#academic-critique

#academic-critique

"We're talking about political leaders who were moved by an enormous sense of responsibility and fear for the world."

Modern scientific societies are increasingly vulnerable due to their dependence on membership fees and journal subscriptions, which are being challenged by the rise of virtual networking and open-access publishing.

The format has ginormous link cards at the bottom of the AI summary, which include a thumbnail of no apparent value, the site name, favicon, description, and title.

Computer programs that check mathematical arguments have existed for decades, but translating a human-written proof into the strict programming language of a computer is extremely time-consuming, often taking months or even years.

The deeper I go, the more feminist I become! Yet my experience of academic philosophy has largely disclosed the opposite: a discipline that solemnly declares its devotion to openness proves curiously unsettled by me as a woman.

Google AI mode has added an 'Ask about this' option above the sources where all URLs are displayed. Clicking on 'Ask about' here automatically pulled a new prompt into the search box.

I'm less interested in topics than in questions, and I'm less interested in publishing than I am in curation. When I've testified before Congress or dealt with an appropriations bill or a budget negotiation, this question, of what is the return on investments when you're doing R&D, comes up quite often. It's been asked by economists in very formal ways since at least the 1950s, but the data and the methods that were available were really not very strong.

In antiquity, many opined about "the elements" in combination. Around 2500 years ago, Leucippus and Democritus founded the idea of atoms. Perhaps everything, they opined, was composed of indivisible building blocks. In the late 1700s, hydrogen and oxygen were discovered. Circa 1804, John Dalton revived atomism to explain chemical behavior. Then in 1869, Mendeleev developed the periodic table: organizing the atoms.

Many colleges and universities have made cuts in these programs, often bolstering STEM programs at their expense. It's a situation that has sparked no small amount of impassioned editorials. The headline of a recent article at The Guardian by Alice Speri referenced an 'existential crisis at U.S. universities,' and Speri's reporting features numerous examples of undergraduate and graduate programs facing cuts or outright elimination.

In this paper we investigate whether infant and childhood feeding practices influenced the imbalanced adult sex ratio reported in medieval Europe from historical and osteological evidence. First, we examine hypotheses for the observed imbalanced sex ratios in Europe and the evidence presented to support these hypotheses. We then use stable isotope analysis (δ13C and δ15N) of incremental dentine in 64 first molars from adults at three medieval sites (Aulla, Badia Pozzeveri, and Montescudaio) in north-western Tuscany (11th-15th c. CE).

If you don't know it, Ecclesiastes is a collection of Old Testament verses in which the eponymous title character discourses on the apparent meaninglessness of pleasure, accomplishment, wealth, politics, and life itself in the face of the infinitude of the universe and the absolute perfection of God. It is the source of many of our most cliched phrases, such as there is a time for everything and there is nothing new under the sun.

A professional philosopher outside the academy walls can act as a popularizer (the goal here is to make philosophy more accessible to the general public), an applied ethicist (the major task is to offer an analysis of various specific moral issues that arise within a society), and a public intellectual (I limit this role to questions that have political connotation). Of course, there are overlaps between these roles and they certainly do not exhaust all possible forms of public engagement of a professional philosopher.

Two senior physicians who had read our first book, Rethinking Health Care Ethics (2018), noted that in their clinical work, they inescapably address many ethical problems, large and small, on the spot, in the course of providing patient care. They also observed, however, that the resident bioethicist cautioned, when presented with one of their typical problems, that it would take him days or even weeks to reach a proper solution.

Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists? The Trump administration signed an executive order on Nov. 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets "to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs."

Many philosophers strike me as like Polish apparatchiks in 1983-they turn up to work and do what they did yesterday just because they don't know what else to do, not because they seriously believe in the system they are maintaining. I think it's not been fully appreciated how much of a blow it is to the confidence of the field's youth that scientific ambitions are increasingly abandoned as untenable.

Just before winter break, news broke that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to close its centers for African, Asian, European, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Slavic, Eurasian and East European studies. Though UNC administrators said in a statement that decisions on closures are not finalized, they confirmed they are evaluating centers and institutes as part of a budget-cutting effort in response to state and federal funding changes.

They were well represented among the awards focused on workforce training but were shut out when it came to addressing larger social issues. To be fair, FIPSE wasn't alone in ignoring community colleges. As Karen Stout pointed out this weekend, The Chronicle 's quarter-century forecast drew on 50 experts from across higher education to talk about emerging trends; only one was from a community college.