“The more often the president makes himself available, the better the chances that his arguments will reach their intended audience without filtering by the often hostile press,” said Mary Kate Cary, a senior fellow at UVA’s Miller Center and a former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush.
The measure has received criticism, with some experts calling it a Band-Aid. “Imagine that you have a college-aged kid who runs up $1,500 in credit card debt,” said James P. Naughton, an actuary now teaching at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. “If you give him $1,500 dollars and you don’t do anything else, the odds that the problem is going to get fixed are pretty low.”
(Commentary) The cornerstone of classic liberal thinking is the “idea that good information, good arguments will triumph over bad information and bad arguments over time,” Siva Vaidhyanathan told On the Media co-host Bob Garfield. Today, Vaidhyanathan, a UVA professor of media studies, argues that a regard for facts has given way to a kind of epistemological tribalism. “People are subscribing to … claims about the world based on their identities, based on their relationships with others, based on what makes them feel better about themselves … the clustering of the Like-Minded for the sake of c...
Delayed kindergarten enrollment, also known as redshirting, is an annual occurrence, but the coronavirus pandemic has contributed to the process. Redshirting, normally sought out by families who are white, affluent and have sons, is when a child delays starting kindergarten for one year. “It is this idea of giving kids the gift of time, the idea of giving them another year to develop, grow and play and potentially be in a less structured environment will allow them to get more out of it down the road,” said Daphna Bassok, a UVA associate professor of education and public policy.
(Podcast) Martin Davidson is the Johnson & Higgins Professor of Business Administration at UVA’s Darden School of Business and senior associate dean and global chief diversity officer. His book, “The End of Diversity as We Know It: Why Diversity Efforts Fail and How Leveraging Difference Can Succeed,” introduces a research-driven roadmap to help leaders more effectively create and capitalize on diversity in organizations.
Interview with Lesley Lokko, recipient of the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize, whose global teaching career has radically changed the conversation around race, identity and architecture. At present, she is still teaching, remotely, at UVA and New York’s Cooper Union, while embarking on another novel – she finds writing fiction a pleasurable distraction from the pressures of academia.
Kiki Petrosino, a UVA professor of English, has been awarded the 2021 Rilke Prize. Since 2012, the University of North Texas’s department of English has awarded the annual Rilke Prize to recognize exceptional artistry and vision by a mid-career poet.
(Audio) In this week’s Unifying America edition of the Kaleidoscope, we look at the joy or dismay people felt over news that six books by Dr. Seuss will no longer be published over racist and insensitive images. Allison speaks with UVA professor Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, who specializes in American and Asian American studies, about what she thinks about this controversy that’s been going on for years.
In the past few years, Asian and Asian-American films that have received critical acclaim have largely focused on East Asian experiences or have featured a predominantly East Asian cast. “It’s not East Asians excluding Southeast Asians, but East Asians and Southeast Asians being put into a zero-sum game, where they have to compete for a limited amount of attention from from people who finance and produce films,” says Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, an American studies and English professor at the University of Virginia who also directs the Asian Pacific American Studies minor.
Workplace diversity and inclusion experts say it is common for human resource officials to use mental health and well-being as a tactic to ignore discrimination – and even participate in it. “The broader pattern of HR not being supportive, continuing to make the person who was discriminated against the problem in some way rather than the discrimination and the perpetrator of the discrimination as the problem – those are patterns that we have seen in our research,” said Laura Morgan Roberts, a professor at UVA’s Darden School of Business and co-editor of the book, “Race, Work, and Leadership.”
“If you just look at the most deaths, it really makes sense to start with 65 and older because if you’re 80 compared with even just 50, you’re 20 times more likely to die from COVID-19. So you definitely want to get 65 and then we’d like to get everyone with pre-existing medical conditions, but at the same time, targeting the populations that have poor access to medical care makes really good sense if our goal is to prevent hospitalizations and deaths,” said Dr. William Petri, an immunologist at the University of Virginia, pointing out that COVID does in fact discriminate, impacting Black and ...
Kevin McDonald, who leads UVA’s diversity efforts, said that the plan is inspired by the Inclusive Excellence ideal developed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He said the ONE Virginia plan leaves it up to agencies to decide the metrics they’ll use to measure progress, allowing flexibility but requiring accountability.
Members of the Charlottesville and UVA community are raising money to provide meals and even a caffeine boost to those on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. Kim and Brian Levinstein are making sure those working at the UVA Medical Center aren’t being forgotten. The two siblings have partnered with others in the community to raise funds to donate meals, and Keurig machines with hundreds of “K-cups” to medical staff.
The Blue Ridge Health District distributed its first shipment of the Johnson & Johnson vaccines on Friday. At Monticello High School, people living in the Blue Ridge Health District who are 65 years old or older could get their one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Friday’s clinic was a collaborative effort between the Blue Ridge Health District, the University of Virginia, and Charlottesville Emergency Operations.
UVA Health says it has received 60,145 doses to date and administered 56,278. That is 93.6% of those vaccines. UVA Health has also scheduled 7,000 first- and second-dose appointments as of Friday.
A study done by The National Marriage Project at UVA found, “Men and women who only slept with their (future) spouse prior to marriage reported higher marital quality than those who had other sexual partners as well. Further, for women, having had fewer sexual partners before marriage was also related to higher marital quality. This doesn’t mean that sex before marriage will doom a marriage, but sex with many different partners may be risky if you’re looking for a high-quality marriage.”
So what’s the income sweet spot? Psychologists from Purdue University and UVA analyzed World Gallup Poll data from 1.7 million people in 164 countries in 2018, cross-referencing earnings with life satisfaction. They concluded that the ideal income for individuals is $95,000 a year for life satisfaction, and $60,000 to $75,000 a year for emotional well-being.
Researchers at the UVA Medical Center had been working on software to help doctors detect respiratory failure leading to intubation. When then pandemic hit, they adapted the software for COVID-19. “It seemed to us when that all started happening, that this is what we had been working toward all these years. We didn’t anticipate a pandemic of this nature. But here it was,” says Randall Moorman, a professor of medicine. “But it’s just the perfect application of the technology and an idea that we’ve been working on for a long time.”
In a study published Friday in the journal Emotion, University of Florida psychology professor Erin Westgate and colleagues Timothy Wilson, Nicholas Buttrick, and Rémy Furrer of UVA and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University instructed participants to think meaningful thoughts. Westgate anticipated that this would guide the thinkers into a rewarding experience, but they actually found it less enjoyable than their unguided thoughts.