Rebecca Wanzo

a bald man with a beard is making a funny face in a dark room . ALT: a bald man with a beard is making a funny face in a dark room .

Looking at the renamed gulf conversation-- this every day, all day.

I have many, many criticisms of the neoliberal university. But every effort they have is going into lobbying right now. Plugging these holes will take every resource. And attorney generals in blue states are in the best position to fight this.

And trust me, I have been gaming this out for months since I am directly in the line of fire, given my position. This is what I get for not reading all 1000 pages of 2025. I didn’t predict they would even go after people trying to cure cancer. They think this will just eliminate the rest of us.

But if I was a university president trying to figure out how to ward off extinction-level attacks, knowing that the administration celebrates retaliation, I might be driven to a lawsuit but know that ultimately that could kill you too. You could “win” and they just stop funding you.

And I don’t think people get how endowments work, as this new NIH attack, and the other funding to follow, will eat up entire endowment payouts. And still won’t plug it. These people hate universities so much they are willing to bring down the entire research infrastructure of the country.

One thing that has become clear to me from across the political spectrum is that people don’t get how universities work, and it is going to be their demise. Palestine shook universities, in that suddenly the leaders of the biggest universities in the world could be brought down.

This is it just about “good messaging.” It is about a media strategy. The most successful movement of the 20th century—the CRM—had a media tragedy that was unparalleled. This very moment we are in is heavily shaped conservative, multi-pronged media strategy. It was not luck or an accident.

We need major media messaging plans across the board. Where is this happening?

I went back to the bad place just to stay on top of media outside of my networks. And I am struck by the fact that for years people have said humanists are not good at helping people understand what they do. But the ignorance around the national science infrastructure is also staggering.

Is there some kind of national media strategizing I am missing or has the Right captured the media so completely we can’t get messaging out there or escape media bubbles?

a good part of me thinks that in addition to everything else, the reason they are scrubbing these stories is they do not want disadvantaged kids to believe they can aspire to anything other than their designated “black” or “hispanic” or “woman” job

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

Democracy Forward - We go to court for democracy Democracy depends on a government that works for all people. We fight vigorously in court against abuses of power and attempts to undermine a government that works for people who need it most.

democracyforward.org

Donate—they brought the suit forward to block his constitutional circumvention of the congressional power of the purse.

This is not a drill. If we can't stop something so blatantly unconstitutional, I don't know how we'll fight anything at all. FIGHT. Donate to the legal organizations that will fight this. Get your representatives to yell about this. NOW.

There are many places to give money to help people in LA and I will post some other links. Here is one place to start.

The big issue is that our history, libraries, and museums are filled with horrible people. We register judgement with how we spend our money and give attention and how we remember them. But making important creative works unavailable would bury much history. Too many “great” thinkers suck.

Banning collaborative works—a frequent call about TV and movies that would punish all the people who worked with someone—is a bad practice.

I think there is a big gap between putting people on pedestals and being upset about serial sexual abusers, no?

There is just one line I disagree with here—that his career has been marginally affected. The fact that adaptations—collaborations that involve hundreds of other people—is not the measure. A huge number of people will never buy his work or read his work again. For many of us—he’s done. Forever.

DoJ releases its Tulsa race massacre report over 100 years after initial review DoJ report acknowledges attack ‘was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence’

More than 100 years after its initial review that blamed Black men, the Dept. of Justice just released its report on the 1921 Tulsa race massacre

The report says the attack “was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence”

Here is a statement by my colleague Katherine Franke about the end of her time teaching at Columbia. Please read it. drive.google.com/file/d/1i4cO...

So honored by this.

@nytimes.com @cnn.com @npr.org @democracynow.org @slate.bsky.social @nbcnews.com Anybody planning on covering this? This policy sure reads as if you cannot talk about being anything other than white or straight on social media or your content will be banned.

That “is diversity over” in Hollywood price is so ahistorical, filled with so many opinions about media production treated as fact that I wonder if anyone gave it even a cursory look for quality.

Do you feel like this rose up with the rise of comics adaptations and other IP with longer histories, and has been expanded to lose meaning? Marvel movies had material for non-comics readers and older fans, and people would post about references viewers would not know without comics knowledge.

I initially had not wanted to see the musical years ago because I liked the book so much. But I was surprised by how much I loved it and appreciate that in this different genre and medium it has a different sensibility and focus.

My Wicked take: 1) Ervio is fantastic; 2.) it would be great if people find the (more adult) novel; and 3.) I now appreciate that the musical does something very different and there is no need for a hierarchy.

I realized I had to stay on the horrible app for a little while longer to double check citations for my book, and when I logged back in the first three tweets I saw hoped children would not know that Wicked was a book, an antisemitic tweet about feminism, and a racist anti-DEI tweet. Sigh.

Weird how black women with Harvard degrees and twenty years of experience are called "DEI hires," but some random dude on Fox News is expertly qualified to run the Department of Whatever.

Texas A&M cuts LGBTQ studies and other programs The flagship is eliminating dozens of programs, including an LGBTQ studies minor that a conservative lawmaker has criticized. He says he’ll soon target other institutions.

www.insidehighered.com/news/governa...