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Eric Hayot

Eric Hayot

@ehayot.bsky.social

1.3K followers 570 following 220 posts

Teacher (Penn State), writer of books about China and the West, literary worlds, academic style, history of the humanities. New project on the end of aesthetic history.

Arsenal fan, occasional Cassandra.

Art 22%

Sociology 21%

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Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

Where are your "skills" now that you need them, Liam???? WHERE?????

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

You're right--I think I was misdescribing your position in the skeets above.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

But based on the responses so far the most likely form of reaction seems to be a new understanding of the role EdTech is playing in this whole fight, and an interest in responding to that.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

We'll see! My feeling is that many of my colleagues don't believe enough in organizing/unionizing to actually DO it, so maybe this pushes some folks from a generic and useless "belief" into action.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

I think it's much narrower than you're making it out to be. But it's also written the way it is to appeal to ALL our colleagues (inclduign people who respond to varying kinds/levels/types of rhetoric). And Matt and I have also different rhetorical relns to those communities, too.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

But it's not "life itself": it's civil society. And it's not a moral claim but a historical claim--that something called "the humanities" has actually (in exiting history) served as a wedge for a larger attack on civil society (which includes corporate DEI, but also the VRA, AADA etc.). ...

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

...then that's what it is. And we don't disagree along the lines that you lay out here. (END, sorry this is interminable)

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

... and that it's turning folks into aggressive/bad readers. If you think of the goal of that piece as: how can Matt and I write something that helps people (1) understand the institutional/political structure of their professional situation and (2) find paths to action rather than despair...

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

Anyway. I think that one of the effects of the current situation for all of us is that we're being pushed into sides (pro-AI, anti-AI, pro-humanities/anti-humanities) that are dividing people who otherwise like and support each other and are on the same side about 95% of the world. ...

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

...and on a quick reread I don't see much in there that you can cite to make it that. You can pick on the "we are all humanists now" but unless you insist on reading that literally (in which case it's false) then, it's a rhetorical claim, doing a certain kind of work, in a piece aiming to persuade.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

...the case that humanities scholarship has a special role in this fight. Some people might think so; I don't, but it doesn't really matter in any case. I think you're misreading the piece as an expression of the thing that you've been arguing against for a decade. But it's not that...

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

...to defend our institutions (as expressions of social goods, b/c public and open; this is a political belief) against OTHER institutions that have/express/organize other values. Again, this is a place for us to act and change. It has NOTHING to do with scholarship. Nothing in the piece makes...

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

That's why that second half is about EdTech (not AI; I am hostile to Gen LLMs not b/c they are "AI" but b/c they belong to the general EdTech project of primitive accumulation/destruction that aim to turn public goods into private ones). Those of us taking our courses off Canvas are acting ...

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

...but rather that they have been politicized, and that the correct responses are therefore political (organization, unions).

PART 2: the other thing the piece was trying to do was to give people a way to act to defend public education in their actual classrooms, in their role as teachers.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

Goal of the piece was to give faculty in the humanities ways to respond to this political situation in appropriate fields (unions, professional organizations, banding together with K-12, sciences, etc.) so that they can act POLITICALLY. The point is not at all that the humanities are political...

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

It's about the position of the humanities in political conflict today, the role they have played as a wedge to unlock the larger project of dismantling civil society/public education. And the argument of the first half is, the wedge is open, now the larger stakes of the political fight are clear.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 18h

I dunno, Aaron, I feel like this is a real misreading of the piece (since as you know I agree with you, or at least am near you, wrt some of your arguments here re reason/knowledge). Without repeating everything I don't think the piece is a defense of the humanities b/c they're politically good.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 1d

I'm not sure how we came up with that either but I recognize some of me in the rhythm and you especially in the final clauses... It was a total pleasure to write together and to find ways to say and mean together more than what I could have said or meant alone.

Reposted by John R. Hutchinson, Rosemary A. Joyce, Andrew Jacobs

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 1d

Happy to see this, written with the excellent @mattseybold.bsky.social , out in the world. Solidarity to everyone fighting for education and civil society!

www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

The ‘Crisis of the Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing.

All of higher ed now suffers the attacks of politics and technology.

www.chronicle.com

Reposted by Eric Hayot

Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 1d

"fear of an educated proletariat+ resistance to secular, integrated public schooling have been the central motive for defunding public education... public education, the closest thing to a lasting success amid the broader failure of Reconstruction, is in danger."

www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

The ‘Crisis of the Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing.

All of higher ed now suffers the attacks of politics and technology.

www.chronicle.com

Reposted by Dustin Mulvaney, Bruce D. Baker, Bonnie Honig , and 6 more Dustin Mulvaney, Bruce D. Baker, Bonnie Honig, Robert C. Richards, Rebecca Tushnet, Johann N. Neem, Christine Kooi, Eric Hayot, Sarah Brouillette

Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 1d

I wasn’t sure they were going to publish this. So good for them.

The ‘Crisis of the Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing.

All of higher ed now suffers the attacks of politics and technology.

www.chronicle.com

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 7d

Couple name Fregel obv.

Reposted by McKenzie Wark, Eric Hayot

Richard Grusin @rgrusin.bsky.social · 7d

In the mid-1990s, at the time Jay Bolter and I were writing Remediation, articles like this began to appear in the media about the dangers of the Internet for children--not only discussion boards and forums and online predators, but also text-based games like MUDs and MOOs.
1/

Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs.

A majority of teens are interacting with AI companions, and many of their parents have no idea.

Reposted by Philip Nel, Sarah Roberts, Mark Rice , and 2 more Philip Nel, Sarah Roberts, Mark Rice, Eric Hayot, Alexander Starre

Sheila Liming @seeshespeak.bsky.social · 18d

Carnegie Mellon’s literature PhD is being liquidated in favor of “computation,” casualized labor, and AI.

That has profound ramifications for, students, faculty, and program alums like myself.

I wrote it about it (w/ Catherine Evans, a current PhD student).

www.chronicle.com/article/a-co...

Opinion | A Coup at Carnegie Mellon?

The university is replacing the humanities with more computers.

www.chronicle.com

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 25d

Look at this garbage... (from our Provost's office).

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 27d

if you watch Goal Rush on peacock you will see 90 percent of the Arsenal game

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 27d

Adrian if you have access to Peacock the Goal Rush channel is mostly focused on the Arsenal game and doesn't seem to have the USA issues.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 27d

4. Zizek, having run through these options (and a few more; I haven't mentioned capitalism), turns the screw one final time and says, the secret truth of the symbolic is in fact the literal: maybe it's just that these guys are all assholes.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 27d

3. Bersani, rectum/grave, Edelman, no future: the a(i)nus as a site of refusal of reproduction, of temporality, of the self as whole; what the AI gives us is a vision (appealing to some, as in Kurzweil's singularity) of the dissolution of the human entire.

Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 27d

2. AI as/and shit factory: like medieval debates about the gastrointestinal system of Jesus, the question here is whether it is possible for the machine to contain vile matter, or whether its holiness is preserved in digestion: is the shit AI produces the remnant of the good, or identical to it?