Institutions such as the University of Virginia have already started to implement institution-wide hiring freezes as part of their effort to minimize the possible economic impact of COVID-19. In a message to the campus, UVA president Jim Ryan pledged that the burden of cost cutting would be shared across the institution. All schools and units will cut or eliminate nonessential expenses. The university’s executive leadership team will take a 10% salary reduction, and capital projects that haven’t already started are on hold.
In light of COVID-19, Aramark is certainly not alone in cutting staff – especially in the service industry. Aramark, which provides services to more than 400 colleges, has faced a particularly large outcry from students at schools such as the University of Virginia, Harvard and Cornell. Most strikingly, UVA even had to go as far as to create a $2M fund to support workers laid off by the company. Surely, leaving an educational institution to pick up the tab for workers in a crisis is not what one should expect from a “stakeholder-first” company.
(Commentary by Alex Hernandez, dean of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies) Online learning can elicit powerful emotions, but is typically not associated with building confidence, leadership, and the other human skills people need to flourish. Sometimes people just want to check the box on their degrees so they can move forward with their lives. But for many adult learners, online learning was transformative.
The White House’s seemingly erratic response has further contributed to the rise in governors’ popularity and credibility, UVA law professor Dick Howard said. “The president’s policies seem to change from day to day, so when you look at that performance in Washington compared with a much more steady hand of at least some of the governors, then it’s not surprising that the governors end up looking pretty good.”
When looking at Jocelyn Willoughby’s player bio on UVA’s women’s basketball page, it takes until the ninth bullet point to reach one of Willoughby’s on-court accolades. Prior to listing Willoughby’s 2019-20 All-American status, her bio shares seven off-the-court achievements.
For younger kids, missing out on play with peers could take a toll. Play facilitates cognitive development, said James Coan, a UVA psychology professor who studies the neuroscience of human connection. And yet “adults are not very good playmates,” he said. “They are boring, they are impatient and they have other things to do.”
On Wednesday evening, you may have noticed a parade of red and blue lights in one Charlottesville neighborhood. First responders from the Charlottesville area came to show support to former UVA Police Officer Becky Campbell.
UVA and Piedmont Virginia Community College are among the schools across Virginia that are getting federal funding to support students.
The University of Virginia Medical Center was able to redesign and accelerate portions of a $394-million expansion project to meet demand for bed capacity brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The University of Virginia is freezing hiring, freezing salaries and taking other steps due to the financial impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
The University of Virginia on Tuesday announced it would freeze hiring and salaries and institute pay cuts for leadership as the university wrestles with coronavirus-created financial impacts of shuttered classes, canceled celebrations and refunds to students.
UVA business professor Raj Venkatesan said, “Streaming is only going to grow. People will need some kind of entertainment, especially with live entertainment going away. The question of budget is definitely there – if people lose jobs, they may only have one service or two. There is an opportunity, especially for cheaper services like Peacock, but there is also the competition.”
The Zimmermans’ initial gift: $100,000. The goal for what they’re calling the Pros for Heroes Covid-19 Relief Fund: $250,000, with the help of athletes from all of Washington’s professional sports teams. The hope: Solicit gifts, both big and small, to create a sustaining gift that can help front-line health workers and their families get through this crisis.
America’s poor have previously blamed themselves for their own poverty, UVA sociologist Allison Pugh said. But “it’s gonna be hard to blame yourself when your grandmother dies,” she said. “All of a sudden, it doesn’t feel like your fault anymore. And you’re gonna look up and be like, ‘This is not OK.’”
“For these five years, juries would say, ‘You know, let’s take an example like 100 years,’” Juliet Hatchett of the Innocence Project at the UVA School of Law said. “They would think that meant that the person was going to become parole-eligible in 20 years or something like that, and then that wasn’t the case. So, they’re giving much longer sentences than they actually realized that they had been giving.”
“It’s a gigantic change,” Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said in an interview on Monday. “There really is no precedent. There is no period like this. Virginia has never had a liberal period.”
(Commentary by Raymond Scheppach, professor of public policy) “Governors Have the Best Political Jobs in America” is the name of one of my lectures in a leadership course I occasionally teach at the University of Virginia. I might call that lecture now, “Governor, Why Did You Want That Job Anyway?”
“It has been a painfully long haul, but I am grateful that we finally have the legal ability to remove these racist relics from our public spaces. These Civil War participation trophies commemorate a failed white supremacist slave-ocracy that destroyed black people’s lives by theft, violence and extraction, only to perversely glorify those horrors as heroic acts. The time to idolize white supremacy in statuary or deed is long past. This bill is the first step to building racial justice and repair for Virginia." - Dr. Lisa Woolfork, associate professor of English.