The “Free Speech on Campus” symposium kicked off Thursday at the UVA School of Law. The two-day event, created by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, focuses on issues of free speech surrounding colleges and universities, and tackles tough topics, such as preserving open spaces and protecting all types of free speech.
Community leaders from all over Central Virginia are gathering to sign off on new protocols for dealing with sexual assault that center around getting law enforcement involved faster in the aftermath of reported sexual assaults. The document will encompass the city of Charlottesville, Albemarle County and the University of Virginia, among others.
Among the 100 newly funded projects are a joint effort at the University of West Virginia and University of Virginia to make a wearable positron emission tomography brain scanner – a device that can be used for monitoring a person’s brain function and their overall health.
Local Food Hub will host a community-wide celebration of the 2016 Community Food Awards on Thursday. UVA’s Greens to Grounds will receive an award for making local foods more accessible to students and developing a culture of healthy eating on Grounds.
Over at UVA’s Rapid Prototyping Lab, students are scanning, modeling and 3-D printing Greek vases. UVA Art History professor Tyler Jo Smith and graduate student Greg Lewis have teamed up with digital resources coordinator Leah Stearns and collections manager Jean Lancaster of The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA. The real value of printing out Greek ceramics is pointed out at the end of the article: “Unlike the original, students pick up, handle and measure the replicas as often as they wish, creating a tactile learning experience not often found in the study of ancient art.&r...
On Thursday, nearly a dozen agencies came together to sign a new memorandum of understanding for the Charlottesville-Albemarle Sexual Assault Response Team, which now includes the University of Virginia. The new agreement is the first in Virginia to include a local university after a change in law on July 1.
Accumulating evidence suggests that economic growth actually kills people. Christopher Ruhm, a UVA economics professor, was one of the first to notice this paradox. In a 2000 paper, he showed that when the American economy is on an upswing, people suffer more medical problems and die faster; when the economy falters, people tend to live longer.
A panel of university presidents, past and present, talked about the future of higher education at a discussion at UVA’s Curry School of Education on Thursday. Online education, affordability and state funding were all topics of discussion.
Congressional race analyst Kyle Kondik, who works for UVA’s Center for Politics, said that Republicans also have to worry that Trump's own war against the GOP could also have down-ballot effects. "That would be a real problem if voters took him up on that," Kondik said.
“Donald Trump’s candidacy is a slap in the face to what was called the ‘autopsy report,’” says Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst with UVA’s Center for Politics. “When he declared his candidacy, he talked about Mexican rapists and has made additional comments since then that can only push away Latino voters, which is really at odds with what the Republican Party said it needed to do to win elections after it lost in 2012.”
Powel, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus , has been anything but Democratic – just four years ago, it voted for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by 23 points. But it's a county to keep an eye on during election night. It's the fastest-growing county in the state, yet it was Trump's worst county in the Republican primary, meaning results here could give an indication of how the night unfolds, wrote Kyle Kondik of UVA’s Center for Politics and author of “The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President.”
(Co-written by Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at UVA) Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton added an important detail to her family agenda this week, outlining a plan to double the child tax credit for families with children 4 and under from $1,000 to $2,000. This new offering comes on the heels of an earlier campaign rollout of a plan to make child care more affordable by capping families’ expenditures on child care at 10 percent of their income, with no commitment to extending similar support to families with a stay-at-home parent.
UVA’s College Republicans chapter voted to rescind its Trump endorsement. A number of other College Republican affiliates have also backed away, agreeing to write in candidates or vote their "conscience."
UVA’s College Republicans chapter is among the largest to pull support, The Washington Post reports. “The only message we wish to convey is that as a club, as the primary Republican organization on Grounds, we do not feel Donald Trump accurately represents the way we view and conduct ourselves,” the group’s executive board wrote in a statement, following a 65 to 54 vote to rescind its endorsement.
A diverse group of religious leaders have called on President Obama and Congress to reject the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' recent report on religious freedom law. They are right to worry about the status of conscience rights protections moving forward, said Douglas Laycock, a UVA law professor and expert on religious freedom law.
Class conflict and growing cynicism toward the government are driving the increasingly polarized political climate in the United States, according to a new UVA report. The University’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture collaborated with Gallup on phone surveys exploring America’s political culture – the attitudes, beliefs and values underpinning political discourse in the U.S.
A dedicated civil rights activist who marched at Selma, Alabama, and was the first Roman Catholic priest to serve the University of Virginia, the Rev. William Stickle died Oct. 3 in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, at the age of 92.
If all goes according to President Obama's plan, America will send humans to Mars by the 2030s. Michael Menaker, UVA’s Commonwealth Professor of Biology, who has conducted Mars-related basic research on circadian rhythms for NASA, agrees that it is important to study the Red Planet – but feels that the emphasis on sending people to Mars serves as an unnecessary distraction away from problems such as climate change.
Larry Sabato, a UVA political science professor, warned that the Republican Party’s inability to unite could spell its doom this election. “A divided party rarely wins,” he said. “The GOP is so riven by factions generated by Trump’s candidacy that the outlook for Republicans is growing darker.”
"If Donald Trump becomes president, Ohio will vote for him," wrote Kyle Kondik, of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics and author of “The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President.” "If Hillary Clinton wins Ohio, she will be president. But if Hillary Clinton wins by just a small margin nationally, the state could easily back Trump in a loss." The state includes 88 counties that Kondik breaks down this way: 58 are in the "red reach" (Republican), 10 are "blue islands" (Democrat) and 20 are "purple ...