Graham Hillard, James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal Journalist Profile

Articles

The neurotic breakdown behind Apple's new sci-fi show Murderbot

5 days ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Graham Hillard

“Artificial intelligence” is a tech fantasist’s dream bubble, but let’s play along. Suppose tomorrow’s robots have human intelligence, self-directedness, and skill. Won’t they have our laziness, as well? Murderbot, the latest science-fiction series from Apple TV+, attempts to answer precisely that question. The popular fear is of machines that slay us in our beds. Apple’s latest is about an android that just wants to watch TV.
The neurotic breakdown behind Apple’s new sci-fi show Murderbot

1 week ago | denvergazette.com | Graham Hillard

“Artificial intelligence” is a tech fantasist’s dream bubble, but let’s play along. Suppose tomorrow’s robots have human intelligence, self-directedness, and skill. Won’t they have our laziness, as well? Murderbot, the latest science-fiction series from Apple TV+, attempts to answer precisely that question. The popular fear is of machines that slay us in our beds. Apple’s latest is about an android that just wants to watch TV.
Goodbye, Belle Wheelan — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

1 week ago | jamesgmartin.center | Graham Hillard

Over the last 25 years or so, one model of university accreditation has given way to another. Under the old system, colleges submitted to invasive but essentially nonpartisan examination of their finances, academic offerings, and faculty hiring. In so doing they proved their “acceptable quality” to the men and women in charge of student loans and gained access to that great, pulsing federal spigot.
In praise of errors: ChatGPT is scrambling campus values

4 weeks ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Graham Hillard

Making the rounds in April was a higher-ed post for our time: “The honest B or C student, submitting essays filled with awkward constructions, malapropisms, [and] earnest, if failed or surface-y arguments, [is] a surprise hero of the present age.” So wrote professor Matt Dinan of Canada’s St. Thomas University, a liberal arts institution in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
A new Mamet film at last

1 month ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Graham Hillard

Between 2009 and the beginning of last week, dramatist and author David Mamet released 16 new plays and books, some of them exceptional. During the same span, filmmaker David Mamet directed either one or zero feature-length pictures, depending on whether one counts the 2013 made-for-TV movie Phil Spector. To say merely that this imbalance saddened fans of the unofficial laureate of American hustlers is very nearly to engage in Mametian deception, so drastically does it undersell the point.
Professionalization Is Killing College Sports — Minding The Campus

1 month ago | mindingthecampus.org | Graham Hillard

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on May 12, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Let us take for granted that the NCAA in its prime was greedy, hypocritical, reactionary, schoolmarmish, tone-deaf, and more than a little absurd. That case is not difficult to make, and I have made it before, fairly drowning in examples.
Professionalization Is Killing College Sports — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

1 month ago | jamesgmartin.center | Graham Hillard

Let us take for granted that the NCAA in its prime was greedy, hypocritical, reactionary, schoolmarmish, tone-deaf, and more than a little absurd. That case is not difficult to make, and I have made it before, fairly drowning in examples. Nevertheless, having come out the other side of NCAA v.
Does Thunderbolts* make sense if you've never seen a Marvel movie?

1 month ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Graham Hillard

Like most Marvel offerings, Thunderbolts* requires so much background knowledge that fine print seems appropriate, which may explain the asterisk at the end of the official name of the film. That typographical addendum, much discussed by Marvel fanboys during the promotional lead-up, turns out not to mean anything at all, unless one counts an in-joke “reveal” during the closing credits. To the critic, however, it is irresistible.
How Hollywood fell apart in the 30 years since ‘While You Were Sleeping’

2 months ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Graham Hillard

Thirty years ago this month, I sat in a suburban movie house and watched America’s sweetheart stumble backward into love. No, the picture wasn’t Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, or You’ve Got Mail, though those 1990s classics deserve columns of their own. Rather, it was a film that nearly fell apart before it could be made — an arch-reactionary romance whose politics, incredibly, feel newly relevant today.
Children of girlbosses: The return of The Handmaid’s Tale

2 months ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Graham Hillard

The Handmaid’s Tale burst onto the TV scene eight years ago and launched its sixth and final season earlier this month. From the start, it is an exercise in blunt-force storytelling, eschewing moral subtlety in favor of a didacticism intended to remind progressives of their inherent goodness. The Sons of Jacob, rulers of the Christian-nationalist dystopia called Gilead, are evil. They have replaced America with a slave state dedicated to systematic sexual assault.