(Commentary by Marva Barnett, professor emerita of French) My former student, Virgil Motley, recently died of respiratory failure. A sad loss of a memorable character, I thought – but I didn’t know the half of it.
UVA provides a case study in flux for public flagship universities. More than 48,000 applied, up 15% from the year before. The University offered admission to about 9,900, or 21%. It also set up a sizable wait list. The target is an entering class of 3,788. What happens next is anyone’s guess. “I’m not sure I’ve ever gone into a summer so uncertain about what’s going to happen,” said UVA dean of admission Greg W. Roberts.
Amanda Rutherford, a second-year at the University of Virginia School of Law and articles development editor for the Virginia Law Review, said spring submissions surpassed last year's numbers well before a published March 30 cutoff. “It seems like we have more submissions from practitioners and people outside [law schools] ... and more from what I'd call the credentialed white males,” she said. “We've had to be super conscientious about what a COVID life looks like for authors, and the priority is get the best scholarship from as diverse a group as possible. It's an ongoing project.”
A commitment to equity and a record to back it up helped Abel Liu make history. The San Anselmo resident broke barriers in his landslide University of Virginia Student Council election victory last month that made him the nation's first openly transgender student government president at any university, and the first Chinese American in UVA's 202-year history. Liu captured more than 81 percent of the vote running a campaign focused on student government reform, equity, empowerment, and what he described as “radical compassion.”
The movement to remove the statues began in 2016 when Zyahna Bryant, then a ninth-grader at Charlottesville High School, started a petition to remove the statue of Lee and rename the park. Bryant, now a second-year student at the University of Virginia, said the Supreme Court of Virginia’s opinion was “both exciting and long overdue.”
Ruth Mason, professor of law and taxation at the University of Virginia, told Tax Notes in an email that generally, it is hard for states to win conditional spending cases because the state can always turn down the federal money. “But [the National Federation of Independent Business] reinvigorated the test the Supreme Court set out for conditional grants in South Dakota v. Dole. Congress does not have the power under the Constitution to forbid states from cutting taxes,” Mason said.
Baseball players, especially pitchers, know the term well. So do golfers. They know it well enough to avoid mentioning it: “the yips.” There’s no strict definition, although Dr. Jason Freeman, the sports psychologist for UVA’s Athletics Department, has a provisional one: “the override of a well-learned or routine motor script.” You can throw a 99 mph fastball. You can sink a 20-foot putt or 20 straight free throws. Then something happens, and suddenly you can’t do those things, and you begin to fixate on the fact that you can’t, and then everything goes bad.
But what makes Aquia Creek sandstone easy to shape also makes its exterior susceptible to weathering and erosion. Thus, after the Capitol was burned during the War of 1812, reconstruction made use of marble — a harder, metamorphic rock found on the upper Potomac. I was learning that a rock is not just a rock. I wanted to know more, and reached out to retired University of Virginia geology professor Thomas H. Biggs.
(Podcast) On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Christopher Mitchell, director of ILSR’s Community Broadband initiative, and Christopher Ali, associate professor in UVA’s Department of Media Studies. Their conversation focuses around the idea of what it means to be local during a time when more and more pieces of our lives are shifting online.
The FCC “has grossly overestimated the number of connected Americans because of faulty data gathering,” Christopher Ali, an associate professor in media studies at the University of Virginia, told lawmakers. “We don’t know the exact number of un- and under-connected rural Americans.”
The proposed changes to election laws could have unintended effects. “Those people who tend to vote less often who like Trump, you know, they may have a hard time voting,” said J. Miles Coleman from UVA’s Center for Politics. “So, in some states, it may even backfire on the Republicans.”
In a Q&A about his new film project on Ernest Hemingway, filmmaker Ken Burns cites UVA literary scholar Steven Cushman, professor of English. “The thing I go back to often is that this is a guy who’s emerging out of a modernist tradition in which everybody is complicated. Joyce and Faulkner, they’re really super complicated. And, as the literary scholar Steve Cushman says in the film, Hemingway dared to impersonate simplicity.”
Openly protesting such a high-profile outlet – which many told BuzzFeed News extends to peer-reviewing other scholars’ manuscripts if asked – could have career consequences beyond lost publications. It could also, some researchers fear, bring reputational harm. “In order for us to promote ourselves up the academic ladder, we have to get our papers into these journals,” said Ebony Hilton, an associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Virginia who is researching how much access racial minorities with COVID-19 have had to scarce medical equipment, like ventilators. Hilton said her...
Dr. Patrick Jackson, an infectious disease expert at the University of Virginia said Pfizer’s announcement Thursday is promising, but expected. “I hope this will make people hesitate less,” said Jackson. “I don’t think this finding was very surprising. It was what we’d hoped to see, but certainly, it was on the stronger side of what we were hoping for.”
“I am hopeful that we will not see a fourth wave. What's going on is we have two things going in opposite directions,” said Dr. Bill Petri from the University of Virginia, referring to vaccinations rising and the British variant of the virus spreading.
There is a long legacy of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. that is often intertwined with misogyny, experts said. One of the earliest acts of anti-Asian sentiment was the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles that killed 19 Chinese immigrants, said Sylvia Chong, associate professor of American studies at the University of Virginia. The Page Act of 1875 denied Chinese women entry into the U.S. due to “lewd and immoral purposes” because “they were seen as a sort of a threat to immigration, but also, they were characterized as not being virtuous,” said Shilpa Davé, associate dean and assistant profes...
Local activist, historian and University of Virginia professor Jalane Schmidt sees vindication for various community members for “having been right all along” and reflects on the historical spaces she has worked to contextualize through tours in recent years.
Richard Schragger, a law professor at the University of Virginia who has followed the case, said Thursday’s ruling was “a symbolic victory in a way, and an important one,” following a year of protests against racism and police brutality in response to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
Next week, BRHD is expecting 4,900 first doses and 1,100 second doses of the Moderna vaccine and 4,680 first doses and 1,170 second doses of the Pfizer vaccine, while the University of Virginia’s Seminole Square vaccine location is expecting 4,680 first doses and 1,170 second doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
(Commentary) Researchers at the University of Virginia, Duke University and the University of Chicago have found that preregistration has a significant effect on youth voting. And evidence showing the turnout gap among registered young and older voters is much smaller than the registration gap between these groups demonstrates that registering more young people to vote translates into more young people actually voting.