Monday marked the two-year anniversary of the first patient with COVID-19 admitted to UVA Health for care. UVA Health hosted a special event in the main lobby at UVA Medical Center in Charlottesville to reflect and pay tribute to the extraordinary dedication contributions and sacrifices of team members.
March 21 marks the two-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 patient’s admission to UVA Health. Though the pandemic is not over quite yet, the hospital took time Monday morning to recognize the significance of the day with a ceremony.
The death this month of Bernie Nussbaum, White House counsel to President Clinton, sent me to an oral history interview that Nussbaum recorded in 2002 with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. It’s a fascinating source for a variety of reasons, but for Education Next purposes I was struck by Nussbaum’s account of the role that New York City Public Schools—and an exam school in particular—played in his upward mobility.
While there is some association between higher gas prices and lower presidential approval, the connection is actually not as strong as might seem, according to Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a bulletin by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. It’s also gotten weaker over the past decade than it was previously. “Even as gas prices have spiked in the past couple of weeks in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden’s approval rating has actually gone up slightly, as measured by the FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics averages,” the Crystal Ball pointed out.
Across the state, the drop is even more dramatic reaching levels not seen since August, the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute reported Friday.
As Ukraine holds ground against Russia’s military efforts, the UVA Miller Center asks the question, ‘Where does the Ukraine war go from here?’ The Miller Center is closely analyzing the war through a series of webinars combined with staff meetings every morning. The focus Monday revolved around how things could escalate from its current state.
University of Virginia’s president appointed a committee on names that recommended a building name reconsideration process in 2018, similar to the one U of Minnesota ultimately adopted. It called for honorific names to be reviewed every 25 years and donor namings to be reviewed every 75 years.
The University of Virginia has updated its COVID-19 policies again, this time due to “encouraging trends.” In an email that was sent to the UVA community on Friday, Provost Ian Baucom and Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis said masks would become optional in most cases on Grounds beginning Monday. According to a release, this is consistent with the latest guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“With Discord, you subscribe to channels and engage in private chat, which is a veil of privacy and secrecy in the way it is constructed,” said Danielle Citron, a UVA law professor who focuses on digital privacy issues. While some larger social networks have faced scrutiny around harassment and other issues, much of that activity is “public facing,” she said. “Discord is newer to the party and so much of it is happening behind closed doors.”
It has been two years to the day since the first person walked into the UVA Medical Center with COVID-19. On Monday, the hospital system took a moment to reflect and remember. “There are many people that left our hospital alive that by the statistics should not have, and that’s due to the incredible care at UVA Health,” Chief Executive Officer Dr. Craig Kent said.
The mask mandate on UVA Grounds is officially over as of Monday. Students are still required to be masked in classrooms, but they do not have to wear them in other spaces.
(Podcast) Sonya Smith is a professor at Howard University and president of the Women in Engineering ProActive Network. She was the first African American woman to gain a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in mechanical and aerospace engineering, and in this episode, she highlights her journey in mechanical engineering, how it compares to the struggle of today’s women mechanical engineers, and what can be done to increase the retention of women in engineering.
Legislation named after a Charlottesville woman who died by suicide while serving as a doctor on the front lines of the pandemic in New York City has been signed into law by the president. The legislation honors Dr. Lorna Breen, a Charlottesville native and University of Virginia graduate who was an emergency room doctor in New York City in 2020. The pressure and constant death connected to the coronavirus pandemic led to her death by suicide.
National Review / March 20
(Commentary by George Messenger, alumnus) Paul Cantor, as I encountered him, was a sage of intellectual creativity who found beauty in the humblest parts of our culture. He saw Lord Macbeth in Vince Gilligan’s Walter White, The End of History in the Worldwide Wrestling Federation, and Alexis de Tocqueville in South Park.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/they-dont-teach-like-paul-cantor-anymore/
Josh Rosenberg, a college student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said he started court-watching as a high school student and has been able to continue because of virtual access — witnessing hundreds of bond hearings in Prince George’s without ever stepping foot in the courthouse. The volunteers, Rosenberg said, have written more than 250 accountability letters to prosecutors, judges, lawmakers and jail officials.
Students at the University of Virginia School of Medicine now know where they will call home for the next three years. They found out Friday in the first in-person match day since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Toni Irving, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, describes, “There is a newfound familiarity people are having with one another as a result of [remote working]. People are now in hoodies and T-shirts; you see their cat. You become acclimated to the personalizations of their life on Zoom that you wouldn’t have otherwise had access to.”
The University of Virginia’s Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman are predicting a GOP gain of 25-35 seats.
“It’s very likely [U.S. Sen. Patty] Murray gets re-elected, but it’s not an ironclad safe seat,” said J. Miles Coleman, a nonpartisan analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “If the national environment gets bad enough, you could have some surprises, and this could be one of those surprises. Murray can’t take this race for granted.”
In educational circles, there is an acronym for students who have had little schooling — SLIFE (students with limited or interrupted formal education) — but little data on how they do once they start going regularly, according to Chris Chang-Bacon, an assistant professor in the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development. What data there is suggests such students have a high dropout rate. “We do find that their success is largely determined not by the students themselves but (by) how well the school is set up to receive them,” Chang-Bacon said.