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Rob Danisch

@robdanisch.bsky.social
179 followers 296 following 460 posts

Professor of Rhetoric and Communication, University of Waterloo, lover and defender of democracy

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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I will never understand the logic of senior hiring committees at universities, over and over again, across so many different institutions, the absolute worst people get picked for these roles and this is just a super clear example.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
How do these people get these jobs? Or do the jobs just make them dumb? www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
theatlantic.com
Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth
Universities that hide from the technology will merely secure their irrelevance.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Well, here's a non-academic-y, first year university summary: soundcloud.com/rdanisch/epi...
soundcloud.com
Episode 001 - What is communication? And how do I get better at it?
This is a podcast about communication skills for those that want to be a better partner, better teammate, better writer, better speaker, and better leader. Each week we'll discuss how to improve your
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
This whole thread is full of woefully bad conceptions of communication. @michaelhobbes.bsky.social read “Speaking into the Air” by John Durham Peters, it’ll give you a clearer sense of the complexities. Also it’s not a book you should kill.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Communication is not a process of “giving information.” This view has been widely repudiated by the field of communication studies for like a century.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Yup, my sentiments exactly, which is super depressing: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
theatlantic.com
A Society of Cheats
Students’ use of AI is teaching them to cut corners, disdain rules, and believe that integrity is for suckers and wimps.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
A relief to read while in the process of raising difficult, opinionated and talkative kids:
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
And then how do you judge any of this as a hiring committee? Or maybe they're just looking for people who voted for Trump, in which case that's just awful.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Does it mean a free speech absolutist? If so, that disqualifies the tech bros and most of the right wingers who are aggressively trying to restrict speech.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Does it mean someone that defends the liberal tradition and the Enlightenment? Or someone that is pro democracy and capitalism because those positions seem against the far left these days?
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Does it just mean a commitment to specific economic policy initiatives or international relations? Again a very narrow subset, but also the governing Republicans aren't really conservative at all.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I wrote a couple of books on civility and got called conservative, so do I qualify? Does it mean conservative political theory? If so, that's a pretty narrow subsection of intellectual work.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I don't really know what this even means:
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
instead we falsely assume that more information means more truth, when it is objectively clear that the opposite is happening.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
We are drowning in information and starving for truth. I think that's what the tech bros had in mind, but no one seems to be able to argue that we ought to regulate information so we can have truth.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
What a bar from Gorgias: "Since opinion is slippery and insecure, it casts those employing it into slippery and insecure successes."
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Christopher W. Jones @cwjones.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
An exemplary policy at UChicago: - Technology ban in class. - Total AI ban. Students may not use it, instructors may not assign it. Exceptions to the latter for narrow purposes must be approved at the administrator level. - Instructors may not use AI for grading. chicagomaroon.com/53262/news/s...
chicagomaroon.com
Sosc Core to Institute AI Ban, Technology-Free Classrooms This Fall
All social science Core classes will transition to an “analog” approach for the upcoming academic year, restricting in-classroom technology use and banning AI-assisted writing and grading for students...
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Leonore (Lee) Carpenter @leecarpenter.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
In case you are an academic who is currently being gaslit into believing that you're a caveman who wants their students to be jobless if you resist allowing AI in your classrooms... I present to you Berkeley Law's response, which can be summarized as "Fuck off directly into the sun."
law.berkeley.edu
Artificial Intelligence Policy
Effective Summer 2026 Purpose Future lawyers may need to use artificial intelligence (“AI”) fluently. But the current state of the technology requires that AI use be coupled with the cognitive […]
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
This gets at a lot of my basic teaching philosophy for my whole career. It's nice to see that perhaps that philosophy is now more important than ever. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | I Let My Students Watch Me Struggle With a Masterpiece. It Changed Everything.
Teachers need to model the passion they want to see.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
I delete every single email from some ed tech company toting some new tool immediately; I skim right by every mention of how to get students engaged with flashy tech. This coming semester, paper syllabus, pen and paper in class, that's it.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
www.bloomsbury.com/us/rhetorica...
bloomsbury.com
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
available now in paperback, an explanation of why we are where we are: www.amazon.com/Rhetorical-D...
amazon.com
Amazon.com
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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
"one of the surest strategies for amassing autocratic power is what I call deliberate deliteracy: the destruction, restriction, and monopolization of the infrastructures that make mass literacy possible." www.theamericanvandal.com/p/neuroplast...
theamericanvandal.com
Neuroplasticity As A Praxis
We Can Read Our Way Out Of Autocracy
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-f...
hedgehogreview.com
Artificial Negligence
Faculty sense that AI could make old-fashioned teaching and learning much more difficult to achieve, if not obsolete.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Liberal Arts seminars. Situated judgment, conditional reasoning, thoughtful persuasion - these are the learning outcomes for university courses.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
The goal of the non-AI curriculum should be to teaching reasoning and persuasion, moral judgment, the cultivation of style and taste, historical and comparative thinking. Guess what all that is?
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
AI cannot help people develop their own idiosyncratic style or aesthetic tastes. AI cannot imagine new goals or even constitute goals. So maybe our classrooms need to focus on building trust, cooperation, developing style, and imagining and calling into being novel goals.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Humanities scholars should be talking a lot about what AI cannot do and building curricula that focus on just those things. Here are some examples: AI cannot build the trust on which cooperation depends. It's use is, instead, eroding trust everywhere.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
This is excellent: www.noemamag.com/why-a-libera...
noemamag.com
How To Future-Proof Your Career In The Age Of AI | NOEMA
The most prized workers will be those who can decode a sea of outputs, spot the meaningful signal and translate it into action that others understand and trust.
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Josh Shepperd @joshshepperd.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
I hate to say it, but the colleagues positioning themselves to be pro AI in teaching and curriculum, are probably also positioning themselves to be administrators, and probably aren’t thinking about or don’t care how it will affect teaching, learning, or the careers of those around them.
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Mallory Moore @sexabolition.blog · 08/06/2026
By far the biggest problem with delegating judgement to machines is the people who own the machines can tune them towards outcomes they prefer but those who don't own anything can't. It's not the technology. It's a transfer of decision making power from rational accountable systems to capital.
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 03/06/2026
I spent more time on this piece than almost anything else I've written in the last year. Building a better, more decentralized internet is an inherent necessity if you want a functioning democracy. I hope people find it a useful encapsulation of where we're at. www.liberalism.org/p/enshittifi...
liberalism.org
Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet
It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes.
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jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 05/05/2026
If LLMs do indeed presage the end of higher education, it will be because university administrators forced LLMs down the throats of students and instructors, undermining the perception that pedagogy produces skills that are valuable to employers.
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Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 28/04/2026
"The goal is not to crush your opponents but to change them, to find a way to live together down the road. Reconciliation may not be comfortable, but it does show a way forward. This may be the hardest step to grasp and implement." www.liberalcurrents.com/lessons-in-t...
liberalcurrents.com
Lessons in Training, Strategy, and Discipline From the Civil Rights Movement
Tactical excellence without a strategic understanding is a recipe for failure.
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Nick Davis @ntd.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
I’m officially nuking screens in class this fall. You can take notes by hand or not I don’t really care. But I’m done pretending that screens are anything other than a massive mistake in classrooms.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
What a surprise, screens in the classroom are bad: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
theatlantic.com
What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens
Why one early adopter of computers in classrooms has decided to toss them
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
As I say all the time in my basic communication theory class: information is not understanding, the more complicated problem is always making meaning never transmitting information.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
War as a failure of literacy; the inability to understand the meaning of events instead of just information. There's a lot hear to justify attention to humanities education (and the lack of just that in this moment): www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Is It 1914 in America?
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Alex Zalben @azalben.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
The annoying gruntwork you’re off-loading to AI is how you learn basic information and skills that help power the logical leaps that lead to creation and innovation. This is why CEOs are all f**king idiots.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
It's kind of alarming, this just reads like a restatement of what I've already published, within my own field, yet no acknowledgement?
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
What does an academic do when people publish something that basically says exactly what you have said over two books and never even cite you? delibdemjournal.org/article/id/9...
delibdemjournal.org
Reclaiming Civility: Towards Discursive Opening in Dialogue and Deliberation
In the midst of polarization often linked to incivility and a 'call out' culture, this paper re-imagines the role of civility. Moving away from reductionist definitions that claim civility is either o...
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Jesspooka Kant 🎃 @jessdkant.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Reposting this because, hilariously, someone running an AI news aggregator just plagiarized the hell out of it and got shared 3x as much as the original post. So you know, here's the actual piece. Where I talk about LLMs making copies of copies of copies of copies and how that drives disinformation.
jessk.org
AI update: replication crisis — Jessica Kant
Regardless of who actually prints a story, it is the merger of social media and machine learning which increasingly drives narratives in the immediate wake of a major event. The next time a catastroph...
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
This is awesome
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Daniel McDowell @danielmcdowell.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
I tell my students that one of the main reasons not to over-rely on AI for research/writing is because--at some point in the future--you're going to have a face-to-face conversation with someone who matters, and if you don't actually know some things, that interaction will not go well for you.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
yes, absolutely: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | A.I. Companies Are Eating Higher Education
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
I think this semester has reminded me more and more of 2017/18 when I was really impressed with students. The pandemic and AI have muddled teaching and learning in so many bad ways. Ask the students to return to forms of education described here and they'll go with you.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
This is really good, especially the idea to stop somewhere and let them catch up: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
I wrote several books and spent the better part of my career writing about why this matters for democracy and how to do it. I'm skeptical such a movement will happen. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
theatlantic.com
What Should Americans Do Now?
We need a mass movement for basic decency.
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
We already wrote a book on this, much better and more detailed than what's in this essay. www.routledge.com/Radically-Ci...
routledge.com
Radically Civil: Saving Democracy One Conversation at a Time
If you feel like the world has gone to hell in a handbasket, you’re not alone. If you often feel there’s nothing you can do about it, you’re also not alone. Along with this increasing anger, fear, and...
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Rob Danisch @robdanisch.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Oh look, a Harvard person discovered the field of communication. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | What Science Tells Us About Arguing With Your Father-in-Law
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