Erin Moriarty

Labor Department moves to end disability hiring goal for federal contractors Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer plans to axe a longstanding, successful incentive program for disabled workers.

The White House's war on disabled Americans continues, going above and beyond Project 2025—now with attacks on a popular hiring program no one even lobbied against.

Inside the Conservative Campaign That Took Down a University President

Obviously hoping to return UVA to its roots and its glory days in the late 1830s, when students rioted and shot and killed the Dean.

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/u...

Letters from DOJ reveal threats to U.Va. over admissions policies, Ryan’s leadership “Time is running short, and the Department’s patience is wearing thin,” the final letter read

This is a must-read story (including full text of letters from a FOIA request) by the Daily Cavalier about Trump admin's efforts to misuse federal antidiscrimination law in support of its ideological agenda against DEI at UVA. Kudos to the student journalists! www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...

On behalf of the Virginia Conference of the American Association of University Professors (VA-AAUP), I write today to strongly condemn the federal Department of Justice (DOJ for their politically motivated campaign that has just forced UVa President James Ryan to resign. VA-AAUP also calls for an investigation on what role, if any, members of UVa's Board of Visitors may have played in assisting the Department of Justice's vendetta against President Ryan. The actions of the DOJ are clear violations of the independence and integrity of the University of Virginia as a free and open institution of research and learning. Even worse, this campaign represents nothing less than an extra-legal bid to impose federal control and President Trump's political ideology on American higher education itself. Much like a free press, the health of American democracy depends upon the independence and integrity of its public and private universities. After all, the university is the place where scientific knowledge about the world is produced, circulated, and shared, and in order to produce valid and actionable knowledge, faculty and students must be free to follow the data where it leads without fear or favor. As scholars, in short, we must be free to pursue the truth, regardless of the opinions or ideologies of politicians, religious leaders, or other powerful social interests. This pursuit of truth becomes deeply corrupted when external actors or government officials try to impose their ideologies and values on the university or when they use their power and authority to bring campus leaders to heel. Yet this is exactly what happened at the University of Virginia last week. The Trump administration has reportedly been unhappy with James Ryan's support for the bedrock values of academic freedom, shared governance, diversity, and equal access. According to press reports, Justice Department officials particularly disliked Ryan's focus on encouraging community service and felt that he had…

racism, sexism, and homophobia went unchallenged and the benefits of higher education were limited to a privileged few. To accomplish this goal, the Trump administration elected to use the full power of the U.S. government to force President Ryan's resignation. And what was their leverage? Despite the fact that the investigation of UVa was incomplete, the DOJ nonetheless threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grant funding, including grants that fund UVa's life-saving medical and cancer research. It worked. Fearing what would happen to the university and the citizens of Virginia without this research funding, Ryan chose to resign. In sum, this was an illegitimate process with an appalling outcome. VA-AAUP also would like to remind UVa's Board of Visitors that one of their most important duties is to protect the University and its leaders from external political interference. By no means should they support this interference or, even worse, execute the politically motivated orders of federal bureaucrats. Yet, according to the New York Times, it appears that, rather than serving the needs of students or the people of the Commonwealth, some members of the Board may have acted as if they were ground troops in a political chain of command that stretched from the Trump White House to Governor Youngkin and then to the Governor's appointees on UVa's Board. Indeed, we have witnessed this political chain of command at work across multiple public universities in the Commonwealth, as many Youngkin-appointed Boards of Visitors have abandoned their responsibility to be wise stewards of their campuses in favor of executing the political orders of the Governor and Attorney General. Over the past year, we have seen unprecedented levels of Board overreach in the form of attempts to control curriculum, rewrite anti-discrimination policies, repress campus political speech, and to expand their power over the faculty tenure process. And now we must ask: did UVa…

colleges and universities. In short, in Virginia's democratic system, a series of checks and balances exist to ensure that the Commonwealth's public universities enjoy independence from the political whims and machinations of local, state, and federal officials. It is clear, however, that President Trump, Governor Youngkin, and many of Youngkin's board appointees want to bulldoze these checks and balances in order to exert ideological control over the Commonwealth's public colleges and universities. We refuse to let them do so. We stand with the UVa Faculty Senate in condemning the actions of the U.S. Department of Justice, and we join with them in demanding an independent and public investigation into the circumstances and negotiations that led to Ryan's forced resignation. On behalf of our members and all faculty across the Commonwealth, the Virginia Conference of the AAUP therefore strongly condemns the Trump administration's attack on the independence and integrity of the University of Virginia. We strongly condemn the Justice Department's decision to hold federal research funding hostage in order to oust UVa's president for political and ideological reasons. We reject the Justice Department's specious claims that President Ryan's administration was not in compliance with federal civil rights law. And we call on President Trump, the Justice Department, and Governor Youngkin to change course, to respect the independence and integrity of the University of Virginia, and to cease their larger effort to exert control over the governance and curriculum of American colleges and universities, both public and private. We also call upon the Rector of UVa's Board and the Rectors of George Mason University and the Virginia Military Institute to follow the rule of law and refuse to seat any board member who was rejected by the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee. As Virginia Senator Surovell has made clear, these appointments have been rejected following the rules of t…

We join with our VA AAUP Conference & UVa Faculty Senate in condemning the DOJ threats to withhold federal research funding in order to oust UVa President Jim Ryan for not bowing to political interference. We join with them in demanding an independent & public investigation into Ryan's forced exit.

critical thread. anyone who finds the scenario laid out implausible needs to get their head in the game. UVA is not Charlottesville, but for better or worse our fates are intertwined. we stand or fall together.

Part of the story about the war on US higher ed right now is university board members who want to see changes for the school that they can’t achieve structurally or politically – their power not in fact being unqualified – inviting and enabling federal incursion to make those changes

And, wow, I can’t believe I got here from there. Except that this administration’s performance of brute power will keep arresting, roughing up, pointing out, desecrating bodies because clearly signaling which bodies cannot count communicates to their base which bodies will always count.

This is a great thread. Highly recommend reading it to the end & the linked articles.

And they look exactly the same.

One wonders if they confused a fertility clinic with an abortion clinic.

My colleagues and I had a hilarious discussion during graduation about our regalia. The joke was that the majority graduated from “Amazon University” because you can order “authentic” regalia via Amazon for $199 (vs 1k for the university vendor).

Teal background with white text “ASL” on top and “Signbank” on bottom. Two outlined hands top right indicating “s” and “b”

Everyone!!!!!! ASL Signbank is live on its own domain 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

Working on a few things but yay!

aslsignbank.com

I’m not sure how to say this without sounding like an AH but I’m still amazed at the structure where I have a PhD and my interpreter has a high school diploma, and it shows. Then I feel like an AH for demanding better.

Times like these, I miss DeafTwitter so much. Just had two separate conversations with deaf colleagues at R1s about interpreters. We rely on interpreters to be good teachers and colleagues but it is so hard to find the right team. Especially if you are outside of a metropolitan area.

When I worked for TDI way back then, I was against the idea of a VRS registry for this reason. People thought I was crazy but I could see where a list of deaf people in the US could take us.

For accessibility purposes, I typed up a full transcript of the Senator's press conference where he provided updated information about the fight to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States.

Thank you so much! Very much appreciated.

Loved your talk! A lot to think about. Do you have any articles or recommendations for reading?

Reunion: How 'deaf rage' and 70s thrillers inspired William Mager's drama The four-part series tells the story of Daniel Brennan, a deaf man on a journey of revenge.

How 'deaf rage' inspired groundbreaking sign language thriller www.bbc.com/news/article...

I genuinely don't understand how anyone can look at the current moment and think "Abolish ICE" was anything but completely correct.

ICE cannot and should not exist. Period.

Ditto. It’s so hard.

Every so often, it just comes back to me in full force. The political and economic order that allowed this man to come to power is obviously no longer tenable. The leaders who let it happen obviously have to be replaced. This is an epoch defining failure and we have to turn the page completely.

Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive.

No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.

1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.

Check out The Beautiful Idea, a trans-owned antifascist bookstore / community space on the downtown mall in C’ville. Looking forward to your talk at UVA on Monday!

I think about this a lot. Cruelty is the point in their execution but it isn’t the ultimate goal.

Congratulations Maartje & team! Has it been published yet?

Built to Last Don’t blame COBOL. Blame austerity.

“Many of these men fancied themselves to be a cut above the [women] programmers who came before, and they often perceived COBOL as inferior and unattractive, in part because it did not require abstruse knowledge of underlying computer hardware or a computer science qualification.”

I’m a fourth generation Democrat. My grandmother was a grassroots organizer in rural upstate NY, working through lists on greenbar printouts, calling people & sending my grandfather out to pick up voters to bring them the polls. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately.

It’s back on my mind: the way they will utilize (in the word’s true sense) and weaponize ‘students’ when they fail to take you down other ways.

When scholars of authoritarianism and fascism leave U.S. universities because of the deteriorating political situation here, we should really worry.