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skort.bsky.social
Scott Ross, animate candy corn
@skort.bsky.social
290 followers 550 following 220 posts
lecturer, wustl | africanist anthro | humanitarianism, infrastructure, war, media, sound | gwu phd | hella left | he/him | arizonan in exile | wants to be your friend
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skort.bsky.social
Some good news that shows faculty can still shape the university when they move and act together. This move would have consolidated AFAS, WGSS, Global Studies, American Studies, Jewish Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and Education
ArtSci dissolves task force considering departmental reorganization after resignation of task force members
October 22, 2025 at 12:59 PM
skort.bsky.social
The WashU Faculty Senate Council (elected representatives across the whole university) have issued a statement emphatically opposing the Compact after their meeting with the Provost and the Chancellor's statement yesterday:
The Faculty Senate Council (FSC) met with Provost West yesterday and shared with great passion the deep concerns and strong opposition the Faculty Senate has to the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. FSC received hundreds of emails, text messages, phone calls and office visits from Faculty Senate members, articulating the serious threats the Compact poses to academic freedom, educational integrity and scientific inquiry. No university should strive for or be given preferential treatment by our federal government in exchange for compliance with one political ideology. No institution can maintain its integrity and stay true to its values, including freedom of speech and respect for the human dignity of all, by capitulating to the untenable demands embedded in the Compact. Consequently, following the meeting with Provost West, the FSC unanimously decided to express our strong opposition to WashU signing the Compact. We respect Chancellor Martin’s intent to engage in dialogue and recognize the importance of maintaining open and transparent communication with our federal partners. However, we believe continued ambiguity about Wash U’s position risks undermining confidence and clarity within our community. We call on Chancellor Martin and the Board of Trustees to join us in unequivocally rejecting the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, or any similar actions that compromise or threaten the mission, values, and independence of WashU and higher education more broadly. The FSC stands ready to work in partnership with University leadership, and in solidarity with faculty, students, and staff across higher education, to defend our shared principles of academic freedom, integrity, and institutional independence. The Faculty Senate Council of Washington University
October 21, 2025 at 6:52 PM
skort.bsky.social
new zine circulating campus just hours after the Chancellor stated that WashU is engaged in "dialogue" with Trump admin about future of higher ed
Trump's Compact for higher education. What it is and why you should resist it Zine pages explaining that the Compact is "the Trump White House's attempt to reshape higher ed by offering preferential treatment to universities that agree with government demands." The demands include banning DEI in hiring and admissions, viewpoint diversity, cutting programs critical of conservative ideas, bans of disruptive protest, defining gender based on biology, and limiting international student admissions. No colleges have agreed to the Compact. MIT, Brown, Penn, USC, UVA, Dartmouth have publicly rejected it. WashU was invited to join the Compact on Friday. On Monday, Oct 20, WashU Chancellor Andrew Martin wrote to the university community stating that WashU had agreed to join conversations about higher education because "it is important to have a seat at the table." The table is rigged. The Trump admin is attempting to dismantle higher education and purge universities of critical thought, challenging analysis, and dissenting voices. The Trump admin is attempting to exert federal control over university policy, personnel decisions, and curricula, violating every tenet of academic freedom and free inquiry. Chancellor Martin wants to engage in dialog - it's not dialog if the terms are already set. The Compact is clear about interfering in higher education. We refuse any engagement with an administration that seeks to undermine higher education. We must reject Trump's vision for academia.
October 20, 2025 at 9:52 PM
skort.bsky.social
Great and immediate response from our local AAUP chapter, alongside those from across the country. sites.wustl.edu/aaup/ "The alleged offer is pure political interference in higher education, and it blatantly opposes the mission of the University."
The compact characterizes efforts to improve diversity as discriminatory, a continuation of other efforts to undermine the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It makes other demands about admission, like requiring the use of standardized tests and limiting the admission of international students, that directly flout the shared governance rights of faculty. It redefines sex and gender according to rigid binary divisions incompatible with science and our value of human respect; forcing members of the University to accept these definitions in their work and medical practice would violate our academic freedom as well as standards of care. Finally, it instructs universities to ensure a “vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus.” Given recent government actions to suppress the expression of ideas with which it disagrees, such as arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty members for Constitutionally protected speech, we can only interpret this as a thinly-veiled attempt to restrict academic freedom to those who agree with the current government, defeating the very purpose of academic freedom and of higher education as a whole.
October 18, 2025 at 2:43 PM
skort.bsky.social
Gross.
White House Meets With New Colleges About ‘Compact’ After Rejections Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Kansas and Arizona State are invited to weigh in after MIT, others turn down proposal
October 18, 2025 at 2:35 PM
skort.bsky.social
This essay is a really succinct and important read. The manufactured crisis in Chicago is an attempt to use state violence to justify more state violence to oppress whole cities, breaking every norm about democracy. www.thebulwark.com/p/emergency-...
We should say what is going on here in clear and unsentimental terms: The president instructed federal agents to use extralegal violence against both immigrants and citizens in Chicago. When the citizenry of Chicago objected to these violent acts, the president used their First Amendment demonstrations of protest as pretext to deploy the Texas National Guard into the city, so that armed soldiers from Texas could impose the president’s will on the people of Illinois.
October 8, 2025 at 4:52 PM
skort.bsky.social
"There is no crisis in Chicago that requires the National Guard. To the extent that there is civil instability in Chicago it has been caused by Trump’s surge of federal agents into the city and their lawless assault on the citizens of Chicago." Some examples:
September 12: ICE agents shoot and kill Chicago resident Silverio Villegas González in Franklin Park. ICE claimed that González was shot after he “seriously injured” an ICE agent. But bodycam footage shows the same agent immediately after the encounter describing his injuries as “nothing major.” September 30: Some 300 federal agents raid an apartment building in the dead of night. Some rappel from a Black Hawk helicopter positioned over the building. They ransack apartments and detain not only children but several U.S. citizens October 4: CPB agents shoot an unarmed woman, Marimar Martinez. They claim that she provoked them by ramming their vehicle with her car. Martinez’s lawyer tells the Chicago Sun-Times that there is bodycam footage that shows an agent turning left into Martinez’s vehicle, after which an agent says, “Do something, bitch.” The agent then gets out of the vehicle and shoots Martinez. October 7: A masked federal agent is caught on camera aiming a weapon at a resident who is reportedly doing nothing more than documenting his activity.
October 8, 2025 at 4:46 PM
skort.bsky.social
Shit just comes coming
WashU Med labeled ‘DEI Indoctrination Training Camp,’ DOJ investigation requested | On Sept. 15, 2025, America First Legal (AFL) filed a complaint against WashU School of Medicine for its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practices, asking the Department of Justice to issue an investigation into the medical school’s alleged “illegal DEI practices.”
October 2, 2025 at 9:06 PM
skort.bsky.social
Another must-read response to Ezra Klein's "Charlie Kirk did politics the right way" argument, this from @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social in @bostonreview.bsky.social on political correctness, stigma, and shame as fundamental to living together.
The challenge for Klein and his fellow travelers is to specify what sort of ground rules could make life livable and social situations manageable for such a wide array of people whose values, commitments, and interests differ so sharply—that is, on terms other than various sorts of segregation or the most naked forms of domination and subjugation—if not precisely “social shame and cultural pressure,” now contemptuously referred to as “political correctness” or “wokeness.” We might more accurately call it exactly the “civility” that centrists like Klein otherwise pretend to champion, even while they seek to hollow out even this meager social protection of its efficacy. These codes of neighborliness or of common decency are, in other words, the bare minimum for us to exist peacefully as profoundly different people who nevertheless share the same time and place. Common decency, then, stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association, as Russell exemplified. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply.
September 23, 2025 at 7:00 PM
skort.bsky.social
Oh nothing to see here, just a Missouri U.S. Senator spouting white and Christian nationalist rhetoric about how America is only for descendants of "Western" "European" "settlers" and non-white immigrants are not American: www.dailysignal.com/2025/09/02/s...
They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny. If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all. But we know that’s not true. America is not a “universal nation.” It is something distinctive, unique, and real—unlike any other place or people in the history of mankind.
September 23, 2025 at 6:46 PM
skort.bsky.social
Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way: www.404media.co/charlie-kirk...
This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this. Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,”and a “School Board Watchlist” for nearly a decade.
September 11, 2025 at 8:46 PM
skort.bsky.social
my AI policy might be a little agro 🤷‍♂️
This course includes writing assignments. The point of these assignments is to assess your understanding of the field, the ideas and concepts covered in the course, and your own individual thinking in response to the prompt. While you may use tools such as spellchecks, you are not permitted to use any AI tools to plan, organize, or write your assignments for this class. In addition to pedagogical reasons, generative AI has been shown to falsify information, draw from invalid sources, violate privacy concerns, exacerbate mental health problems, literally make you dumber, and be harmful to the environment. Maybe don’t use it, generally. Definitely don’t use it for this course. The use of generative AI in this course will be considered an academic integrity violation and may result in grade penalties or conduct referrals. If you are looking to check or improve your writing, consider visiting the Writing Center Links to an external site.. Sharing with a peer and coming to office hours are also encouraged. Don’t use AI.
August 22, 2025 at 4:45 PM
skort.bsky.social
www.studlife.com/news/2025/08...
"I know what you did last summer" written on a piece of paper. Student Life article "WashU rolls back and alters DEI-related content across its websites" by Riley Herron and Elizabeth Stump | August 13, 2025 Over the past few months, WashU has removed content related to its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs from various University websites. Although some DEI-related content remains, websites of several University offices, departments, and schools have edited descriptions of DEI initiatives, deleted links to pages focused on DEI efforts, and erased content promoting WashU’s efforts towards equity.
August 15, 2025 at 9:27 PM
skort.bsky.social
"The goal might have been going viral, but the message was still *Stop thinking you can play this game without any dicks involved.*" @brandyjensen.bsky.social on the misogyny of throwing dildos at women: defector.com/why-a-bunch-...
Every misogynist joke poses a question to its female audience: Can you laugh along? Will you be chill or are you going to make a big deal out of this? Are you going to be a bitch about it? Arriving in the form of a dildo, the joke that is also the question becomes a double entendre: Can you take it?
August 10, 2025 at 2:36 PM
skort.bsky.social
Don't mind me, I'm just adding slides to my Introduction to Anthropology "what is culture" lecture
Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers in tuxes standing on stage with a screen that reads "Rule of Culture #1: Culture is when a woman does something seriously, a gay guy does something as a joke, or a straight guy does something good by accident."
August 8, 2025 at 10:33 PM
skort.bsky.social
Great digging by @monicaobradovic.bsky.social @stltoday.com. Among the many DEI-related pages WashU had deleted: statistics documenting and celebrating efforts to diversity the campus and milestones of that diversity.
One page on equity.washu.edu, called “our progress,” existed until at least April 28, the last time the nonprofit Internet Archive captured a version of it. It included year-to-year data of student, faculty and staff demographics, with graphics showing WashU’s share of female, Asian and Hispanic populations of students and faculty rising — and its share of white students declining — as well as statistics on WashU’s socio-economic diversity improving. Another page called “our progress timeline” boasted WashU’s “rich history of activism and progress,” with an interactive timeline showing milestones on DEI-related issues. It began in 1869, when WashU School of Law became the first chartered law school in the U.S. to admit women. The timeline charting the university’s progress also was removed sometime after April 28.
July 17, 2025 at 11:48 PM
skort.bsky.social
I'm in the newest issue of Anthropological Quarterly with a review of Rachel Marie Niehuus' @dukepress.bsky.social book on healing and repair amid violence in Congo.
BOOK REVIEW Scott Ross, Washington University in St. Louis Rachel Marie Niehuus, An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024. 201 pp. What is it like to live amid violence? To endure war and attempt to build a life within it? Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is a place whose very name often evokes associations with violence. As the battleground of multiple international conflicts and civil wars for the last three decades and currently home to over 100 armed groups, these associations might seem obvious and even be taken for granted. In Rachel Marie Niehuus’ new ethnography, An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo, readers find a Congo that is wracked by violence and destruction, yes, but also one that is the site of reconstruction, of healing and repair, of new possibilities. The book offers an insightful and reflective meditation on what it means to live life in a place marked by war, such as eastern Congo.
July 14, 2025 at 5:08 PM
skort.bsky.social
It's going to be rough when the delusion wears off. I don't understand how people are like this.https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vd1vn9n06o
Trump was elected in part because of his promise to "launch the largest deportation programme of criminals in the history" - a promise Arpineh, her husband and mother say they all still believe in. Yet her family says they have faith that Arpineh will be released, and believe that only hardened, dangerous criminals will actually be deported. "I don't blame Trump, I blame Biden," Arthur says. "It's his doing for open borders, but I believe in the system and all the good people will be released and the ones that are bad will be sent back." While many of those detained do not have criminal records, Aprineh is a convicted felon, which makes her a prime target for removal.
July 10, 2025 at 2:25 PM
skort.bsky.social
Happy Juneteenth. Just like five years ago, today's racist monuments can fall, will fall, must fall.
The pedestal to Albert Pike (without statue), covered in graffiti that labels him racist and says things like Fuck White Supremacy, Fuck 12, Black Lives Matter.
June 20, 2025 at 12:22 AM
skort.bsky.social
"A movement that aligns with the forces of law and order is not a liberatory one."
Emphasis on lawlessness also invites us to think that any legal institution that reins Trump in is on our side—as if the enemy of our enemy is our friend. This is an especially important mistake relative to the United States’s pervasive pattern of criminalizing poor people, people of color, and the marginalized more generally. A movement that aligns with the forces of law and order is not a liberatory one. The extent to which Trump, and to a lesser but still important extent many Democrats, tends to frame undocumented migrants as having broken the law is salient in this political content. Solidarity with migrants and opposition to the ways they are managed by the state is strategically significant and, more importantly, morally urgent.15 A legalistic political outlook is at best of little use—and is, I suspect, actively antithetical—to that solidarity.
June 13, 2025 at 4:47 PM
skort.bsky.social
We got coverage in @stlmag.bsky.social's daily newsletter, with this rundown from @ryankrull.bsky.social:
Last week, the leaders of more than 460 colleges and universities—ranging from the president of Yale to the president of the community college in Elgin, Illinois—released an open letter taking the Trump administration to task for what they called “the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” That letter came in response to Trump’s push to cut university funding and even put some programs under “academic receivership.” Not among the letter’s signatories: WashU chancellor Andrew Martin. That absence has spurred another letter, this one addressed to Martin, urging him to sign on to the statement pushing back against Trump. As of last night, almost 300 faculty, staff and alumni had put their names to it. One signatory, law professor Gregory Magarian, says he signed on in protest of, among other things, the Trump administration turning public dollars into leverage. “The only way to resist that is to band together and say, collectively, we are not going to be bullied, we are not going to be bought, we are not going to be intimidated,” he says. “It's incredibly encouraging that those efforts are underway in higher education.” Magarian adds that while he can’t get inside Martin’s head, the chancellor did write an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education in February arguing that universities ought to be less political. “Based on that essay that he authored, he thinks that we can stand above or outside the fray, and you just can't,” Magarian says. “There is no above or outside the fray. We're living in the fray.” As for Martin, he told SLM earlier this week, “We’re all approaching advocacy in different ways,” and shared additional thoughts about Trump’s threats to higher education.
May 2, 2025 at 7:26 PM
skort.bsky.social
Lots of protests, rallies, actions as part of the Higher Ed Day of Action tomorrow—also a huge list of political education and organizing events to attend: www.dayofactionforhighered.org/events
List of virtual events for the April 17 National Day of Action for Higher Education - full list and registration info available at link in post.
April 16, 2025 at 10:59 PM
skort.bsky.social
Latest info is that almost a thousand students have now had visas revoked - what are universities doing about this? www.insidehighered.com/news/global/...
Inside Higher Ed article headlined "International Student Visas Revoked" "As of April 12, over 170 colleges and universities have identified 950-plus international students and recent graduates who have had their legal status changed by the State Department."
April 13, 2025 at 3:53 PM
skort.bsky.social
"Innocence will not protect you... we must exert maximum pressure on Columbia and other universities to protect international students from these arbitrary state actions." aurdip.org/en/letter-fr...
Second, innocence will not protect you. I was not in the country from August 2023 to April 2024. While I received a summons on April 30, 2024, the case was dismissed by the courts and I have faced no disciplinary charges. Apart from attending a handful of low-level protests and posting on social media, I have had little contact with events on campus. So there is no explanation why I was targeted. With the rapidly escalating situation, the criminalization of free speech, and eminent travel bans, what has happened to me can happen to you. Therefore, we must exert maximum pressure on Columbia and other universities to protect international students from these arbitrary state actions. And we must fight for complete amnesty and reinstatement for those whom Columbia has sacrificed in the hope of reversing funding cuts. Now is the time to come together and demand universities do the right thing. Ranjani Srinivasan
March 24, 2025 at 10:32 PM
skort.bsky.social
Surprise, faculty and students who weren't present at the protest believe the university's representation of the facts, based on no other evidence.
After speaking with various students, faculty, and staff who did not witness or participate in the protests, the committee found that many supported the administration’s response on April 27. “Many believed an unprecedented number of protestors had no relationship with the University and further believed that the protestors came with ill intent,” reads Page 19 of the report. “[The committee] also pointed out that the unaffiliated protestors far outnumbered WUPD and prevented WashU students from studying during the critical week before finals.”
March 19, 2025 at 12:53 PM