The News for 12/13/25
The content you hear on this program has not been reviewed by WRFL prior to broadcast and is produced under the discretion of its host DJs, and does not reflect the views of the University of Kentucky, WRFL, or its underwriters.
We’ll get back to the music on 120 Minutes in just a moment, but first, it’s 12:30 and it’s time to check the news, for this week, December 13th.
The Lexington Herald-Leader reported Wednesday that the University of Kentucky has flagged 1,200 of its partnerships with external organizations for cancellation due to potential violations of the Civil Rights Act as interpreted by the Trump administration. This news comes after the U.S. Department of Education found earlier this year that UK and 45 other universities had violated the Civil Rights Act for participating in The PhD Project, a program for students of color completing their doctoral degrees. The federal government had forced UK to examine its relationships with every external organization to see if any of them “may restrict membership based on race.” But the Herald-Leader said that the report that UK sent to the U.S. Office of Civil Rights this week “went much further” than that.
Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford’s piece this week was titled, “UK complies with Trump administration’s desire to turn higher-ed back to 1950.” In it, she calls the process a “witch hunt” and says UK’s criteria to flag its partnerships for cancellation went as far as considering whether the organization’s name includes “racial, ethnic, gender-based or identity-specific terms” and whether they’ve had DEI trainings. UK also flagged any organizations whose websites contain terms such as “anti-racism,” “structural racism,” or similar concepts used to describe “the historical facts of a country that used to enslave much of its population,” Blackford said.
In the column, Blackford went on to say, “For some reason, UK officials seem a little too eager to comply in advance, with no word about how they disagree with these measures, even as they meet them. Are other universities putting as much evident passion as UK is into meeting Trump’s call to rid public spaces of everyone but white men? Certainly, UK has been dotting every i and crossing every t, especially if the t is in transphobia,” Blackford said. She concluded her piece by saying, “This too shall pass, and we will remember who folded to Trumpian extremism and hate. That’s not much consolation for the minority and vulnerable students on campus who are living through these attacks right now, but in Kentucky, it seems that it’s all we’ve got.”
In other local news, The Kentucky Kernel reported this week that the independent news outlet Kentucky Lantern has now sued the University of Kentucky after UK’s open records office refused to release records related to a $375,000 settlement that UK made with a faculty member who opposed its decision to disband the University Senate last year. Kentucky Lantern attorney Michael Abate told the Kernel that this case shows UK’s resistance to transparency and that he has never seen another situation like this one, in which UK made a large payment to faculty member Deshana Collett in June in exchange for her withdrawing her open records request. Abate said that UK “doesn’t want anybody to know what they’re up to,” and that people “should be really concerned.”
Finally tonight, in media news, Deadline Hollywood reports Friday that Paramount has launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros., which Netflix announced last week it would be buying for about $28 a share. Paramount’s hostile takeover bid offers $30 a share for Warner Bros., using funds from Jared Kushner’s private equity firm and from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Deadline reports that unlike Netflix, Paramount would likely shutter WB’s film studio and also wants to take control of the slate of cable TV channels owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, which would be spun off into a separate company under the Netflix deal. Warner Bros. must respond to the bid by December 22nd, although it could do so sooner, Deadline says, as the future of another historic major film studio hangs in the balance.
And that’s… the news.