The University of Virginia Board of Visitors unanimously voted Thursday to rename Ruffner Hall in honor of Walter Ridley, the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from the university.
The University of Virginia is waiving its ACT and SAT requirements for next year’s applicants. The university announced Thursday that it will not require applicants to submit standardized testing as part of their application “for at least the next application cycle.” UVA made the move because of the “uncertain prospect of universally accessible, reliable and equitable” testing.
The University of Virginia will not require applicants to submit standardized testing scores to apply for the fall 2021 semester, but students who want to submit a test score still can. The uncertain prospect of universally accessible, reliable and equitable SAT or ACT testing because of the coronavirus pandemic is behind this decision.
The University of Virginia will not require students to take either the SAT or ACT when applying this fall. Provost Liz Magill said that with the COVID-19 pandemic, this was an easy call for officials, and one other universities have made in recent weeks. University officials will use this admissions cycle to learn about the impact of the policy change and decide next spring whether to extend the pilot.
The University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors voted Thursday to rename Ruffner Hall, and honor the late Walter Ridley. He was a Newport News native who became the first African-American to receive a doctoral degree from UVA. When Ridley graduated in 1953, he was the first black who earned a doctorate from a historically white university in the South.
The average student could begin the next school year having lost as much as a third of their expected progress from the previous year in reading and half of their expected progress in math, according to a working paper from NWEA, a nonprofit organization, and scholars at Brown University and the University of Virginia.
The sight of Malcolm Brogdon, holding a megaphone, being a leader on the streets of his hometown during civil unrest, is surprising only to those who don’t know much about him. It’s not an act. It’s not pandering to get likes on social media. Or attention. “He had that deep voice. Very thoughtful. A perfectionist. He was raised well,” says Tony Bennett, who coached Brogdon at UVA.
What goes into the toilet doesn’t always stay there, and other coronavirus risks in public bathrooms
(Commentary by Dr. William Petri, professor of medicine) So, how do you stay safe when you’re away from home and you’ve really got to go? As a medical doctor and epidemiologist, I study infectious diseases involving the gastrointestinal tract. Here are four things to pay attention to when it comes to any public restroom.
Doctors and researchers who study the link between race and health also worry the seemingly relentless onslaught of brutal news is having a secondary effect: dialing up already-persistent stress levels within African Americans, making them even more vulnerable to illness and disease. Agreed, says Dr. Gail Christopher, executive director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity. She points to a study of women with Arab names in California following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when many in the Arab-American community were harassed. That someone like Christopher, an African Ameri...
Large public universities and elite private colleges will also undoubtedly suffer financial hardship from the pandemic – James Ryan, president of the University of Virginia (which has a nearly $10 billion endowment) says the university will have to “tighten our belts, just like other organizations and universities across the country” – but those schools aren’t currently in danger of closing forever. COVID-19 may come and go, but the uncertainty plaguing students at small colleges across the country is here to stay.
Last week, we spoke with Molly O'Dell of the Roanoke-Allegheny Health District about the numbers, and she pointed out numbers about COVID-19 cases and deaths don't always match the same datasets recorded at the state level. But the data discrepancy goes further than that and, one expert says, with serious consequences. “The fact is, I don’t think there’s any question we could have saved lives if we could have acted more responsible, you know, in a way that was more coordinated earlier on,” said Philip Bourne, dean of the newly created School of Data Science at the University of Virginia.
Winning the primary outright – and avoiding a runoff – could give a boost to the Democratic nominee, although some political insiders argue that facing voters multiple times can help keep candidates sharp and keep the electorate engaged. “The runoff dynamic in Georgia maybe adds another extra step that the Democrats have to be very careful about planning for,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan newsletter from the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
(Subscription required) The coronavirus has parked multitudes on their sofas, where many have gone half-mad reading rants from advanced-studies graduates of the University of Twitter. Matthew Crawford’s “Why We Drive” is the perfect antidote. Mr. Crawford, a senior fellow at UVA and the author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft” (2009) and other works of social philosophy, has written a thoughtful, entertaining and substantive work about the joys of driving – and about the attempts by various scolds to relegate that joy, and similar expressions of independence, to the junkyard of history.
In the United States, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which is the major law for health data regulation, applies only to medical providers, health insurers and their business associations. Its definition of “personal health information” covers only the data held by these entities. This definition is turning out to be inadequate for the era of the Internet of Bodies. Tech companies are now also offering health-related products and services, and gathering data. Margaret Riley, a professor of health law at the University of Virginia, pointed out to me in an i...
Two UVA researchers are working on a project to help people who have suffered large amounts of tissue loss. The researchers are a biomedical engineer and a mechanical engineer, and they are creating a custom-designed tissue incubation system, or bioreactor, to automate the growth of muscle stem cells into tissue patches that can be implanted.
University of Virginia students who lost their summer internships due to COVID-19 are now helping area businesses transition online in the wake of the pandemic. The Central Virginia Small Business Development Center is teaming up with UVA for the Propel Management Consulting Program. The projects will target Fluvanna, Louisa, Orange and Greene counties.
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George F. Will joins UVA law professor Saikrishna Prakash for a conversation on Prakash’s new book, “The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against Its Ever-Expanding Powers.”
UVA’s Aynne Kokas discusses how Beijing is successfully using images of U.S. protests as domestic propaganda. Mainly used to push back on U.S. critiques of Chinese human rights violations, the propaganda is extremely effective among casual viewers of news and state-owned media.
Dr. Taison Bell is both an infectious-disease and a critical-care physician at UVA – exactly the sort of doctor one wants when contending with a hyper-contagious virus that sends people to the ICU. He said that, as a black man, he’s been disturbed but not surprised by both the most recent examples of police brutality and the disproportionate coronavirus death toll among African-Americans. Watching the current protests, Bell has wanted to join them; at the same time, he has worried about how they may worsen the pandemic.