Dr. Jane C
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janecragun.bsky.social
Dr. Jane C
@janecragun.bsky.social
progressive, struggling optimist, pragmatist, wife, lifetime educator, UT-Austin alum, PhD/tenure-track survivor. Posts my own.
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
If a Psych prof assigns students an essay response paper with explicit guidelines and then flunks a student for turning in a paper that ignores those guidelines but instead makes vague gestures to "the Bible" then THAT IS NOT A VIOLATION OF THE STUDENT'S RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.
OU has put the professor here on administrative leave:
November 30, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
Walmart and McDonald’s are among the top employers of workers who rely on food stamps.

McDonald's CEO raked in $18.2M last year — over 1,000x the company's median employee pay.

Walmart's CEO pocketed $27.4M — 930x the company's median employee pay.

See the problem?
November 30, 2025 at 5:30 PM
good thread overall, but this hits hardest
The ORANGE 🟠 section shows what the tax credit formula is about to change to:

--less generous sliding scale from 100 - 400% FPL

--when you break 400% FPL, you're shit out of luck

#400FPLSOL as
@dmaanderson.bsky.social
says

At 401% FPL, premiums go from $885/mo to $2,184/mo...2.5x higher.
November 30, 2025 at 3:19 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
Tech oligarchs have been scrambling for products to retain dominance since the plateau of the home computer and mobile phone. Today, they're forcing 'AI' garbage on us while pushing for mass surveillance and war products, even if they have to make the wars to service them. We can reject this future.
November 30, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
“Based on the available evidence, the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process.”
“When you allow a machine to summarize your reading, to generate the ideas for your essay, and then to write that essay, you’re not learning how to read, think, or write.“
November 30, 2025 at 11:10 AM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
"Never spread the lie in the headline" should be a hard rule of 21st century journalism.

Research shows that repeating lies helps to spread them, and people read headlines more than they read stories.
News media has to do better with headlines that present false and unverified public health claims.
November 30, 2025 at 1:10 AM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
There. Is. No. Plan.

But the only way to communicate to voters, parents, students, etc. that there is no plan for cutting 20-25% of every R1 university's budget is for our university leaders to be out, loudly & collectively talking about this. The silence is maddening.

bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Just pointing out how grim the funding situation is. If an institution fights you have no idea where future grants are coming from. Harvard won in court and is still telling researchers to cut everything 20% because they don’t know what happens next. Somehow everybody has to make it to Jan 2029
Yes I agree with this. The problem for grant-dependent researchers is that even if they win in court to get their illegally withheld funds, they’re sure to be denied any new grants by these corrupted agencies. 2026-2028 will be a killing field as institutions hemorrhage their research apparatus
November 29, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
The public does not know this. They don't realize how the budget at their beloved 🏈/🏀 State U works, or that their kids won't be able to take courses/labs they need there anymore, bc they won't exist without federal $ & foreign graduate students.

Maybe someone should speak up about this stuff? 🤷‍♂️🧐
Old Man Yells At Clouds

No one wants to hear this message. Not our university leaders. Not the media (I & colleagues have tried & failed repeatedly). Everyone just wants to pretend doing the definition of insanity is going to work this time. Sleepwalking into epic disaster.
August 5, 2025 at 6:16 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
Northwestern’s leaders will likely try to justify their choice to appease fascist extortion with some BS about needing to help researchers get federal funds that were illegally withheld, so it’s important to note that virtually all of the researchers said not to.
So apparently the administrators at Northwestern have caved to the extortionist demands of the Feds. Faculty voted 595-4 AGAINST this measure.
November 29, 2025 at 1:18 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
Australia just recorded zero cervical cancer cases in women under 25 for the first time since records began in 1982. The amazing result of HPV vaccination.
November 28, 2025 at 8:44 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
Columbia and Northwestern are the academic homes to the most prestigious journalism schools in the country and they are the two universities that caved to the Trump administration’s extortion demands that are directly connected to the First Amendment. Just gonna sit with that for a while.
November 29, 2025 at 4:29 AM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
Taiwan recognized the threat of disinformation from china around 2000-ish and engaged in a society-wide cognitive inoculation strategy that focuses on prebunking and media literacy education.

www.foreignaffairsreview.com/home/beyond-...
Beyond Censorship: Taiwan’s Model for Combating Disinformation — FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW
In today's digital and globalised world, disinformation is a greater threat than ever. In 2024, when major democracies held elections, fears of its impact were especially strong. According to the Co...
www.foreignaffairsreview.com
November 28, 2025 at 4:00 PM
So many aging individuals will remain tethered to their jobs simply for the health insurance. Wouldn’t it be nice to retire before Medicare kicks in?
ACA allowed people to start businesses or retire early. Before ACA insurance made those things too expensive for many
November 28, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
Always ask whose crimes are seen as incriminating a whole population and whose aren't. "During 2018–2021, a total of 3,991 female victims of intimate partner homicide were reported to NVDRS...." www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...
Killing is bad, and to that end I'd like to call attention to the dozens killed in small boats in the southern Caribbean by the Trump Administration and the estimated 600,000 who've died of preventable disease and starvation thanks to the administration's destruction of USAID.
November 28, 2025 at 3:56 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
Again, there is no plan for running our universities without federal funding, or foreign students, at scale. But the public has no idea about this because no. one. is. telling. them. this. They expect their kids are still going to be able to do all the things at college in the next 4 years, & well:
The entire business model of R1 public universities rests on 4 revenue sources:

1. Federal grants
2. Private gifts/endowments
3. Tuition (esp. from foreign students)
4. State $

For decades, 📈 in 1-3 offset a secular 📉 in 4. Now, 1 & 3 are being decimated & 4 ain't coming back. The math is clear.
November 27, 2025 at 4:08 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
To put this in context, I was offered a teaching track job in 2023 that had a salary of $55,000.
November 27, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
We're gonna need a truth and reconciliation commission and Nuremberg style trials to reckon with all of this evil, and any Dem candidate for office who shies away from a full reckoning in the name of "moving forward as a nation" can get well and truly fucked
November 27, 2025 at 4:29 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea
November 25, 2025 at 1:57 AM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
"As of right now, there is no compelling evidence, to us, that genAI is useful to promote the development of learning as framed by a model of expertise (i.e., the MDL) or any other scientifically backed model of learning."
#PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky
What does current genAI actually mean for student learning?
Many genAI (generative Artificial Intelligence) enthusiasts and much of the broader public see genAI as a substantial force for good within education.…
doi.org
November 25, 2025 at 1:02 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
“Higher education is a public good. It’s good for democracy, it’s good for the economy. And so it’s worse for all of us if it gets controlled one way or the other from the outside”
AAUP Protests Against Trump Admin’s Higher Ed Compact
Fordham faculty and students attend a protest against Marc Rowan and the Compact for Excellence in Higher Education.
thefordhamram.com
November 24, 2025 at 8:39 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
One of the bragging rights that the US ed system had in the 20th century is that we didn't have education tracks. Essentially, any kid could go to a CC or state school & major in whatever they wanted to (obviously an oversimplification). I fear this aspect of the American dream is dying.
November 23, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
My hot take is that over the next 10 years, we're going to see more emphasis on and investment in the humanities at Ivy League and other fancy schools just as state schools and small privates continue to decimate and even eliminate the humanities.
"While other universities report that the humanities are shrinking, at Berkeley, the opposite is true. The music major is the fastest-growing major on campus. We are finding bigger classrooms because film is exploding. English is back to the numbers we saw 15 years ago. We are hiring" bit.ly/4ohKuOe
"The humanities really are a resource — a confidence for living in our times.” Dean Sara Guyer on the modern utility of humanities degrees
This interview originally appeared on the Division of Arts
bit.ly
November 23, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
Really important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.
One of the bragging rights that the US ed system had in the 20th century is that we didn't have education tracks. Essentially, any kid could go to a CC or state school & major in whatever they wanted to (obviously an oversimplification). I fear this aspect of the American dream is dying.
November 23, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.
November 23, 2025 at 7:13 PM
Reposted by Dr. Jane C
As Matthew Sitman points out — like @zohrankmamdani (and MLK, etc) ‘1984’ author George Orwell was a Democratic Socialist who fought for workers.

He also opposed communism because the two are not the same things and words have meanings.

theconversation.com/orwells-oppo...
November 23, 2025 at 5:30 PM