Author, critic. 🌱🦋🕊️ Olson Chancellor’s Distinguished Chair of English; Fellow, Institute for Ethnic Studies; Director, Center for Great Plains Studies.

Lincoln, NE
Joined July 2011
“A stunning work of the imagination—a brilliant evocation of the way war, exile, and freedom defined the Cuban nation from the start, and how the wounds of the early republic haunt us still.…A spectacular achievement.” —Ana Menéndez bookshop.org/p/books/one-bri…
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Humanists should be snobby about the fact that they are stewarding a tradition that stretches back thousands of years rather than doing busy work involving little technical puzzles. Instead they find dumb “research” niches to fill because STEM gave them an inferiority complex.
Replying to @jennfrey
I'm convinced that the R1 model will always disfavor the humanities and liberal learning and that we need to be very savvy and strategic in how we understand ourselves and our place within that model. Very few humanists agree with me, I've found.
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Loving the new issue of Prairie Schooner (I have an essay in it!), and just finished reading this haunting gem of a short story by Andrew Bertaina. @andrewbertaina @TheSchooner #fiction #shortstories #litmags
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Joy Castro retweeted
Today I take the highly controversial position that in fact 4 year universities are supposed to be about education, not football, sex, drinking, or hiring lots of administrators, and they've lost the plot. dilanesper.substack.com/p/co…
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Joy Castro retweeted
Don’t be misled. This is not about jobs or financial accountability. That’s a rhetorical veneer. This is about reshaping the culture. It’s about reserving the arts as a private luxury for the wealthy. It’s about depriving those most in need of the care & education they deserve.
Artists, musicians, those who teach, those who think about the spiritual life, & those who help those most in need. All of the above who do not come from family wealth. Those are the ones this administration wants to crush. It wants to crush their contributions out of society.
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Joy Castro retweeted
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Just a Nebraskan who loves California & its wonderful people
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Joy Castro retweeted
Now would be a good time to reacquaint yourself with Elizabeth Schambelan's writing on fraternities, male bonding, gang rape, and the relationship between hazing and counterinsurgency 🧵:
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“A first-grade district lesson plan presented to teachers called ‘My Friend AI’ suggested teachers use language like, ‘AI is like a smart helper that can learn and help us do things.’”
My latest investigation: Inside Google's AI Push Into American Schools "It Slowed My Thinking Down." Students are becoming academically and emotionally dependent on AI, in large part thanks to Google's push in schools. Gift link: wsj.com/tech/ai/google-ai-ge…
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what if the world was made of pudding
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Please don't send us AI-generated stories. This age of taking credit for something you didn't do is such a pain. We will now have Zoom calls with all writers we consider accepting. And we will delay payment to avoid paying bad actors. This bullshit.
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Another think piece from the collaborationist wing of the professoriate.
The head of the philosophy department at Williams College downplays the pedagogical value of writing: “What if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought? The evidence that supports this belief is thin at best. Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement.”
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Don’t be misled. This is not about jobs or financial accountability. That’s a rhetorical veneer. This is about reshaping the culture. It’s about reserving the arts as a private luxury for the wealthy. It’s about depriving those most in need of the care & education they deserve.
Artists, musicians, those who teach, those who think about the spiritual life, & those who help those most in need. All of the above who do not come from family wealth. Those are the ones this administration wants to crush. It wants to crush their contributions out of society.
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Artists, musicians, those who teach, those who think about the spiritual life, & those who help those most in need. All of the above who do not come from family wealth. Those are the ones this administration wants to crush. It wants to crush their contributions out of society.
Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/NmmAzhf
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Direct link to program here: library.miami.edu/chc/new-di…
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Pleased to announce the program for New Directions in Cuban Studies at @umchc, Oct 21-23. Promising new research being presented by up-and-coming scholars. Keynote by @Lillian_Guerra. Register and join us if you're in Miami! mailchi.mp/miami.edu/librari…
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Joy Castro retweeted
Very happy to see my essay on Rabindranath's flowers in Plant Humanities (Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University Press). On 'phooler bhasha' and 'phooler itihash' -- the language of flowers and the history of flowers: hup.harvard.edu/books/978088…
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