Completing my mandatory training at my job. My #university job. Where I am a #professor. I'm not boasting, I'm setting up the stupidity of this training: #SUNY has decided to, IDK, save money or boost someone's career by investing in a corporate training platform. The modules are all clearly corporate. It is repeatedly assumed (and mandated) that I make "the company's" financial bottom line my highest priority. I am one of 30,000 or so SUNY faculty (or maybe 90,000 employees) watching these steaming piles of corporate compromise, in which 20somethings in Business Casual congregate around water coolers or their cubicle desks to discuss a Michael Scott stereotype who says inappropriate things to his female employees.

Okay, one part is relevant: my dean's leadership style is notably similar to Michael Scott's (though I have no information suggesting he's sexually harassed anyone, so at least there's that).

#rant #training #corporate #capitalism

SUNY Fredonia is in financial trouble. #administrators are trying to manage money as well as perceptions of their management. Not everyone is a fan of their approach.

#suny #highered

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Gauging non-invertible symmetries on the lattice

Sahand Seifnashri, Shu-Heng Shao, Xinping Yang
SciPost Phys. 19, 063 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.19.2.063

#IAS #SUNY #MIT #Yale

My school's president & Provost, after years of obstruction, secrecy, and misinformation about finances and other critical information (based on which they have eliminated positions, increased workloads, and made lots of people very unhappy), have reluctantly agreed to create a "secure web portal" sometime in the future to share some data.

We're a public university, funded and owned by the citizens of the state. This information should be automatically, with no human intervention, fed to a page on the open web.

Nobody hates transparency as much as public servants.

[Note: we had more transparency until about 3 years ago, when a colleague and I created an analysis of spending by the administration, after which the Provost cancelled the service that allowed faculty to see any university financial info, so I guess I'm proudly responsible for that]

#highered #money #transparency #ugh #suny #nys #BareMinimum

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Entanglement Rényi entropies in celestial holography

Federico Capone, Andy O’Bannon, Ronnie Rodgers, Somyadip Thakur
SciPost Phys. 19, 042 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.19.2.042

#FSU #SUNY #KTH #StockholmUniversity #NORDITA #SogangUniversity
#NordForsk

So this is a bit niche even for enviro-nuts like me but if you're down to sign petitions, this one could use it. Tell SUNY ESF to drop their partnership with the dangerous, unproven, and disrespectful "Darling 58" genetically modified chestnut tree makers SilvaBio.

If you read "The Overstory," you may be familiar with the tale of chestnut trees in North America: afflicted by an invasive blight and then prematurely chopped down by panicking white people, to the extent that chestnut trees almost went extinct. Now this private company has been working with ESF to develop blight-resistant trees, but even though their results are poor, and even though indigenous communities of the northeast, such as the Onondaga Nation, have been urging a traditional breeding approach, and even though SilvaBio's stated intent to sell the trees for profit is in conflict with ESF's mission for "all people... to propagate them for personal or restoration use," ESF has been sticking with SilvaBio.

#trees #ChestnutTrees #Darling58 #SUNYESF #SUNY #NewYork #NYS #NYpol

https://globaljusticeecology.org/chestnut-pr-2025-1/

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Strings and membranes from A-theory five brane

Machiko Hatsuda, Ondřej Hulík, William D. Linch, Warren D. Siegel, Di Wang, Yu-Ping Wang
SciPost Phys. 19, 009 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.19.1.009

#KEK @uniheidelberg #SUNY

#NewYork Invests $40M to Launch #EmpireAI Beta with #NVIDIA Blackwell #Supercomputer
#EmpireAIBeta will be 11x more powerful than current capacity, allowing hundreds of researchers from 10 institutions to continue to advance #AI research. Empire AI is now backed by over $500M in public and private funding, including up to $340M in state funds.
Empire AI Beta also is expected to be among the first academic deployments of NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX #GB200 systems.
https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/state-of-new-york-invests-40m-to-launch-empire-ai-beta-with-nvidia-blackwell-supercomputing/ #SUNY

Update. Bruce Simon's slides on the Mutual Academic Defense Compact (#MADC) at #SUNY-Fredonia.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11wOgjRy38D88Y1ib9wPvBbnMx3PbQ0Cctxt2ezUHQwY/edit?slide=id.p#slide=id.p

#Academia #Universities #Trump #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

Setting all grades to "visible" except there are at least two settings buried in menus and submenus that make it "invisible".

Students can't see grades. Takes a while to figure this out.

Fucking #SUNY has apparently decided to disable (WTF) the instructor "student view," so we can't see what students see.

This means yet more time to do really basic things that shouldn't take time at all.

#professor #complaint #highered #brightspace #lms #baddesign

Interesting thing at my university: the AAC&U statement (signed by over 150 #university presidents in the USA) is a powerful (well, as much as letters can be) response to the #GOP attacks on higher ed via international students.

SUNY's chancellor hasn't signed it, which doesn't really surprise me; our recent chancellors have been fairly #spineless political creatures. When the pressure is overwhelming and the risk seems low, the #SUNY chancellor will sign.

My issue is with my university's president

1/

https://www.timesnownews.com/education/over-150-us-universities-sign-letter-against-trump-administration-study-abroad-article-151473395

#aacu #internationalstudents #uspol #fascism #management

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Emptiness instanton in quantum polytropic gas

Alexander G. Abanov, Dimitri M. Gangardt
SciPost Phys. 18, 122 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.18.4.122

#SUNY #Birmingham

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics #Community_Reports

LHC EFT WG note: Basis for anomalous quartic gauge couplings

Gauthier Durieux, Grant N. Remmen, Nicholas L. Rodd, Oscar J. P. Éboli, Maria C. Gonzalez-Garcia, Dan Kondo, Hitoshi Murayama, Risshin Okabe
SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 6 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCommRep.6

#UCL #NYU #LBNL #UCBL #USP #ICREA #SUNY #IPMU

Live now #SUNYOnlineSummit Kim Ccalzo - SUNY Digital Innovation & Academic Services (DIAS) #InnovativeInstruction Coming next Dan Feinberg with a report on the state of #SUNYOnline #OnlineEducation #SUNY #OnlineTeaching #OnlineLearning online.suny.edu/summit/update/

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Two-dimensional topological paramagnets protected by Z_3 symmetry: Properties of the boundary Hamiltonian

Hrant Topchyan, Vasilii Iugov, Mkhitar Mirumyan, Tigran Hakobyan, Tigran A. Sedrakyan, Ara G. Sedrakyan
SciPost Phys. 18, 068 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.18.2.068

#AlikhanyanNationalLaboratory #SUNY #SCGP #YSU #MassachusettsUniversityAmherst
#SCS

Even "blue state" university presidents are in a tough spot: they will get negative press (i.e., career advancement threat) if they knuckle under to GOP/DOGE/whoeverthefuck, but they'll also potentially have those consequences from other quarters if they don't.

I don't think you get to be a university president by showing "bold leadership." You get that job by doing exactly what every other university president does, which is usually to make loud pronouncements about supporting the "academic status quo" (including supporting all DEI initiatives) while supporting the societal social status quo (i.e., quasi-corporate behavior, anti-labor actions, etc.) with the actions you don't publicly announce.

Currently, university presidents have few "career-safe" avenues of action.

My uni president has finally (after 3+ weeks and like 1/3 of the federal government usurped) made an announcement obliquely related to the insanity. It's only "you don't have the authorization to give ICE/FBI/whoever any information about students and you don't have the authorization to receive or respond to any kind of warrant so refer them to system General Counsel", but I guess it's something.

Maybe someday, possibly after the union is a smoldering ash heap, we'll get some bold leadership.

#suny #highered #professor #corporate #educorporate #uspol #fascism

This post might seem like it's about #brightspace (the #lms the #suny system is forcing us all to use), but it's actually about having bosses who hold you in such contempt that they can't even be bothered to explain why they paid millions of dollars for a product that doesn't work while telling you to use it or else.

Today's Brightspace issue: hundreds of questions with images (trapped within BS's little walled garden of impenetrable database locations) that appear only as placeholders, but might or might not render when placed into a student quiz. The odds seem so far to be about 50/50.

There is no way to know which items are affected *even when I edit each of the hundreds of items by hand*, because I see this placeholder for MOST of the questions but then the students sometimes see the image. Sometimes not.

It's silent failure. No flags, no checks, no indications of what's wrong. No way to know if any changes will fix things.

Other silent failures: BS will cheerfully tell you it has imported your 5,000 or so items (painstakingly created over the past decade) from your previous LMS--which was also mandated--and then just *won't tell you* that hundreds or thousands of them did not import because BS simply choked and pooped or because BS doesn't even have the functionality to use those question types.

I fucking hate this LMS, but I really hate the fact that the people in charge think so little of me and 30,000 of my colleagues that they shove shit like this at us and tell us to pretend it works.

#professor #rant #highered #broken #shittydesign #baddesign #badsoftware #capturedmarket

Time to for an #introduction from my new account. I'm a #gay #married guy with #XLH and living in #RochesterNY. We have three cats and I work as a #AcademicLibrarian at a local #SUNY. This is my personal account so most posts will be shared with followers only. My hobbies include #scuba #travel and hanging out with #friends.