Dave Addison

@daveaddison.bsky.social

776 Followers 431 Following

Historian of Late Antiquity. British Academy Postdoc at University of Liverpool. Hispanophile, Leodensian. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/david-addison

The FT's 'How to Spend It' rebrands as HTSI, with alternative readings of the S given as 'style', 'surf', 'save', etc.

And here is where the class dimension becomes unavoidable: wealthier students have always had access to human “AI” – private tutors, professional editors, writing coaches. The university’s AI policy effectively punishes working-class students for accessing the free version of what wealth has always bought.

The defence of this model often claims that “writing and idea development are interconnected.” But this argument privileges a specific type of complexity, the kind that aligns with Western academic traditions. It dismisses other forms of knowledge as lesser. Bob Marley was not a great writer in the academic sense, but he demonstrated through song that he was capable of profound philosophical thought. No-one listens to Redemption Song and thinks it would be better as a peer-reviewed journal article.

The university’s insistence that writing and thinking are inseparable is not a pedagogical truth, it is epistemological imperialism that has mistaken the technology of one culture for universal human cognition.

Peter Kyle: "too often people go to university to 'explore research and knowledge'".

A Google Ngram showing the frequency of the phrase 'dark ages' in books archived by Google from 1600 to 2022. There is a large spike in the middle of the 19th century.

"The cost of servicing its [Chicago's] debt is now 85 percent of the value of all undergraduate tuition."