Great news that #AndrewFeinstein is going to stand against genocide complicit #Starmer in the Holborn/StPancras constituency in the UK General Election this year
Here an excellent interview with Maya Wind, author of “Towers of Ivory and Steel”, giving a really introduction to the central role that Israel’s universities play in advancing its settler-colonial agenda - right across engineering, middle eastern studies and archaeology, and through the settlements and geographies they themselves bring with them. Hugely illuminating, and made me reflect on complicity of all universities.
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
#AcademicVenting The crisis in HE (higher education) is so tangible it’s making headline news; our dangerous exposure to changes in migration/visa regimes and therefore whims of government ever more apparent.
Who is completely silent on all this (as fas as I know), as on everything else? Starmer, Labour. It would make a massive difference, and would work for them. But no. Everyone beholden to the same - imagined! - anti-woke, anti-immigration, anti-university voter.
#AcademicVenting Anyway, here a nice comment piece by Polly Toynbee
“Tories and their pollsters see as clear as day that the growth in highly educated citizens, above the OECD average, is a social and political revolution not in their favour: the more educated people are, the less likely they are to vote for what John Stuart Mill called “the stupidest party”.”
@Roadwarrior29 i hope so but with so many universities (including my own) on the brink of collapse all this talk now affects international student decisions to come to UK this September and a significant drop there will be disastrous for some HEIs.
Brixham, a Devon harbour town, has been struck by an illness caused by a microscopic parasite - cryptosporidium - in the water!
About 16,000 households and businesses in the Brixham area have been told by South West Water (SWW) not to use their tap water for drinking without boiling and cooling it first.
Not an expert but it does strike me as symptomatic of the state of our water companies and water system. #Water#Sewage#ukpolitics
@spytfyre 😊 Thank you! The article is really only about Devon and South West Water, no general comments at all, that was just me commenting. I do fully appreciate that using UK for things that don’t apply is Scotland is frustrating and wrong - i just can’t quite being myself to add “England” or “English”, that feels wrong, too! As your comment is there, and since I simply said “our”, I think i will just leave it. Need to have coffee, too! 😊
@alx yes!! I was really struck by that too. Also reminded of when there were fires in Greece a couple of years ago and all the articles focused on tourists complaining about their evacuation not being handled well. Not quite the same I know, but misplaced tourist-centring in both.
@Unknowable THANK YOU. I haven’t quite finished it yet but when j have i will post it again - as many people as possible should watch it! What I particularly appreciate is that i knew bits and pieces (about #Christofascists for example), but this makes the whole phenomenon of evangelical zionism so much clearer. I hadn’t heard of Christians United for Israel (CUNI), nor of systematic evangelical conversions in the military. And wasn’t so aware of centrality of #Armageddon in all this. Scary.
@kim_harding yes! News articles say “scientists believe” so often, and it always annoys me. They don’t believe - they tell us what all the most recent research says!