UVA President James Ryan Caved to MAGA—and They Forced Him Out Anyway; The New Republic, June 27, 2025

Siva Vaidhyanathan, The New Republic ; UVA President James Ryan Caved to MAGA—and They Forced Him Out Anyway

[Kip Currier: Capitulation to Trump almost never gives people and organizations what they think or hope it will. For examples, just look to the craven law firms that have debased themselves and are paying the price for submission.

The forcing out of UVA President James Ryan is just another step in what Trump et al have planned for higher education.]

[Excerpt]

"Thomas Jefferson’s vision for a noble and educated republic has been dealt a firm blow. The enemies of free and open inquiry, of science, and of informed, democratic citizenship have chopped off the head of the very university Jefferson founded to make his vision real. 

On Friday, the Trump administration, aided by a board appointed entirely by Republican Governor Glenn Younkin, forced University of Virginia President James Ryan to resign. The Justice Department had threatened to block all federal funds to the second-oldest public university in the country if Ryan remained in office.   

Ryan and the board had eliminated all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in March, even though the specious executive order commanding such changes was already under challenge by the courts. The university chose to comply rather than fight.   

But, in a turn that Franz Kafka would appreciate (and perhaps inspired), the Trump administration declared that capitulation insufficient. In a clumsily worded letter to the university sent in April, the Department of Justice claimed that it had “received complaints that [Ryan’s] office and the University may have failed to implement these directives and further that you have refused to produce the report on the matter.”...

To this day, no one at the university has a clear idea what the university could or should have done. The New York Times reported Thursday that the only specific move the Justice Department demanded in recent weeks was Ryan’s resignation. 

Laying the attack on the University of Virginia on DEI was brilliant and maddening. What, exactly, is DEI? Those of us who work in universities have a good idea. It is the collection of efforts and programs that allow students who have served in the military, do not come from homes that have had college students before, graduated from high schools deep in the coal fields of Appalachia, arrived on student visas from Nigeria, have endured sexual violence or harassment, or occupy segments of society that are constantly under attack from the majority to succeed and graduate. They are not zero-sum programs. They do not deny anyone else an opportunity to attend a university or thrive at one.   

DEI programs recognize that society and the world are complex, diverse places."

Parks, libraries, museums: here’s why Trump is attacking America’s best-loved institutions; The Guardian, June 2, 2025

Margaret Sullivan , The Guardian; Parks, libraries, museums: here’s why Trump is attacking America’s best-loved institutions

"Why would any politician – especially one as hungry for adulation as Donald Trump – go after such cherished parts of America?

It seems counterintuitive, but this is all a part of a broad plan that the great 20th century political thinker Hannah Arendt would have understood all too well.

Take away natural beauty, free access to books and support for the arts, and you end up with a less enlightened, more ignorant and less engaged public. That’s a public much more easily manipulated.

“A people that can no longer believe in anything cannot make up its mind,” said Arendt, a student of authoritarianism, in 1973. Eventually, such a public “is deprived … of its ability to think and judge”, and with people like that, “you can then do what you please”.

That’s what Trump and company are counting on."

THE NEW DARK AGE: The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.; The Atlantic, May 27, 2025

Adam Serwer , The Atlantic; THE NEW DARK AGE: The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.

"The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age."

Jim Clyburn Is Right About What Democrats Should Do Next; The New York Times, July 7, 2024

Ezra Klein, The New York Times; Jim Clyburn Is Right About What Democrats Should Do Next

Kip Currier: The most important sentence in this Ezra Klein OpEd is this one: 

"What Democrats denied themselves over the past few years was information."

Democracies, and political parties, depend on informed citizenries. Informed citizenries are cultivated and advanced when people have access to accurate, trustworthy information. Without informed citizenries, democracies and political parties are like endangered species that can weaken and disappear.

Access to information is the core principle that information centers -- libraries, archives, museums -- make possible. As New York Public Library Director Anthony Marx has previously underscored, "libraries are in the information access business." 

Information centers serve essential roles for healthy, functioning democracies, political parties, and societies.

More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend seen on most other social media sites; Pew Research Center, November 15, 2023

KATERINA EVA MATSA, Pew Research Center; More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend seen on most other social media sites

[Kip Currier: This November 2023 Pew Research Center article about news consumption by Americans--particularly increasing numbers of teens--who use TikTok should be concerning to anyone who has an interest in democratic principles, informed citizenries, accuracy of information, national security, and public health.

It's not going to be easy, though, to stem access to dis- and misinformation and instill more guardrails against conspiracy theories and hate speech (--looking at you too, Elon/Twitter-cum-X) for Big Tech platforms like TikTok (though states like Montana are trying to provide bulwarks) that are well-documented for-profit purveyors of disinformation and misinformation.

One step in raising awareness of social media platform concerns is to get more informed about TikTok's meteoric rise from new-kid-on-the-social-media-block just a few years ago to prodigious social media sensation/Trojan horse threat today: the Washington Post's May 2023 "How TikTok went from teen sensation to political pariah" provides an informative timeline of TikTok's onset and vitality.

A significant concern of TikTok usage and market penetration is public health-related: Social media companies like TikTok and Meta utilize known (and unknown "trade secret-shielded") design features that foster addictive consumption of their content, which, in part, is having documented negative impacts on mental health. Bloomberg's April 2023 article "TikTok’s Algorithm Keeps Pushing Suicide to Vulnerable Kids" is one example.

Ongoing concerns about TikTok's threats to U.S. national security and cybersecurity have also prompted the Biden administration to speak out forcefully in March 2023.

The burden of addressing the "information threats" these sites present is going to be on schools and public libraries: to advance "social media information literacy" and critical thinking skills in young people, as well as persons of all ages. Unfortunately, libraries are, in many instances, jumping pell-mell on the TikTok bandwagon: rhapsodically promoting the platform, both tacitly and overtly, without commensurately weighing the substantive downsides of its use for community engagement and messaging that, admittedly, can have positive upshots, like combatting rising rates of book challenges and bans.

Notice, too, on television the increased Public Relations/Crisis Management "feel-good ad" campaigning that TikTok--like Meta/Facebook--has been engaging in the past few years to counter reporting about the burgeoning amounts of disinformation and misinformation on these sites, as well as other real concerns highlighted above. These ads employ folksy, "nothing-to-worry-about-on-here" messages in attempts to downplay the genuine dangers that they represent to individuals and democratic societies. The reality, however, is that there is bonafide "stuff" to worry about regarding TikTok and its ilk -- and ample evidence of these intersectional problems to vindicate taking affirmative steps now to mitigate and push back against their negative impacts.

Are you listening, U.S. Congress and state legislatures?]

"A small but growing share of U.S. adults say they regularly get news on TikTok. This is in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.

In just three years, the share of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023.

TikTok, primarily known for short-form video sharing, has become especially popular among teens – two-thirds of whom report ever using the platform – as well as young adults."