The Trump administration pushed out a university president – its latest bid to close the American mind | Robert Reich

Demanding that the University of Virginia's president resign is taken from the Viktor Orban playbook of authoritarianism

Under pressure from the Trump administration, the University of Virginia's president of nearly seven years, James Ryan, stepped down on Friday, declaring that while he was committed to the university and inclined to fight, he could not in good conscience push back just to save his job.

The Department of Justice demanded that Ryan resign in order to resolve an investigation into whether UVA had sufficiently complied with Donald Trump's orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion.

Universities are controlled by leftwing foundations. They're not controlled by the American taxpayer and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year.

I'm not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orban has ever done [but] I do think that he's made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com