I am still trying to figure out how to use Substack, or maybe how to use Substack versus the Wordpress site I’ve maintained in one form or another now since 2004. I don’t write blog posts on a regular schedule. Rather, I write blog posts when something comes up that I want to write about, and I write blog posts (I’m trying to avoid verbing blog here) about pretty much anything.
Substack as a platform and a genre (I guess) feels different to me. There’s are blog-like and social media-like components to it, but it is primarily about email newsletters, and to me, that calls for a more regular publication schedule along with a more focused topic. It’s one of the reasons why I have also set up a Substack called “Paying Attention to AI.”
I also write blog posts nowadays when I have time, and for the last half of this last semester (what EMU calls “winter” term but what almost every other university refers to as “spring”), I have not had time. You would think I would know better by this point in my career, but one thing after another came up and put me super duper behind. March and April were both A LOT.
Maintaining a weekly or so Substack newsletter might be a good way of attracting an audience, but it also makes the whole thing seem like more of a job. And while I think it might be pretty cool if I could phase out of academia and somehow generate enough paying subscribers to actually make a living writing on Substack (and/or as a freelancer or something), that strikes me as extremely unlikely. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, my main future career goals at this point of my life are some combination of retiree and lottery winner.
Anyway, here’s I guess a not-so-regular email newsletter/Substack post about some of what I wrote about on the blog that I’ll share here:
Now is a Good Time to be at “Third Tier” University
I wrote this in late March in response to a New York Times op-ed published in mid-March called “The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education,” and the fact that it took me a couple of weeks to write this post says plenty about how weirdly swamped I’ve been with work and everything. Like other academics (and honestly, like other sane people regardless of political party affiliation), I’m horrified and angry about what Trump et al is trying to do to higher education right now. None of this is about saving money, and all of this is straight out of the authoritarian government playbook.
I’m also writing here about a long-standing complaint I’ve had with the general public/MSM discourse around higher education: it’s always focused on the 100 or so (or even 20 or so) universities that everyone has heard of. I’m glad that (since my original post) Harvard decided it was going to fight back, and that feels to me like it has completely changed the discussion and the strategy. Instead of giving Trump whatever he wants by throwing its academic mission under the bus in the name of protecting the business (I’m looking at you, Columbia), Harvard’s move has inspired things like the Big Ten “mutual defense compact” and this call for “constructive engagement” from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. So that’s good.
But the fact remains that most of what counts as higher education are very VERY different kinds of institutions. EMU (and most of the regional universities like it) is not that vulnerable to federal funding cuts because we’re not a research institution. 90% of academic institutions are in the same boat as EMU.
I will say though I’m not sure we’re completely safe from Trump. EMU said they are not going to close their DEI office, though I have already heard some rumors about how they’ve already changed some websites to take down some DEI things. There were also some local FBI raids of houses where students who were involved in pro-Palestinian protest groups at U of M lived, including in Ypsilanti. Things could definitely get worse before they get better.
Teaching this Fall (TBA): Writing, Rhetoric, and AI
I’m hoping to teach a “special topics” course in the fall called “Writing, Rhetoric, and AI,” and I wrote briefly about that. The class still needs to “make” (that is, get enough students into it), and while the enrollment numbers are encouraging, we’re not quite there yet. Stay tuned.
4C25: My Talk in Two Parts
I posted the talk I gave at the 2025 Conference for College Composition and Communication in Baltimore. The tl;dr version is I talked for a bit about what I was originally going to talk about, which is how a lot of the scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s about computer stuff (early AI, CAI, and of course word processing and the internet) was different from but also similar to a lot of the freakout about AI going on now. The second (and longer) part of my talk was a more detailed discussion of Cynthia Selfe’s great CCCCs speech (and essay and eventually a book) “Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention.” Among other things, this is what the field should be doing with AI: pay attention to it. Instead, it sure seems like there are a lot of people in the field who are advocating that the right thing for us to do as teachers and scholars is to “refuse” and “resist” AI. That’s dumb, and I try to explain why in the whole talk.
“Thoughts”
I also included with my post about my 4Cs talk a bit about my experience at the conference, the first time I had been f2f since 2019/pre-Covid. The short version: I had a good time and a good road trip, but that’s probably the last time I’m going to go. I have a lot of complaints about the organization and how they’ve run the event, but at the end of the day, the problem isn’t NCTE or whatever. The problem is me: I’m too old. I just don’t get a lot out of attending conference presentations anymore, and all the people who I used to plan on seeing and hanging out with at the event— people I knew in the field who I only ever saw at things like this— have either left the field entirely, became an administrator, retired/died, or, like me, just lost interest. Never say never, but that was probably my last CCCCs. Probably.