The U.S. Senate has voted to approve Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, a lifelong executive with Exxon Mobil. The news did not sit well with about 30 students. Students from UVA, Virginia Tech, Mary Washington and George Mason occupied the office of Senator Mark Warner before the vote, chanting "Virginia’s seas are rising, Warner’s compromising."
Tom Perriello made a few stops on Grounds to talk to students on Wednesday. The first stop was at the Law School where the Democratic candidate for governor spoke about his vision for Virginia. He compared and contrasted himself as a Democrat with Mark Warner, and talked about public schools and employment.
When it comes to addressing issues of global hunger, American institutions of higher learning already have a head start. Other organizations meanwhile are working along similar lines. Label Insight, for example, tracks product data on some 350,000 products. The company announced recently that it would be making food data available to a range of partners, including the University of Virginia and others.
UVA hosted a panel discussion on the different effects caused by the president’s recent executive order on immigration.
The University of Virginia announced an expanded financial aid program for middle-income Virginians as well as plans to increase in-state enrollment by 100 students next year. The new “Cornerstone Grant” initiative will provide a substantial number of $2,000 tuition grants to qualified, in-state students from families making less than $125,000 per year.
In 2015, Liberty University received $347 million from federal undergraduate grant and loan programs. Few other private nonprofit colleges receive anything like that sum. To put the amount in perspective, the highly regarded University of Virginia, a nearby state university, received $37 million from the same sources that year.
Tom Perriello is running for the Democrats’ nomination for governor, and he spoke Wednesday at the University of Virginia. The former 5th District congressman addressed the American Constitution Society and a UVA Civil Rights Movement class.
Former Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo is currently on staff at UVA’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, where he is heading up a new master's program that will further education for members of law enforcement.
"We know that seven hours of sleep have been determined by the national sleep foundation as best for your cognitive functioning and prevention of Alzheimer's," said Joanne Pinkerton of the UVA Health System. For women having trouble with sleep, there are a number of interventions that may help, Pinkerton said.
Even as he introduced a signing class with just eight in-state prospects among the 22 who signed Wednesday, UVA football coach Bronco Mendenhall said recruiting the commonwealth is his program’s focus.
Tens of thousands of people make eyewitness identifications in criminal cases each year, sometimes resulting in false convictions. But three UVA researchers are about to begin a project to improve the outcomes. They have just received a $1.4 million grant to help stop innocent people being convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.
A lack of doctors in Southwest Virginia is making it hard for patients to get access to health care at a reasonable price. A new UVA study is providing patients in the area access to care without doctors being physically present. Researchers believe the screenings are the first of its kind to be done via telemedicine.
UVA political science professor Larry Sabato agreed that the weekend protests over the executive orders would not hurt Trump politically. “His base is as firm as ever,” he said. “What he’s lost in the very early polls is the Republicans who were never Trumpers and ended up voting for Trump.”
Several cases currently in the federal court pipeline could present themselves before the court and a new justice in the near future that test the limits of Obama-era regulation, according to UVA environmental law professor Jonathan Cannon.
The plenary power doctrine has ebbed over time, according to some legal experts. Kerry Abrams, a UVA law professor, says the courts have begun to approach it more skeptically, weighing the civil liberties of individuals against the interests of the government.
According to Doug Laycock, a professor at the UVA School of Law, the likelihood that we would see fines or jail time even if a contempt order did come down is very slim – in large part because neither the judge, nor the government, has any interest in having the situation devolve to that point.
President Donald Trump's decision Monday to fire an insubordinate acting attorney general was not unprecedented, but it is a rare occurrence in presidential history. Since President Harry Truman began his first presidential term in 1945, only 35 presidential appointees have been fired, according to a report compiled by Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics, and published by Politico.
In a 2015 paper titled “Corruption in India: Bridging Research Evidence and Policy Options,” Sandip Sukhtankar, UVA associate professor of economics, and a colleague point out how political parties in India circumvent the law to receive anonymous cash donations just below the Rs 20,000 threshold to escape scrutiny.
Perriello sent out a fundraising blast Tuesday, urging Democrats to donate to his fledging 2017 campaign as a way of rejecting Trump. Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst at UVA’s Center for Politics, said attacking Trump is smart politics with the Democratic Party electorate because neither candidate is well-known and voters are itching for confrontation.
(Co-written by Chris Lu, senior fellow at UVA’s Miller Center) As former political appointees in the Obama administration’s Labor Department, we can think of few areas where we are in agreement with Donald Trump. Yet we share his belief that government needs to do more to lift up American workers. If the new president is interested in delivering on his promise of creating jobs and growing wages for workers, there’s an executive order already in place that he should support.