Scott MacKenzie

I’m not finding that analogy super comforting, tho

Gender affirming care. We have to call gender affirming care by the right name. Always

literary studies is no longer that kind of boutique. Our object of study is now literacy, which includes culture, media, representation, language models, etc. When you think about it, and as your own career attests, information science is really a subfield of English😜

Oh, not to worry about that. I have said way too many shady things on your feeds. I guess where I took a big tangent from your point was about the object of study. Literature qua literature is a pretty stable object if you're studying it for literary effects, etc. What I didn't say so well is that

important not to confuse your good fortune with a kind of Olympian perspective that literary scholars and practitioners cannot or will not participate in. I humbly suggest that interdisciplinary solidarity and respect is the best option for everyone in higher ed (except B-skool bros, I guess)

you didn’t intend to come across all Allan Bloom, but it does matter, which is why I sometimes have to jump up and down and have tantrums about some of your pronouncements. You are lucky to be able to reshape your own career and modes of scholarship—and you deserve your success—but it’s

woke-ism serves illiberal and even authoritarian kinds of intellectual rigidity, homogeneity, and narrowness. It’s grade A horse-shit, of course, but its consequences are very harmful for us and higher ed in general. That’s why I object to your misguided comparison between disciplines. I know

component of the discipline. For the most part we have tended to catch it from our detractors because we’re understood to be too radical and relativist and politicized and impossible to pin down. But if course that complaint has been folded into the established tradition of claiming that all our

seem like a department that insists on fostering genuine literacy, critique, and creative practice must be fundamentally conservative, but that’s a bad read. The theoretical and practical features of our work are continually reconceived and transformed as an intrinsic

Are talking about would look like. My department works very hard on anticipating and responding to the conditions that affect our objects of analysis and the professional environments that students will be heading into. In the case of something as stupid and destructive as AI, it might

That’s fine and all, but whether or not you’re aware that you’re dunking on literary studies, you’re trafficking in pretty silly generalizations. English departments are, in methodological terms, neither homogeneous nor static. I wonder what you imagine the kind of transformation you

centrist trap of viewing literary studies as ideologically driven and fundamentally illiberal. No-one says that math departments need to reinvent their relationship to numbers every week. You're Also, you specifically may not simply substitute moral for political or vice versa.

Yes, but it's not different, because we're a discipline, not a vocational program. We continually attend to the job market, such as it is and our bedrock connection to literacy and critique means we are always working with and/or against what's coming next. Please don't fall into the reactionary-

blame for the decline of higher ed. We're paying attention to our situation at least as carefully and thoughtfully as any discipline, at least partly because we're getting so consistently harassed about the same kinds of thing that you're cherry-picking. Please do not

Nope nope nope. Stop perpetuating that reactionary centrist stuff about literary studies being abstract and ethereal and disconnected from reality. We do literacy. Nobody is going after math departments for being hidebound about numeracy. A narrow patch of the humanities is getting most of the

your prejudices with you, which might make you a tourist rather than traveler.

The literary object is constantly reconstructed, but that's not relativism; it's language. Please also retract your very silly conflation of moral and political. Change is by no means invisible from within an given discipline and your interdisciplinary travels are admirable, but you're bringing

No Mr Ted. That is very incorrect. The version of literary studies that fixes its object in serene precision died long long ago. Language models didn't emerge to show us our errors; we have been telling you all along that language is, as Barthes said (in the 1960s) a tissue of quotations.

Thanks, Mr Mansplain!

Go watch Community, season 6, episode 2. It’s terrible, but somebody is going to have to make an edit that we can post on BSky about how upper admin’s adoption of AI looks from outside of upper admin

Touché!

Uh, nope. Peter Thiel gives lectures on the anti-Christ; Ilya Sutskever leads “feel the AGI” chants; Marc Andreesen goes in with New Founding to set up a christian nationalist enclave. They went way past functional ideology. Now they do metaphysical theology with their own selves on thrones

Awesome. The moron who destroyed WVU is now helping Bari Weiss set up a reactionary hothouse in Austin and charging people money for instructions on how to blow the Turmp administration. And he has time to castigate us for our arrogance. Fail up, dipshit

Photo of frozen pizza box: "Flaky and Buttery CROISSANT CRUST"

This thing appears to be real -- I photographed it myself, promise. When it appears in pretentious New York Bakeries, will it be named the Crozza? No! It will be named the Pissant. Copyright!

Scott R. MacKenzie
May we also please note that the first paragraph suggests that, 1. students are not receiving guidance from instructors, and 2. what Grammerly provides is "guidance." Fucking fucking fuck off

Dear faculty, we have inserted a deadly neurotoxin into your breakfast. But don't worry, we can neutralize the toxin with our new product that you probably should purchase.

Hi Scott, Thousands of Ole Miss students use Grammarly independently to support their writing. While this reflects strong demand, it also means only some students receive consistent writing guidance. This leaves faculty managing wide skill gaps and uneven expectations amid growing concerns about AI use. One of the most common concerns I hear from faculty is whether students are genuinely writing their own work or using AI to bypass the process. Authorship, a first-of-its-kind tool from Grammarly, addresses this directly. It provides a transparent record of how a document was written without relying on detection algorithms or guesswork. Authorship is already in use across R1 institutions and recently won the Breakthrough Technology Award. I'd love to explore whether this could support your goals this academic year. Would you be open to a brief conversation?

Can you believe the absolute fucking grift of these people?

Uh, hi scott, we made a problem for you and now we have a great deal for you, where you can pay to make the problem go away. 🤦‍♀️🤦🤦‍♀️🤦🤦‍♀️🤦

Let me help you with that headline: "Two Bonkers, Far-Right Organizations Have a Political Strategy to Mainstream Their Fucking Gonzo Fascisticism and We're Helping to Legitimate Them. Bless"

They Have a Common Criticism of Higher Ed. And They’re Arguing. The Manhattan Institute and the Heterodox Academy disagree on whether higher ed can reform itself.

Jeezus, Chronicle. Let me help you with your headline: "Two Bonkers, Far-Right Organizations Have a Political Strategy to Mainstream Their Fucking Gonzo Fascisticism and We're Helping to Legitimate Them. Bless"