27 Latin* undergraduate Ss' experiences of servingness [i.e., racially-affirming support at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs)], particularly focusing on gateway math instruction. doi.org/10.1177/2332... (1/5)

media.tenor.com

spongebob squarepants is holding his hands up in the air and says published

ALT: spongebob squarepants is holding his hands up in the air and says published

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Not only is this coming for you, it is here and we are collectively behind in preparing.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2025

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Luis Antonio Leyva @luisleyvaedu.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Math Ed community, the abstract submission deadline for the JRME special issue is quickly approaching — Aug 31st.

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Jen Bendery @jbendery.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

Elizabeth Warren on CBS canceling Stephen Colbert's show: "CBS canceled Colbert’s show just three days after Colbert called out CBS owner Paramount for its $16 million settlement with Trump – a deal that looks like bribery. America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.”

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 17/07/2025

Everyone needs to understand that the defunding of public broadcasting this week is part of a broader effort to dismantle the free press and control the means of reality production itself. www.thedissident.news/the-oligarch...

thedissident.news

The Oligarchs' Coup Against the Free Press Is Happening Now

The American information space is not merely changing; it is undergoing a hostile takeover. It is a deliberate, coordinated campaign by a new class of oligarchs out of Silicon Valley that includes Jef...

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

So they’re basically laundering our federal science budget over to the for-profit prison and concentration camp industry? NSF’s 2024 budget was $9.06 billion. NASA: $24.875. NIH: $47.7 billion. Fund science, not cruelty.

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Neil Stenhouse @nstenhouse.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

“ICE gets a bigger budget than the Marine Corps” is a simple fact that should be communicated very widely because it clearly expresses how crazy and radical this is

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David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

With this budget, ICE alone would have nearly as large a detention operation as all 50 states' prison systems combined. Bigger budget than the Marine Corps. Police-state levels of spending

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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 27/06/2025

"For the child born this summer in Texas, whose parents receive no documents, whose name never appears in any system, and who grows up asking why she can’t go on field trips, apply for scholarships, or open a bank account, the consequences are not legal theory. They are her life."

slate.com

The United States Is About to Embark on a Terrifying Experiment in Mass Statelessness

This scenario, until recently, might have read like a dystopian projection. But after the court’s decision on Friday, it is no longer hypothetical.

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Eddie Fuller @ejfuller.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Difficult to overstate this. It seems that many in core science and math fields feel that they will be able to hunker down and wait, but the infrastructure for ALL science is being diminished. This will diminish US higher ed in ways that will not be apparent for another 12-18 months.

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Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Journalists keep asking me, baffled, “What’s the Trump administration really trying to do to the science agencies?” So I say “They are trying to destroy them. Cut off their funding, ruin their facilities, harass their staff into leaving.” It’s not reform, and it never was. It’s destruction.

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 25/06/2025

“No one like Mamdani has ever won an election where as many as a million people voted. This is akin to a socialist winning a medium-size state.” nymag.com/intelligence...

nymag.com

Zohran Mamdani Just Remade American Politics

There is no real precedent in U.S. history for his victory in New York mayoral race.

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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years. NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

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Sam @samd.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

every single member of Congress should be pushing for Trump’s impeachment. and every single Democrat who isn’t calling for impeachment should be primaried

Artl.S8.C11.1.1 Overview of Congressional War Powers
Article I, Section 8, Clause 11:
[The Congress shall have Power ..
• I To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; ...

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results. t.co/JXeTALBPds

Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper.

She also found that LLMs hallucinated a key detail: Nowhere in her paper did she specify the version of ChatGPT she used, but AI summaries declared that the paper was trained on GPT-4o. “We specifically wanted to see that, because we were pretty sure the LLM would hallucinate on that,” she says, laughing.

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

I'm sorry but the largest protest of my lifetime is not the 7th or 8th biggest news story in the country behind "what does Gen Z want from Instagram?" This shit is humiliating. Rearrange your layout to meet this moment. Omitting the thing happening in every American city is malpractice.

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Mark Jacob @markjacob.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

As a four-decade veteran of the daily journalism business, let me tell you: Every competent political reporter in this country knows that Trump is trying to establish a dictatorship. The industry's shame is that so few journalists will say so, and the ones who do lose their jobs.

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