Category: Inside the Ivory Tower
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The Hidden Prompt in ICML Submissions: What It Says About Trust in Peer Review
This year, while reviewing submissions for the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026), I encountered something unexpected. A few days ago, someone forwarded me a Reddit post that claims a hidden LLM prompt has been injected into every paper assigned to the person. I became curious and checked my own assignments. And guess what? Across…
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What Academics Say vs. What They Mean
Academia has its own language. On the surface, it sounds polite, thoughtful, and collaborative. In reality, it’s a carefully evolved dialect designed to survive meetings, peer review, and email threads that never end. Here’s a quick translation guide. Peer Review, But Make It Passive-Aggressive Peer review is how science moves forward. It is also how…
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Universities Don’t Actually Have a Space Shortage. They Have a Space Allocation Problem
I sit on a ‘faculty building committee’ whose stated purpose is to “provide faculty input” on a new campus building. Space shortage is everywhere in academia, and my university isn’t an exception. Listening to other faculty and student colleagues, the message is simple: We need more classrooms, more instructional labs, and more research spaces. But…
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Too Many Deans Spoil the Broth: How Administrative Bloat Is Quietly Undermining Teaching and Research
Administrative bloat is getting out of hand. Over the past decade, I’ve watched job titles multiply like bacteria in a petri dish: Associate Dean of This, Vice Provost of That, Senior Executive Director of Strategic Alignment and Synergy (okay, slight exaggeration—but not by much). Meanwhile, class sizes creep upward, faculty searches get “paused,” and research…