(Commentary by Nicholas Sargen, adjunct faculty at the Darden School of Business) Are Republicans and Democrats capable of compromising to make sound public policy decisions? Based on the extreme partisan wrangling over the past decade, the odds appear slim to none. But the negotiations over public infrastructure spending raised hopes that a compromise might be reached.
The local district has hosted several vaccination clinics in predominantly Black areas alongside the University of Virginia, Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital, the African American Pastors Council and others.
Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio’s efforts have led to other accolades. The University of Virginia/Vanderbilt University Center for Effective Lawmaking rated Rubio as the most effective Republican senator in the last Congress.
An equity profile for Albemarle County has now been released. According to a release, the county worked with the Equity Center at the University of Virginia to create this profile, which is called Albemarle County Equity Profile: Centering Equity in Evaluation Well-Being and Quality of Life for Albemarle County Residents. The profile lets county staff and community members see how well-being is being experienced by people living in the county.
Cardiologists and researchers at the University of Virginia say they have developed a new metric that could improve survival for heart-failure patients. The new measurement helps identify patients who could be at higher risk for heart or pulmonary issues so doctors can tailor their treatment to be less or more aggressive.
UVA Health has developed a new physiological measurement that may help heart-failure patients. According to a release, this measurement could improve survival for such patients by identifying high-risk patients who need tailored treatments.
(Press release) A new memorial acknowledging the historical use of slave labor to build and maintain University of Virginia’s Charlottesville campus has been attracting attention and heightening racial awareness since its completion in what became a turbulent 2020.
A change is coming to the Whispering Wall memorial at the University of Virginia. According to a release, the UVA Board of Visitors approved a resolution to modify the memorial on Friday. The wall was originally named for Confederate soldier and politician Frank Hume. That name will be removed and replaced with blocks of a contrasting color to mark the change, based on the recommendation of the Naming and Memorials Committee.
The Board of Visitors’ Buildings and Grounds Committee at the University of Virginia approved the re-dedication of the Frank Hume Memorial during its afternoon meeting on Friday. Frank Hume was a Confederate soldier who also served in the Virginia House of Delegates. Many fought for the memorial to be removed entirely, instead only the inscription will be removed. The inscription will be replaced with contrasting blocks to represent an enlivening future.
The University of Virginia has recognized four people with its Thomas Jefferson Awards. Normally, there are just two recipients each year, one for scholarship and one for service. However, the awards were canceled last year.
Researchers from UVA and Carnegie Mellon University reported that study participants were able to recall 56% more information when it was presented to them on multiple monitors rather than on a single screen.
Virginia Tech is optimistic Gov. Ralph Northam will take executive action in the coming weeks and allow students in the state to capitalize on their name, image and likeness. UVA athletic director Carla Williams, who is part of the NCAA federal and state legislation working group, composed a letter asking Northam to step in. Virginia Tech President Tim Sands and Athletic Director Mike Babcock are among the signatories on the letter.
But the coronavirus pandemic will be more complicated to mark than a trauma in which the enemies and the losses are more clear-cut, said Jeffrey Olick, a UVA sociology and history professor. An event like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is different from an ongoing collective trauma like poverty, he said, adding, “COVID is something in between.”
(Book review) There are many, many biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, the most exhaustive being Arthur Hobson Quinn’s, first published in 1941, the most concise Peter Ackroyd’s 2009 “Poe: A Life Cut Short.” Nearly all of them, however, are written by literary scholars, poets or novelists. By contrast, John Tresch’s “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night” situates our nation’s most influential writer, as I would claim Poe to be, against the backdrop of what its subtitle calls “the forging of American science.”
Katie Tracy Kishore was an accomplished multisport athlete at James River High School and the University of Virginia. But as a female in the 1990s, she was under no illusion that basketball and/or soccer would ever pay the bills. “Sports was fun,” she says, “don’t get me wrong, and I loved it, and I worked way too hard at it, for sure. But I knew I needed a solid plan.”
"The speaker is describing love as a prison. And imprisonment is really the perfect metaphor to describe being subjugated by love," said Deborah Parker, professor of Italian at the University of Virginia. Her book “Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing” explores how this sense of entrapment gets expressed in the poetry.
On March 1, the state of Virginia decriminalized jaywalking and reclassified it as a secondary offense — meaning people won’t be ticketed unless they’re violating another law. The change also reduces unnecessary interaction with the police. “As long as jaywalking was a primary offense, it was going to be a big source of harassment,” Peter Norton, associate professor of history in the University of Virginia’s Department of Engineering and Society, told NBC 12.
On March 1, the state of Virginia decriminalized jaywalking and reclassified it as a secondary offense — meaning people won’t be ticketed unless they’re violating another law. The change also reduces unnecessary interaction with the police. “As long as jaywalking was a primary offense, it was going to be a big source of harassment,” Peter Norton, associate professor of history in the University of Virginia’s Department of Engineering and Society, told NBC 12.
Some schools have faced complaints from graduates or administrators unwilling to let go of beloved founding myths. Kirt von Daacke, a history professor and assistant dean at the University of Virginia, which founded the growing international consortium Universities Studying Slavery, said that the inquiry underway is vitally important, as it is at other institutions, but this academic questioning of the Hopkins evidence is unusual. “I’ve never seen a case,” he said, “where there’s a group of scholars arguing with the findings.”
Jim Wyckoff, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia, said that when school districts decide on which teachers to award tenure to, they are looking for employees who are effective and do a good job with educating students. “Teachers get a lot better over the first five years of their career. ... [School systems are] having to make the decisions about tenure during that improvement,” said Wyckoff, noting that some teachers do have excellent years earlier in their career.