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.
Whether people maintain traditional prevention methods – frequently washing hands, wearing masks and keeping a distance of 6 feet from others – could make the difference between a continued improvement in the public health crisis or another peak to surpass January’s, according to analysts at UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute.
Almost all of the new COVID-19 cases that were reported Thursday at UVA are among students.
The Education Department has said that the FAFSA site is not down, but they are aware that some users haven’t been able to complete certain actions. Officials at the University of Virginia, which had a March 1 deadline, said they were aware of the issue and know that the department is working to fix it. As of Thursday, the University had only heard from one student about the problem.
UVA is feeling the financial burdens of COVID-19. Spokesperson Brian Coy says the pandemic cost the school more than $250 million in the last two fiscal years. The University lost housing and dining fees, launched COVID-19 apps, provided PPE, and shifted gears to support mass virus testing efforts.
Local hospitality businesses weren’t surprised by UVA’s decision Wednesday to cancel its typical May graduation ceremony due to COVID-19 concerns. Although expected, the call represents another hit to Charlottesville businesses buffeted by the pandemic.
UVA students will have to wait to find out how much their tuition will cost next year as the University’s Board of Visitors on Friday postponed a decision until after Gov. Ralph Northam has signed the state’s next budget into law.