If I stumble across a mention of Max Weber and bureaucracy in connection to higher education organizational dynamics I’m compelled to share the quote:

Max Weber described bureaucracy as a form of rational authority in which rules and procedures, rather than personal whims, govern outcomes. We trust institutions, at least in part, because they promise nonarbitrary decisions. But the LMS era has given us something stranger: systems in which the appearance of personal judgment—the professor’s name on the grade—masks a deeper reality in which judgment is distributed across software defaults, drop-down menus, automatic “late penalties,” and back-office interventions.

The professor’s no becomes just one input among many—and not necessarily the decisive one.

When I asked who had changed my grades and why, I did not get a straight answer.

Hat tip to @ayjay whose feed I found this article on:

Emir J. Phillips:

“It was late, the end of an exhausting term at a public university in the Midwest. I logged into our learning-management system (LMS) to answer a routine student email. The gradebook — rows and columns I had populated myself — should have been familiar. But one number was wrong. A student who had failed my course after submitting a final exam composed almost entirely of AI-generated text now showed as having passed. The F I had entered, following my syllabus and the university’s academic integrity policy, had become a D. […] 

Once I understood what had happened to my grades, I did… social.ayjay.org

Anyone able to blend Postman and Huxley is worth sharing IMHO:

This is why, to me, these last weeks have been particularly unmooring, even after the endless chemical train wreck of 2025. The media and technology critic Neil Postman famously argued that the incipient American dystopia wasn’t the blunt overpowering fascism of 1984, but rather Huxley’s intoxicatingly mediated brave new world—we were all on the brink of amusing ourselves to death. It turns out they’ve both arrived, in tandem; the state is booming obvious falsehoods in our face and demanding we accept them, and they are simultaneously being packaged into infotainment to delight the converted and enrage the opposed. It’s a feelie that tells us 2+2=5.

Matt Glassman on Greenland:

The Trump administration has never been fond of NATO, and there are problems with it. But many of those problems are creatures of its success. NATO is like a vaccine; it has worked so well at its core purpose that people now have trouble understanding why it is necessary to continue it. It’s insanely cheap at the price we pay; no one in 1935 would even believe it possible…

…I also doubt that Trump has any intention of a serious trade war over this. It almost seems like the perfect time to go long on a TACO trade. What I think Trump never accounts for is the cost of bluffs. This isn’t poker, where you play hard at the table and when you get up everyone is friends. The whole thing is endogenous, and every action colors every future relationship.¹

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1. Here’s the link to the second part of the quote. ↩︎

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon arguing for what they think the modern humanities are addressing:

The modern humanities address not disordered desires, unruly passions, or the presence of evil but historical changes: industrialization, new technologies, natural science, and capitalism. This permanent relationship to the present links the modern humanities to the temporality of crisis. Whereas the temporality of change or development is ongoing, observable, and slow, that of crisis is decisive, exceptional, and particular. (p. 6)