Pavel Iosad

I challenge you to read this article by the ex-convenor of Edinburgh Council’s Transport and Environment Committee and find even slight acknowledgment of how unsafe roads suppress cycling levels and how the city wasted the opportunity of Covid to change things for the better.

Gaps in the network (George Street? Meadows-Canal?). Schemes compromised by not reallocating space away from private cars (Leith Walk?). Massive road schemes with no active travel infra (North Bridge?). Endless ‘consultation’ over decisive action (Corstorphine? East Craigs? Braids? Silverknowes?)

Fantastic bookshop find: a Latin textbook in Welsh, complete with glossary and a guide to spotting Latin borrowings in the modern language.

Really galling that the Principal accuses staff of ‘weaponising’ students when the revealed preference of the University’s management has consistently been that they prioritise breaking the union over things avoiding students graduating with empty pieces of paper.

Also really quite demeaning of him to say that students support staff because they’re young and therefore anti-establishment. He should try coming to the picket lines, where we’ve had some interesting (and sometimes difficult) conversations with students genuinely torn over how to handle this.

Correct — great point in a good thread.

Cf.

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A further observation: the response to the news is widespread horror and solidarity (which we’re grateful for), but it’s also really interesting to observe the gap between how this looks like from ‘the inside’ vs the outside.

It’s really bad and dangerous but also not irreversible if management ever come to their senses. Which brings me to: management! Appalling as the internal comms have been (many colleagues are finding out from the papers!), the uni has clearly put zero thought in managing the external messaging

A further observation: the response to the news is widespread horror and solidarity (which we’re grateful for), but it’s also really interesting to observe the gap between how this looks like from ‘the inside’ vs the outside.

For instance, they’ve cut all ‘Language + English Language’ but not ‘Language + Linguistics’ degrees, but in practice they’re the same degree, different only in the balance of course choices on one side. There’s less demand for EngLang across the board, so numbers are low, but where is the saving?

A further observation: the response to the news is widespread horror and solidarity (which we’re grateful for), but it’s also really interesting to observe the gap between how this looks like from ‘the inside’ vs the outside.

So this Defence Universities Alliance thing… we do actually need defence capacity but it’s a bit insane that somehow the defence sector still has nothing to do with languages, area studies, history and suchlike. Complete loss of institutional memory. This used to be widely recognised!

Among the degrees that have been cut at Edinburgh are Persian Studies (and Persian and Middle Eastern Studies), and Africa and International Development. If only there was any need for specialists in any of these areas in the current state of affairs.

What does it say about HE that its about-to-be-busted business model has been facilitating the production of plausible-looking text?

So this Defence Universities Alliance thing… we do actually need defence capacity but it’s a bit insane that somehow the defence sector still has nothing to do with languages, area studies, history and suchlike. Complete loss of institutional memory. This used to be widely recognised!

Just wild that this is coming out at the same time as the British Adademy’s report on the continued shrinking of languages in UKHE.

The thread is entirely correct in that there aren’t any good options that anyone with the power to change things is remotely interested in.

I suppose if I had to guess what’s coming next for tertiary education is that we get a bifurcation where the Morlocks are given Big School (which will be bad because no-one’s interested in making school any good, either) and a radically smaller group of Eloi get to rule the wreckage of HE-as-was

The telling bit is that net zero or trans rights can be framed as ‘culture war’ issues but migration is just bloodless policy, number go up/down. This is a worldview where migrants don’t really count as people with dignity.