Research Clippings on Nic Babarskis

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:30:00 -0400

Philip Cohen, reflecting on the intersection of the perverse incentives of ‘publish or perish’ + low consequence editorial accountability + generative AI:

I assume you are appalled at the idea of journals publishing such fabricated results. However, there are a lot of people who would draw a different lesson from this example: Why spend an hour getting this real data, doing some recodes, running the model, and sharing the data and code — when ChatGPT already “knows” the answer? They see the small errors in the table above, and compare the time it took to produce them, and conclude that the ChatGPT approach is much more efficient and almost as good. This is productivity!

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:02:10 -0400

Currently reading: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon 📚

On the growing challenges early modern education reformers claimed (and overpromised) the humanities could address:

The humanities came to stand in for the contradictions and tensions that, as we have traced in this chapter, characterized nineteenth-century liberal education or allgemeine Bildung: tensions between method, research, and ways of knowing on the one hand and ethos, teaching, and questions of how to live on the other. The scholars who helped establish “the humanities” as a distinct institutional domain within the modern university and identified themselves with it gradually claimed (and sometimes gained) a monopoly over these questions and concerns, especially as other scholars (natural and physical scientists in particular) began to regard such questions as outside their own domains (witness Pinker). Yet the academics who did so much to make the humanities possible within universities also inherited all of the contradictions and confusions that beset Diesterweg in the 1830s. (p. 79-80).

My first blush thought on this is that focusing on humanities stakeholders overpromising intellectual unity allows for side-stepping the issue of disenchantment (the loss of “magic” as Max Weber might phrase it). In this chapter they do briefly address figures like Alasdair MacIntyre and Brad Gregory, but brush them aside pretty quickly.

Is the unifying promise they address really a sign of hubris when the pre-Enlightenment world (particularly in Europe) had a unifying meta-narrative that underpinned intellectual life?

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:02:44 -0400

Currently reading: Science, democracy, and the American university : from the Civil War to the Cold War by Andrew Jewett 📚

On the argument that the middle 1800s scientific democrats (a Jewett definition for educational reformers) viewed science as a type of ‘theory-to-practice’ for Christian doctrine:

the first generation of scientific democrats in the universities identified ethics, rather than God’s handiwork in nature, as the point of contact between science and Christianity. They portrayed science as the highest expression of a mode of interpersonal behavior prescribed by God. (p. 34)

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:04:11 -0400

Currently reading: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon 📚

On a central problem identified by German university reformers in the 1830s:

This is what the student experience of “academic freedom” has come to: freedom from all authority, guidance, information. Universities are no longer sacred communities held together through the shared sources of authority and common purpose. They have become modern institutions in which individuals pursue their own purposes, largely unaware of and so uninterested in the desires of others much less those of a community. (p. 70)

A common meme related to current events commentary I see on my various social feeds is to compare the U.S. to Weimar Germany of the 1920s and early 1930s. At least in my realm of U.S. education policy and ideology I think we are more frequently re-litigating the 1820s and 1830s.

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:51:42 -0400

Currently reading: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden 📚

On the compatibility of a fundamentalist worldview and technological progress:

Mystical, metaphorical, and symbolic perceptions of reality have largely disappeared. Instead, most Americans share what sociologist Michael Cavanaugh designates as “empiricist folk epistemology.“ Things are thought best described exactly the way they appear, accurately with no hidden meanings. Such folk epistemology, it happens, is close to what which works best for engineers – straightforward, consistent, factual, with no nonsense. In fact, there are an unusual number of engineers in the creation-science movement. Henry Morris, an engineer himself, connects his engineering standards to his standards for biblical hermeneutics. “Probably for no class of people more than engineers do common sense and reason have their greatest value, and I hope that these qualities have not remained completely undeveloped in me.“ Many of his readers will agree, Moore quickly observed, that such “common sense and reason” must be applied to biblical interpretation. (p. 166)

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:36:11 -0400

Currently reading: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon 📚

On the books central thesis:

…one of our chief claims is that the self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of the project of the humanities.

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:38:05 -0400

Currently reading: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden 📚

On the appeal of secularization in the 19th century U.S. context:

On the one hand, the push to secularize might come from nonreligious people, such as the agnostics, who were convinced that their positivism (using the term loosely) provided a better moral basis for civilization than did Christianity. On the other hand, secularization might be promoted simply as a methodology. That is, various activities might be removed from religious reference not because people sought to promote a non-Christian worldview, but simply because people were convinced that their positivism activities could be better carried out without the distractions of religious considerations, however valuable those considerations might be in other contexts. (p. 141-142)

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:20:11 -0400

Currently reading: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden 📚

Here’s a quote that provides some insight into why a subset of silicon valley moguls are starting to sound like the elders in the fundamentalist church of my adolescence:

Fundamentalist thought is in fact, highly suited to one strand of contemporary culture–the technological strand. Unlike theoretical science or social science, where questions of the supernatural raise basic issues about the presuppositions of the enterprise, technological thinking does not wrestle with such theoretical principles. Truth is a matter of true and precise propositions that, when properly classified and organized, will work. Fundamentalism fits this mentality because it is a form of Christianity with no loose ends, ambiguities, or historical developments. Everything fits neatly into a system. It is revealing, for instance, that many of the leaders of the creation – science movement are an applied sciences or engineering. (p. 119)

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 13:27:14 -0400

Reading Marsden again today and this passage has me thinking about all the “is revival happening” discourse in my feeds recently:

One other chief consequence of the lack of an institutional church base, and of the declining role of the traditional denominations, is that evangelicalism’s vaunted challenge to the secular culture becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The movement depends on free enterprise and popular appeal. To some extent conservative churches grow because they promise certainty in times of uncertainty, and the name of the old-time gospel. Yet, with a few institutional restraints on what message may legitimately be proclaimed, the laws of the market invite mixes of the gospel with various popular appeals. So the evangelical challenges to the secular “modern mind“ are likely to be compromised by the innovative, oversimplifications and concessions to the popular spirit of the age. Hence, as is often the case in church history, the advance of the gospel is bound up with the advance of secularization within the church. Perhaps this conjunction is inevitable in a fallen world. The tares will grow with the wheat. (p. 82)

I think one can make an argument that the “spirit of our age” is fierce nationalism: we collectively define and then fiercely protect the borders/boundaries that cohesively give shape to whom we extend solidarity. The dynamic Marsden frames above is why I think conservative culture-warriors are so quick to align revival with their sociopolitical program. They see themselves as “gospel” guardians, but their gospel is more about appealing to a “god-and-country” milieu that will buy the arena tickets, books, advertised products that sponsor their content product, and register to vote for their preferred candidates. Tares and wheat indeed.

A take on Artificial General Intelligence I found informative and helpful in framing all the discourse around the term

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:53:00 -0400

Robin Sloan arguing Artificial General Intelligence is already here while giving a big picture framing of the whole discourse around LLMs and their implications that I found pretty compelling:

The key word in Artificial General Intelligence is General. That’s the word that makes this AI unlike every other AI: because every other AI was trained for a particular purpose and, & even if it achieved it in spectacular fashion, did not do anything else. Consider landmark models across the decades: the Mark I Perceptron, LeNet, AlexNet, AlphaGo, AlphaFold … these systems were all different, but all alike in this way…

If you appeared in a puff of smoke before the authors of that paper, just after publication — a few months before half of them cleaved from OpenAI to form Anthropic — and carried with you a laptop linked through time to the big models of 2026, what would their appraisal be ? There’s no doubt in my mind they would say: Wow, we really did it ! This is obviously AGI!

…Pile up the tendencies: the Bay Area is the land of the overthinkers; a linguistic technology invites endless rumination about both language & intelligence; it’s more fun to define a cool new standard than go along with a boring old one; the feeling of every creative project, upon completion, is the same: It’s not quite how I imagined it … None of this should prevent us from using plain language to acknowledge an obvious capability.

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Still reading Marsden today. Here’s an observation about how class dynamics may influence theological commitments I appreciated:

…a general point in modern church life: the more well-to-do a group, the less demanding its requirements for sanctification. Liberal Protestants, as a group, were better off socially than any other body of Protestants. For them virtue was found in the best developments of modern civilization and in their own lives. Traditional denominationalists stood somewhere in the middle, having more ambivalent attitudes toward how much of the world had to be renounced in order properly to live the Christian life. Near the far end of the spectrum were the holiness groups, speaking of much radical separation from worldliness but having, in a material sense, less of the world to renounce. (p. 42)

Perhaps its not surprising that the fundamentalists saw the mainline liberals as squishes…they were after all basking in the fruit of the social and economic advances wrought by the industrial revolution.

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 23:10:48 -0400

Nilay Patel on Ring cameras as objects of mass surveillance:

I have this theory about just what is happening in our politics right now–It was, I think about it a lot–Right now, we are convinced, culturally convinced, that our actions do not affect other people. You just see it everywhere.

You see it in the rise in measles cases. Why? Because we’ve decided our actions don’t affect other people, even though they very clearly do. Like all over the place.

And Ring cameras are an incredible example of this, where the cameras on my house are fine. They’re fine. And I can turn them on and off and whatever. But they are, to your point, taking video of you. And so my cameras can invade your rights, but me turning that on has no impact on me.

So, here’s this button in, in an app distributed by Amazon, on the hardware that Amazon owns, where you have a moral quandary: Should I affect someone else’s rights? And I would say that American culture in 2026 does not equip people to think about that well.

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 13:20:00 -0400

I love a good one-webpage site: You should leave substack

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:37:08 -0400

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
Alan Jacobs https://social.ayjay.org/2026/01/22/emir-phillips-it-was-late.html

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 23:18:00 -0400

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.

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:22:36 -0400

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

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

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:32:25 -0400

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)

Wed, 28 May 2025 22:19:33 -0400

Taking a Python Intro course this summer and turns out if you need to code late into the evening Olde Pine is a great companion:

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This Rufo take on the Department of Ed clearly states the ideological project at play.

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 12:39:36 -0400

Pulling this series of quotes from an interview between Ross Douthat and Christopher Rufo. I was listening as a means of trying to understand the justification for all the pain being wrought upon the educational bureaucracy. This is such an ideologically driven take on what a government bureaucracy is and how it functions that I don’t know where to start with common ground or compromise.

It’s the worst sort of cavalier slash and burn policymaking:

Rufo: Here’s the problem, though: It’s very easy to cut external contracts. It’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution and the permanent bureaucracy of that institution. I know for a fact that at the Department of Education, replacing the management within the building does not really replace the broader culture… I just think that there has to be a kind of binary choice, agency by agency. Can this agency be reformed or can this agency only be abolished or dismantled to the maximum extent permissible by law? I think the Department of Education is then in the latter camp. I think the F.B.I. could maybe be reformed. Other agencies can be perhaps reformed. But the Department of Education in my view is beyond reform. You have to spin off, liquidate, terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law. All while maintaining your political viability and your statutory compliance for those things that are essential, required by law, and that are politically popular. You always want to maintain the popularity, but can you take those things away ——… Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things.So we have to figure out what we can do. Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can’t do those things, then what do we have to shut down? Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy.

I don’t know what sort of objective standard you use to ascertain the level of “wokeness” for any bureaucratic agency. The general gist under the current administration seems to be how quick they are to implement structural change that favors the incumbent president–jurisprudence or constitutionality be damned…

Good policy-making is NEVER a binary choice. It is always a sequence of calculated, often provisional, frequently complicated series of balancing acts that requires an informed perspective on national history, the law, the current cultural moment, and domain expertise of the subject matter (e.g. education, law enforcement, national defense, energy, land management). You can’t summarize the bureaucracy’s value and operation in a pithy Tiktok video, podcast interview, or scintillating video essay–it takes decades of usually quite and monotonous work to see a positive social transformation. That is partially what is so gut-wrenching about what I am seeing happen to the Department of Education–and the federal bureaucracy more generally–I may not always agree with our bureaucratic leaders, but to see the centuries of institutional knowledge and domain expertise demolished with glee or a shrug fills me with dread.

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 13:51:00 -0400

Happy birthday to my undergraduate alma mater Wheaton College (IL) which was chartered on February 15 of 1860.

I believe Jonathan Blanchard’s–the first president–reflections on the purposes of higher education still hold relevance in our thoroughly disenchanted era:

“A sound and thorough education is of priceless value,” Blanchard wrote. “Yet an education without moral and religious excellence, an enlightened intellect with a corrupt heart, is but a cold gas-light over a sepulcher, revealing, but not warming the dead.”

This is a thought provoking little profile of a small college fighting to keep the lights on.

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 00:08:00 -0400

This is a fun and thought provoking profile of a small college. How are these institutions going to survive? Uncommon College has some thoughts.

Is there something uncommon happening at Unity Environmental University?

Colleges that fail often fail because they attempt to appeal to everyone. In so doing, they appeal to no one because they cannot sell themselves as having any distinction. They will continue to spend themselves into infamy by trying to satisfy every possible interest. Eventually, adding programming and offering discounts on tuition catches up to you. In the past decade, Unity took a hard look at itself and decided it was good at two things: environmental programs and online education. They decided that those were the only two things they were going to do.

Welcome to Thinking About Colleges and Universities

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 17:15:00 -0400

Hello there.

What

My name is Nicolas Babarskis and this site serves as a public journal of my thinking on colleges and universities. I have 14 years of experience working in postsecondary education settings, primarily in student support services, and for the last 3 years I have been pursuing a PhD in Higher Adult and Lifelong Education from Michigan State University.

Most of my writing topics of interest are associated with how bureaucracy, rationalization, and broader socio-political dynamics influence college or university behavior. So if you are a fan of social theory, education policy, and organizational behavior, this might be site worth following.

Why

Why keep a public journal? Accountability.

I find that I write more sharply and with more focus if I know that someone else may engage with it. As a doctoral student I spend large portions of my day in my own head and at some point I need to put those ideas to paper, whether for a class assignment or for the furtherance of research projects. Posting here is a means of transforming some of that head material into “paper” material.

How

I plan to post at least once a week on a postsecondary education topic. Sometimes it may be as simple as a quote from another author, or it could be a more extensive reflection on a particular theory, research method, or scholarly discourse I’m contending with.

So What

I’m a U.S. citizen and I believe our educational institutions are a major organ that sustains and promotes our liberal ideals of representative democracy. I think about colleges and universities because I also think a lot about the state of U.S. civic institutions and what their health might mean for civil rights and collective prosperity.

A pluralistic society is difficult to sustain without our diverse ecosystem of educational institutions. Colleges and universities also play an important role in the prosperity of our nation through the original research they provide. They contribute to our cultural landscape through the psychological and social development they cultivate in their participants. If you too think that colleges and universities are important on the national or global stage then this might be a place to think with me about how we ensure their health and flourishing.