The News for 12/6/25
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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 6th.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that the University of Oklahoma placed one of its instructors on administrative leave after a student complained about religious discrimination for receiving a zero on an essay she wrote for a psychology class that was not based in any scientific foundation but instead cited the Bible and called the existence of multiple genders “demonic.” The decision to suspend the professor, who is trans, resulted in widespread condemnation of the University of Oklahoma, which is just one in a long line of universities this year, including UK, that have suspended their own faculty or staff after conservatives complained, according to the Times.
Independent journalist Parker Molloy wrote about the subject Tuesday, saying, “Somewhere, right now, a trans person is doing their job, but at some point, someone is going to have a problem with them because they’re trans. That person will take their grievance to the media, and it won’t matter what actually happened. The news will cover the [so-called] ‘controversy’, and the trans person will be put on leave, fired, or resign. And then the conservative who started it all will go on Fox News and get a GoFundMe.” Molloy went on to say, “This is a pattern. We’ve watched it happen over and over again, and we will keep watching it happen until the institutions that capitulate to these campaigns start recognizing them for what they are: coordinated attempts to purge trans people from public life.”
In other higher education news, The Atlantic published an article this week with the title, “Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize,” arguing that, “The skills that students will need in an age of automation are precisely those that are eroded by inserting AI into the educational process.” The author, Michael Cline, wrote in the piece, “Technology professors believe that no one yet understands how to integrate AI into curricula without risking terrible educational consequences. It’s difficult to imagine a market for graduates whose thinking, interpreting and communicating has been offloaded to a machine.” This news comes after UK last month announced its “CATS AI” initiative, launching an Artificial Intelligence major and partnering with Microsoft to infuse AI into the workflows of UK students, faculty and staff, as reported by the Kentucky Kernel.
Also here at home, Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford wrote on Thursday about UK’s decision this week to fire its football coach, Mark Stoops, and pay out the remainder of his contract. Blackford wrote in the piece, “How could UK afford to pay $38 million over 60 days? We don’t know.” Earlier this year, UK funneled its athletics department into a limited liability company called Champions Blue, which requires fewer transparency disclosures, according to the Herald-Leader. “All this points to UK reaching peak corporate status, one in which various parts of what used to be a university have been parceled off into LLCs or into public/private partnerships. None of that is fundamentally improving UK, where professors and researchers are being told to save money and cut back. The last thing anyone talks about these days is educating students,” Blackford said.
Finally tonight, in media news, The New York Times reported that Netflix announced plans on Friday to acquire Warner Bros. in an $82 billion deal that “will send shockwaves through Hollywood and the broader media landscape. Netflix is already the world’s largest paid streaming service, with more than 300 million subscribers. Bulking up Netflix with Warner Bros. and HBO would create a colossus that could force smaller companies to merge as they scramble to compete,” the Times said. A group of feature film producers sent a letter to Congress on Thursday about what they said are their “grave concerns” with the deal, writing, “Netflix views any time spent watching a movie in a theater as time not spent on their platform. They have no incentive to support theatrical exhibition, and they have every incentive to kill it.”
And that’s… the news.