(By Deborah Hellman is the D. Lurton Massee Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law)Citizens United may have been just what the United States needed — a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court so dramatically wrongheaded that people across the country paid attention to it and said, “Hold on, something is wrong here.”Though the actual ruling simply extended the flawed approach to campaign-finance laws that the court had been following for decades, Citizens United shined a light on the justices’ reasoning and demonstrated its shortcomings by taking that r...
The tallies are in, and Sen. Harry Reid has pulled the short end of the stick: He’s been rated the “most vulnerable” of all Democrats by Larry Sabato, the political scientist who oversees the University of Virginia’s Crystal Ball polling site.
Sign your kids up for dance class, STAT. That is, if you want them to learn computer skills and survive the 21st century. Choreography's not so different from computing, says Jennifer Chiu, an assistant professor of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Education at the University of Virginia. Both require rhythm and precision alongside abstraction. Plus, it's "potentially transformative" to get otherwise uninterested young people addicted to computer science.
(By Harold A. Gould is a Visiting Professor of South Asian Studies in the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia ) It has been widely publicized that Barack Obama is the first American president who will be guest of honour at the Jan. 26 Republic Day festivities since this dazzling celebration commenced in 1950.I personally witnessed this grand event in 1960 when Queen Elizabeth II was the honored guest. As Al Jazeera reported (Jan 7), “Modi has been courted by the United States as a key partner in the attempt to rebalance U.S. diplomatic weight towards As...
Some researchers explain why - compared to previous generations - some of the defining qualities of today's marriages make it harder for couples to cultivate a flourishing relationship. The simple answer is that people today expect more out of their marriage.Other researchers, like sociologist Jeffrey Dew, support the notion that time is a crucial factor in sustaining a successful marriage.Dew, who is a professor at the University of Virginia, found that Americans in 1975 spent, on average, 35 hours a week alone with their spouse while couples in 2003 spent 26 hours together. Child-rearing...
An impressive body of psychological research suggests that the men who killed Brown and Martin need not have been conscious, overt racists to do what they did (though they may have been). The same goes for the crowds that flock to support the shooter each time these tragedies become public, or the birthers whose racially tinged conspiracy theories paint President Obama as a usurper. These people who voice mind-boggling opinions while swearing they're not racist at all—they make sense to science, because the paradigm for understanding prejudice has evolved. There "doesn't nee...
As the University of Virginia's head basketball coach during the 1990s, Jeff Jones scheduled opponents from across the commonwealth. And not just at home. On the road and at neutral sites, too. Understand that Jones' Cavaliers ruled the state then. Among other programs, Jones is most aware of, naturally, Virginia, his alma mater — he was the point guard on the Cavaliers' 1981 Final Four squad — and former employer. Moreover, his son, Jeff Jr., is a Cavaliers walk-on."Clearly they're good," Jones said, "but after watching how they kind of dismantled Cl...
When Julian Bond and Phyllis Leffler began their oral history project on black leadership, many of the people they interviewed said, “Well, where are the black leaders? King is gone and no one has come to take his shoes.”The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was such an obvious symbol, Leffler said, that people were looking for another towering figure. “People put him on a pedestal, venerated him. But that can lead you to not recognize other kinds of leadership in our midst.”At the University of Virginia, she and Bond, a civil rights icon who was on the faculty with her, spen...
Ministers, community leaders and members of the Charlottesville community packed Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church for the 30th annual community celebration of Dr. King’s life. Along with music, there were plenty of speakers who talked about Dr. King's dream becoming a reality, including University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan.
Some high school students got the chance to take a look inside the University of Virginia Medical Center on Monday.Dozens of students spent the afternoon at the U.Va. School of Nursing's Simulation Center. They learned how to take blood pressure readings and care for critically injured patients.
A bill introduced by the majority leader of the House of Delegates on Tuesday is intended to reduce the growth of student fees spent on athletics at the state’s 15 public colleges, and it would likely force ODU, Norfolk State and James Madison to reduce their athletics budgets or increase revenue from other sources. Most colleges in Virginia use different accounting methods, making it difficult to compare their budgets. Cox’s bill would require state agencies to come up with a standardized formula to determine the true expenses of athletics. Colette Sheehy, the vice president of ma...
He’s the ultimate Democratic insider, the most powerful liberal you’ve probably never heard of, especially if you live outside the nation's capital. To Beltway insiders, John Podesta needs no introduction; when two presidents -- and a woman who wants to be the next one -- know your name, everyone else in this town probably does, too. “He’s just a very important player in Democratic and liberal circles,” Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, tells Whispers. “He’s in a lot of w...
When you fall off your bicycle, slamming your knee into the pavement, your attention focuses on the pain. But the rest of your body is focusing on something else. Your injury has just begun rallying a large number of your cells to do serious battle. Scientsts, including Shayn Peirce at the University of Virginia, are trying to find better ways to understand the immune system. To do that, they're borrowing a method pioneered in video games and the movies. It's called agent-based modeling. Scientists study the process by essentially playing a computer game that attempts to mim...
If foreign travel is on your retirement bucket list, a world of wonders awaits. But if a health crisis arises while you are out of the country, you could face a world of worries. "Medicare, as well as the private health insurance companies, do not provide any significant support for people traveling overseas," says Dr. William Brady, medical director for travel insurer Allianz Global Assistance. Brady, who is also a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Virginia, notes that travelers could face steep costs in addition to whatever the hospitals and doctors charge.
100 years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: you walked across it. Today, if there's traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there's a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green. Fail to do so, and you're committing a crime: jaywalking. "In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers' job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them," says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American...
Third hour guest, social psychologist Prof. Timothy D. Wilson has investigated unconscious processing and happiness, and discussed why many approaches in the self-help industries as well as some social programs not only don't help, but produce outcomes which are the opposite of what they claim to fix. For instance, the Scared Straight programs, in which convicts tell teens about the horrors of prison life, actually do more harm than good, he cited. He also reported that if people are able to modify or tweak their own personal narrative or story about themselves (what he calls &qu...
Everyone knows by now that 2010 and 2014 were very good to the Republican Party. What they don’t understand (or understand well enough) is just how good. Yes, Republicans now control the Senate and have their largest majority in the House since World War II. But it’s downballot (way downballot) where the depth of the Republican victories over the past three elections truly reveal themselves -- and where the impact will be felt over the long term. In the past three elections, Republicans have gained 913 state legislative seats, according to calculations made by Larry&...
Every year, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute produces EduScholar rankings--a list of the 200 most influential scholars in the education policy field--for Education Week. The rankings combine six distinct metrics to assess each expert's influence in the academic, book, and media realms. While there are, of course, many ways to interpret the rankings and, as Hess himself acknowledges, legitimate criticisms of them, a key trend in the 2014 EduScholar list is hard to miss. Robert Pianta (22nd), dean at the University of Virginia Curry School of Education, whose res...
Startups and entrepreneurship are the key to boosting the numbers of middle-class jobs according to Steve Case and Carly Fiorina. The University of Virginia's Miller Center released a report on Thursday from a commission led by Case, the co-founder of AOL and Fiorina the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard proposing ways that state and local communities and governments can increase entrepreneurship and middle-class jobs.