With students moving in and the first classes already underway, UVA has come back to life. And for many, it is time for a reckoning. How much will one traumatic weekend change the university?
Ralph Sampson was on the West Coast when he received a call from his family, asking if he had heard about the racial and social unrest in Charlottesville. When Sampson turned on his television, he was horrified with what he saw.
Steve Macko, a UVA professor of environmental sciences, and the artists who created the show are hoping to raise awareness around the world – to inspire new laws and rules for fishing and reporting ghost nets. Macko and the curator of the Kluge Ruhe Aborginal Art Museum will lecture on the subject Friday at 4 in Clark Hall.
One organization worthy of the spotlight is UVA’s Virginia College Advising Corps. The nonprofit serves 28 partner high schools around the entire commonwealth, pairing recent college graduates with students as they prepare for college.
Washington PostThey swarmed the monument with Tiki torches that flickered in the dark, their shouts piercing what had been a quiet evening on the Lawn at the University of Virginia. There, at the foot of the bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson, they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” The neo-Nazis and white supremacists who recently descended on Charlottesville ignored one key historical fact, among others: Monticello, Jefferson’s beloved iconic mansion just a few miles southeast, was saved from ruin by Jews.
“Finland has universal health care, a robust visiting nurse system for families who just had a baby, and extended maternity and paternity leave. All of these we know impact positively on infant mortality rates,” said Rachel Moon, a University of Virginia pediatrician and chair of the task force. “The U.S. has none of that,” she said.
Union Bank & Trust continues as a lead underwriter for Leadership Charlottesville. Union is now joined with the University of Virginia and the University of Virginia Health System as lead underwriters for the Leadership Charlottesville program.
The last time the world paid so much attention to Charlottesville, it was the summer of 1940, and Europe was on fire. In a few short months Hitler had conquered much of western Europe, and France itself was on the verge of succumbing. On June 10, the day that Mussolini took Italy into the war on the side of the Nazis, Franklin D. Roosevelt traveled by presidential train to Charlottesville to deliver a commencement speech in the University of Virginia’s elegant Memorial Gymnasium.
New research published in the journal Child Development – led by Rachel K. Narr, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia – shows that teens aged 15 and 16 who had a close friend, rather than a bigger peer group featuring less intense relationships, reported higher levels of self-worth and lower levels of social anxiety and depression at 25 compared with their peers who were more broadly popular as teens.
Aiming to quash concerns of parents of perspective and current UVA students, more than 200 African-American UVA graduates mobilized and activated altruistically “to support the efforts in Charlottesville in order to strengthen the community that helped to shape our individual characters over the years.” Condemning the white supremacist march and shedding light on racism, through the prism of an African-American in UVA’s environment, Quentin Washington and his fellow alumni – Cameron M. Webb and Gregory Jackson Jr. – led an organized effort to engage incoming freshman throughout move-in weekend...
As classes began Tuesday at this historic school founded by Thomas Jefferson, 10 days after deadly violence jolted the community, UVA is seeking not only to heal, but to learn from what happened.
A spokeswoman for NextGen said its organizers registered more than 1,000 voters at the University of Virginia campus as students moved onto campus over the past weekend.
(Commentary by UVA alumnus Chase Gunter) Over 100 robotics and artificial intelligence experts worldwide warned the United Nations about a future of war that includes autonomous killing machines. In a letter to the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the 116 signatories representing companies from 26 countries -- including co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk and co-founder of Google’s DeepMind Mustafa Suleyman -- urge the U.N.’s Group of Governmental Experts to ban the international use of robotic weapons.
(Commentary by UVA alumnus Steven Okun, founder and CEO of APAC Advisors, who has lived and worked in Singapore since 2003) Okun wrote about how much he loves Charlottesville, is proud of UVA, and contrasts the words of the U.S. president with those of Singapore’s prime minister on race.
Professor Christopher J. Ruhm of UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy recently demonstrated that many death certificates in drug overdoses cases do not specify the drug or drugs involved. Correcting for this problem, he estimated the true heroin death rate in the U.S. is 22 percent above the government’s official figures.
Scholars of right-wing movements say James Damore has positioned himself as the new, milder messenger for an older set of beliefs animating right-wing extremists. By using his newfound publicity to reinforce notions that innate biological traits help explain social inequality, and downplaying the role of discrimination, he’s promoting a version of alt-right lite. It’s particularly complicated because Damore cites legitimate science as evidence for questionable conclusions. That’s a well-worn playbook, says Nicole Hemmer, a UVA professor focused on the history of conservatism.
UVA computer science professor Vicente Ordóñez and colleagues tested two of the largest collections of photos and data used to train these types of AIs (including one supported by Facebook and Microsoft) and discovered that sexism was rampant.
UBikes allows people to create an account and check out bikes around the university. The program started in 2015, but has seen usage double in recent years. Currently, UVA has 21 bike stations with 120 bikes. The university is looking to place another station between University Hall and John Paul Jones Arena.
Others were more interested in the scientific side of the event. Library staff and University of Virginia students handed out about 200 special glasses that resembled 3-D eyewear distributed by movie theaters but with special filtering lenses, exhorting attendees to share.
In the wake of the violent white supremacist rally at the University of Virginia and Charlottesville last weekend, as well as President Donald Trump’s inability to condemn the evil of neo-Nazis, it could be tempting to sink into depression and feel powerless. But thankfully, strong communities around the world — including thousands of Care2 members — have come together to offer hope and support. (First on the list is the UVA vigil Aug. 16.)