The Republican Party of Virginia has publicly criticized the social media posts of UVA politics professor Larry Sabato as partisan lambasting of former President Donald Trump and requested the University investigate them. Sabato called the criticism “silly but predictable,” and a University spokesman said the professor’s opinions are protected free speech.
(Commentary co-written by Laurent DuBois, co-director of UVA’s Democracy Initiative and author of “Haiti: The Aftershocks of History”) The assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse on Wednesday was the first slaying of a Haitian leader in more than a century. But the scripts that dominate interpretations of Haitian politics, with its cycles of political upheaval abetted by foreign actors, can seem relatively unchanged over time. Often lost in this narrative are the root causes of the alienation of the Haitian people from their government.
(Commentary by Elizabeth R. Varon, Langbourne M. Williams professor of American history and author of “Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War”) On Saturday, Charlottesville will remove two equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from the city’s public squares. That removal will not “erase history,” as the statues’ defenders have repeatedly charged. It will instead allow us a clearer view of the complex Southern past.
Smith Mountain Lake Democrats hosted Allison Carter, operations director of the University of Virginia Center for Effective Lawmaking, at its general meeting June 28. Carter, who is a native of SML, introduced the club to the work of the center, which seeks to advance new knowledge about the effectiveness of individual lawmakers and U.S. legislative institutions.
Observers say voters are unlikely to base their decision at the ballot box based on who endorsed the candidate. Unless it's Trump. "I can guarantee you that Trump’s name ID is better in this district than Stivers’ is," said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
It’s not clear that Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet is vulnerable. University of Virginia’s Sabato’s Crystal Ball lists Bennet’s seat as safely Democrat and a June poll from research firm Global Strategy Group had Bennet leading a Republican challenger 48-40%.
Experts say the data dramatically underlines how crucial vaccines are, even as officials scramble to convince more people to receive the shots. “I mean, gosh, get vaccinated,” said Dr. Bill Petri, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Virginia. “But it also shows we should continue to make big outreach efforts to get to these populations that, in many cases, have historically not received adequate medical care.”
The French considered Algeria part of France, and around a million Europeans had settled there by the time war broke out. “If we look to the period of decolonization, settler colonies in the world are the most violent and the hardest to decolonize,” said Jennifer Sessions, a University of Virginia historian.
I spoke with a few Black women about their own take on what happened to Hannah-Jones and how it connected with their own experiences in the academy. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity. Lisa Woolfork, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia: Something I’m incredibly grateful for is Professor Hannah-Jones saying “no.” I think it is a powerful reminder that we all have that choice. It seems as though we don’t, and it seems as though we must accept second-best.
A professor who represented a Louisiana family in a civil lawsuit against the Baton Rouge Police Department has filed a federal lawsuit against the city, alleging that it retaliated against him for releasing police body-camera footage to the media. University of Virginia law professor Thomas Frampton filed the complaint in the Middle District of Louisiana last month. The complaint noted the city petitioned a Baton Rouge juvenile court to hold Frampton in contempt for releasing video depicting how officers strip-searched 23-year-old Clarence Green and his under-age brother after a traffic stop.
Haiti officially declared its independence from colonizer France in 1804 after a revolutionary war staged by enslaved laborers and inspired by the American Revolution. But the French “never quite gave up on reconquering their former colony,” according to Marlene Daut, a historian of Haiti at the University of Virginia.
“He had obviously many enemies,” said Robert Fatton, a professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia well-versed in the Haiti situation. “There might have been some degree of complicity on the part of those protecting the president. The past 30 years have been one calamity after another, and now it is getting more serious. We have two individuals vying for the position of prime minister. The economy is in terrible shape. The covid situation is deteriorating. No one is vaccinated. And then you have the security situation. The police are completely fragmented, and som...
Political instability, the lasting effects of a devastating earthquake and a cholera epidemic, foreign political meddling, and gang violence have all contributed to serious instability in the country. "You have this situation where the institutions are not working, where the economy is stagnated ... the politics has been extremely volatile. The current government has been challenged by the population. There have been massive accusations of corruption," Robert Fatton, an expert on Haitian politics at the University of Virginia, told NPR. "So you name it, in terms of instability and institutiona...
Robert Fatton Jr, an expert on Haiti at the University of Virginia, agreed that a new election would be a "huge mistake" and said a better goal would be pushing for a government that includes the opposition as well as civil society. "If the international community is to use its power in a wise way, it could compel the government to accept a government of national unity," Fatton said. He acknowledged that Haiti had little precedent for such power-sharing compromises but said: "The fact that Jovenel is dead might in a weird way be an opportunity to force the issue."
Though Haiti has experienced all manner of crises in its modern history — coups, US interventions, a devastating earthquake — the country hadn't seen a presidential assassination in over a century. "I was absolutely shocked," Robert Fatton, a native of Haiti who is an expert on Haitian politics at the University of Virginia, said. "I'm quite a pessimistic guy, but I didn't expect any assassination," Fatton added. "The idea that you have, what are for all practical purposes, foreign mercenaries coming into the country, going to the house of the president, and killing him — that to me was absolu...
“The most important new fact is that apparently the mercenaries were not supposed to kill the president, but arrest him. Why? And who paid them remains an enigma,” Robert Fatton, a professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia who has written extensively on Haiti, said in an email. “Now whether the mercenaries are lying to the Haitian police is another question.”
Robert Fatton, a Haitian politics expert at the University of Virginia, said gangs were a force to contend with and it isn’t certain Haiti’s security forces can enforce a state of siege. “It’s a really explosive situation,” he said.
(By Rachel Augustine Potter, assistant professor of politics) Nearly six months in, President Biden’s regulatory policy is slowly coming into focus. It is ambitious. The administration has revoked many of Trump’s executive actions on regulation, repealed dozens of regulations issued over the last four years, pledged to use regulatory policy to pursue administration priorities, promised to incorporate distributional consequences into regulatory analysis, and selected an ideologically-progressive regulatory team. Biden has also ordered the Office of Management and Budget to “determine an appropr...
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New Darden Scholarship Initiative Aimed At Attracting Diverse Candidates To PE, VC & Hedge Fund Jobs
It’s no secret that MBAs who land jobs in private equity, venture capital or hedge funds are among the most highly paid graduates of business school. But those lucrative positions often prove elusive to both women and underrepresented minorities. To address those shortfalls, the University of Virginia’s Darden School Foundation is launching a new scholarship fund and career program to encourage and promote diverse leadership in those fields. The Breakthrough Scholars Program will target an annual cohort of up to a dozen students who apply to either Darden’s full-time MBA or Executive MBA progr...