Anthony Michael Kreis seems to love Twitter. Or maybe he hates it.
He’s certain about one thing, though: that he “100 percent” wouldn’t have become an assistant law professor at Georgia State University without it. He has more than 62,000 followers.
Same goes for Tressie McMillan Cottom. “There’s no way that the scale of my career, and the trajectory of it, would have happened without Twitter,” said Cottom, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her follower count? Almost 240,000.
At the same time, she said, it’s been “absolutely brutal and horrible” to her as a person.
In its rise to internet prominence, the popular social-media platform has contoured the typically rigid structures of higher ed in ways both good and bad. Twitter — which billionaire owner Elon Musk, in a recent head-scratching business move, renamed “X” — has become an unlikely force influencing campuses, a dozen academics said in interviews with The Chronicle about the site’s impact on their careers.
But this year, Twitter, or X, or whatever else it’ll be called in a couple of months, has veered hard in a new direction.
With Musk at the helm, the site’s verification rules — which lent credibility to the voices of scholars during major news events, natural disasters, and the pandemic — were all but scrapped. Some say the coup de grâce came earlier this summer, when Musk slapped limits on the number of tweets (do we even call them “tweets” anymore?) nonpaying users can see in a day. Several prominent public scholars with large followings decided to close up shop.
“It’s just gotten weird,” said Rick Clark, assistant vice provost and executive director of undergraduate admissions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has nearly 10,000 followers.
X, formerly Twitter, did not respond to a request for comment.
The ordeal has left some faculty rejoicing at the fading relevance of a platform they viewed as problematic from the start. Others are giving Musk the bird (and not the kind that once graced the logo).
Still others are hanging on. Perhaps it’s a matter of addiction. There are faculty members who are just as bad about scrolling their feeds as the students in their freshman seminars. Yet some who long for the ghost of Twitter’s past also wonder whether, in the absence of a viable alternative, the site’s reconfiguration could make it harder for some of higher ed’s most-prominent voices to interact with one another and the broader public — at a time when overall confidence in institutions like colleges is at an all-time low.
A sizable number just can’t give it up.
A Dizzying Cycle
#AcademicTwitter emerged shortly after the platform’s founding in 2006 and became a place where many scholars, particularly those from historically marginalized backgrounds and fields, found community with one another. It drew attention to academic causes, connected disciplines, and amplified expertise in key moments.
Yet over the years, Twitter grew into an environment rife with hate speech, as well as inappropriate comments, offensive jabs, and targeted harassment. It traded in the same gossip that gave life to many a faculty listserv, which could quickly stray from good-natured into demeaning. While scholars’ viral tweets often led to interviews on national television or ideas for new research papers, they could also jeopardize chances at tenure. In some cases, tweets ended careers.
Twitter’s nexus with the academy reflected some of the more serious and difficult questions facing higher ed in the 21st century: about academic freedom and free speech, systemic institutional barriers, and the role of technology in and outside of the classroom.
Many scholars have opined at length on such questions in The Chronicle.
Gordon Fraser, then a lecturer at the University of Manchester, condemned “The Twitterization of the Academic Mind” and argued that the platform was too shallow a venue for intellectual knowledge sharing. “We profess not in sound bites, but in peer-reviewed studies,” Fraser wrote. His opening line captured a hard truth: “Things fall apart fast these days, often on Twitter.”
Twitter represents the denial of the values that academe is supposed to represent.
Katherine C. Epstein, then an associate professor of history at Rutgers University at Camden, reached a rather dark conclusion: “Twitter represents the denial of the values that academe is supposed to represent.”
Rafael Walker, then an assistant professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York, had a rosier take. Responding to Epstein, he called the site’s professional networking benefits “unparalleled.” In his view, its occasional cheekiness had only been a “welcome corrective to the snobbish aloofness that so many of us have learned to cultivate.”
Even as academics look toward the exits, Twitter is still the place to be. For now. If they want to know what’s going on, that is.
Developments at New College of Florida, a small public institution in the midst of an ideological overhaul led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, have often been announced on Twitter by one of its new conservative trustees. Faculty layoffs and program cuts at West Virginia University have drawn widespread attention on the site.
And where else can you find hard-to-believe stories like the one about a college handing an adjunct three classes without even telling him?
The dizzying speed with which more tech-savvy scholars have gotten used to getting national attention persists, too.
Two weeks after Musk imposed limits on the number of tweets users can see, Matthew Boedy, an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, tweeted about Charlie Kirk, the controversial founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA.
Boedy, who has a penchant for debunking dubious claims made by Kirk and runs a website dedicated to the cause, used Twitter to break news he’d called to Rolling Stone’s attention: that a company run by a registered sex offender had sponsored Turning Point’s annual faith summit in May. (A Turning Point spokesman told the magazine the organization “‘was not aware of this incident.’”)
Boedy’s thread — a blend of politics, scandal, and alleged hypocrisy — was a master class in how to go viral. Within hours it racked up hundreds of retweets. Two days later, the professor was talking about Kirk on national television; MSNBC’s Joy Reid invited him on her show.
‘It Hurts’
Sharing research and reacting to news in real time are two of #AcademicTwitter’s defining features, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
For Boedy, Twitter isn’t just a place to get noticed for his thoughts on controversial figures. As the conference president for the Georgia chapter of the American Association of University Professors, he said the platform is an invaluable resource for something else as well: faculty organizing.
It hurts. There’s not an alternative that kind of hits the exact same spot as Twitter right now.
“Solidarity, whether it’s through liking tweets or emailing people whom you see a tweet from, happens all the time,” he said.
Of course, faculty organizing happened before social media. Except there’s something intangible about the space #AcademicTwitter has provided: a sort of 21st-century virtual faculty lounge filled with signal boosting and mutual griping.
During Texas’ most-recent legislative session, for example, when higher-ed bills targeting tenure and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were sending faculty members nationwide into a worried frenzy, Boedy relied on the state AAUP chapter’s Twitter account for updates on the legislation.
That kind of presence makes the site unmatched when it comes to political messaging, said Eli Melendrez, a public-affairs researcher and writer for the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. But the tone of Twitter has changed in recent months, he said, seemingly amplifying more right-wing content as his group and others respond to efforts by largely conservative politicians in Texas and elsewhere to reshape their states’ colleges.
“It hurts,” he said. “There’s not an alternative that kind of hits the exact same spot as Twitter right now.”
Instagram and Facebook are both more photo-oriented, which he said isn’t as conducive to organizing. Threads, Meta’s new Twitter alternative, just isn’t the same, to his mind. When it was first introduced in July, Threads couldn’t even display posts in reverse-chronological order.
The reverse-chronology feature has played a role in labor-organizing spaces, too. Johannah King-Slutzky, a fifth-year doctoral candidate at Columbia University and a steward for the graduate-employees union, said contingent faculty in particular “need something like Twitter.”
King-Slutzky was part of the bargaining committee that negotiated an end in January 2022 to what was, at the time, the longest higher-ed strike in more than a decade. Columbia’s work stoppage, aimed at securing pay raises and better health care, was one of the first major graduate-employee strikes that spurred a surge of labor organizing over the last few years. During similar campaigns at the University of California system and Rutgers University, Twitter served as something of a north star for unionizers.
“The ability to let other workers at other universities know the challenges we’re facing is instrumental,” she said.
‘Catapulted’ Careers
Administrators arrived a little later to the online party. The first to show face? Gordon Gee.
In a 2009 interview with The Chronicle, Gee, then president of Ohio State University, hailed the app as a way of demystifying the college presidency. (He now leads West Virginia University, an institution mired in controversy over a fiscal crisis and the resulting plans to cut programs.)
“It shows that you’re not just living in a big house and begging” for money, Gee said at the time. “You do get out and work.”
It wasn’t long before people like Santa Ono, then president of the University of Cincinnati, were catching on. Being genuine on Twitter can boost a leader’s reputation, Ono said in a 2014 interview. Plus the app was a boon for his institution more broadly. One online relationship he cultivated, between himself and an alumnus who was a higher-up at NASA, started a chain of events that ultimately earned the university a Space Act Agreement with the agency. Funding and resources poured in for faculty and students.
“That started because of a Twitter interaction,” said Ono, now president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
What Twitter did by accident is give us a fighting chance with shaping our own narrative in a way that none of the other platforms did.
When the platform first came into vogue, administrators and faculty alike struggled to strike the right balance between their personal and professional lives. Some of them, like Christian Brady, split their digital identities. When he spoke to The Chronicle in 2011 as the dean of Pennsylvania State University’s Schreyer Honors College, he was juggling two Twitter personas. One was for Christian Brady the administrator. The other was Christian Brady the man.
As higher ed tried to figure out how to exist online, the 2010s brought countless examples of a certain type of advice column: how academics should use Twitter.
Princeton University’s Kevin Kruse built an enormous digital brand by providing historical context for the political and cultural battles of the moment. “If you’ve heard of Kruse, it’s probably because you’ve read his tweets,” said a 2018 Chronicle profile. Kruse now has nearly half a million Twitter followers.
“There’s a whole slew of people whose careers were really catapulted through Twitter,” said Kevin McClure, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who has 10,000 followers.
Research shows social media, and Twitter in particular, has been instrumental for many scholars in developing their professional networks. One study published in 2017 in The Internet and Higher Education said it has the potential to “break down silos that might have restricted professional growth.”
It has made historically underrepresented scholars more visible to one another, said Cottom, the UNC-Chapel Hill professor.
The website gave academics who didn’t go to a selective college, weren’t considered stars in their labs or departments, or came from marginalized groups, new ways to build community and establish respect in their fields outside of the traditionally closed-off structures of academe.
“What Twitter did by accident,” Cottom said, “is give us a fighting chance with shaping our own narrative in a way that none of the other platforms did.”
In a 2019 letter to the editor in The Chronicle, two professors argued that Twitter had dismantled ableism in academe, too. “For disabled people, social-media platforms like Twitter offer a democratizing means by which communities can be formed and sustained through dialogue and collective thinking,” they wrote.
Yes, Twitter can also be a certifiably toxic place. But in Cottom’s view, the type of “outrage machine” that’s now endemic to the platform will inevitably entrench itself in whatever form of social media academics frequent most.
Critical Mass
Will academics ever actually give up Twitter? It’s too soon to tell. This moment does feel different, though. And the proof may be in the scale of the retreat.
The “rate limit exceeded” fiasco in July was the final straw for Robert Kelchen, a professor and head of the department of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville — and arguably one of higher ed’s most-prominent voices. He said sayonara on July 5, prompting one former academic to opine: “An excellent business plan. Drive away the content providers.”
“You can still tag or DM me, but otherwise I’m tuning out,” Kelchen wrote. “Thoughts on where to go next, folks?”
For some, the answer to Kelchen’s question has been Threads, Meta’s Twitter alternative. The platform took off in its first few days, but activity has since plummeted. Mastodon, with its many servers, isn’t as user-friendly as Twitter. Bluesky remains invite-only.
McClure, at UNC-Wilmington, has set up shop on LinkedIn. Once a Twitter super-user, he soured on the platform for ethical reasons after reading reports that Musk demanded his employees pledge loyalty to the company’s new direction. Limiting his time on the site was quite the about-face for McClure: His Twitter account at one point got so popular he started getting recognized at conferences because of it.
“For me, it really kind of came down to values,” he said.
In spite of his moral objections to the site, McClure admitted he’s still mildly active on it. That’s because while the features may be different, and some important voices are gone, the exodus hasn’t quite reached “critical mass.”
Until it does, he’ll keep refreshing his timeline, if only occasionally.
If a “critical mass” departs, it’s entirely possible another platform will rise from Twitter’s ashes. Especially given how advanced technology has become, any suggestion that higher ed’s modern interconnectedness will vanish entirely seems ludicrous. A new and improved “global faculty lounge” could be a healthy thing.
The question might not be if an alternative will arise, but when and what, in the meantime, higher ed stands to gain. Or lose.
On a recent afternoon, Kreis was, in a rare moment, not doomscrolling. Instead, the Georgia State law professor was spending some time outside, in the fresh air. He wanted a break from the daily chaos that befalls Twitter users in the Musk era, especially those accustomed to the old ways.
But his hand-wringing about the site’s future was soon interrupted by a newsy situation, one that was ripe for his expertise: A district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, had indicted former President Donald Trump.
Kreis tweeted about it daily. Those tweets were followed by more appearances on cable news. Hundreds of new followers flocked to his account.
