One institution where millions of dollars is being spent to make sure everyone has a say in how universities remember and mark the past is the University of Virginia. On a warm comfortable night last fall, dozens of people sang and weaved their way through the north side of the University cemetery, to pay their respects. The unmarked grave shafts of 67 African-American slaves were discovered just six years ago. One year after the discovery of the unmarked graves, UVA formed its President’s Commission on Slavery and the University.
A new national report lead by UVA professor James Galloway claims the environmental pollution problems caused by humans can actually be reversed by humans.
There are many things that give wealthy students an academic edge in college – a good high school education, resources to pursue extracurricular activities and expensive tutors, to name a few. Now, UVA professor Josipa Roksa argues helicopter parents are also a help.
As the automotive industry moves us tantalizingly closer to a sci-fi future of roadways thrumming with such self-driving cars, Virginia has positioned itself as a hotbed for developing and testing autonomous vehicle technologies – in large part due to innovative research work coming out of state universities such as Virginia Tech and UVA.
On January 25, the Washington Post ran an article by the author of a new book related to Thomas Jefferson with the headline “How Did We Lose a President’s Daughter?” In the first sentence, the author writes: “Many people know that Thomas Jefferson had a long-standing relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. But fewer know that they had four children, three boys and a girl, who survived to adulthood.” “It is shocking that anyone would say he fathered all the children,” Robert Turner, a professor at the University of Virginia, told me in a phone call recently. Turner is one of the f...
Black lives matter. And in the struggle to reduce racism, the Black Lives Movement matters. That's the encouraging conclusion of new research, which reports both conscious and unconscious pro-white bias decreased during the early years of the political and social crusade. "Anti-racist social movements like Black Lives Matter may have an effect of moving all racial groups toward more egalitarian racial attitudes," write Jeremy Sawyer of City University of New York and Anup Gampa of the University of Virginia.
Given these potential challenges, the president could try to avoid Congress altogether and unilaterally direct DOD to fund the wall. To do so, the administration would have to find legislative language that allows the president to transfer funds for other purposes, said Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, a UVA law professor.
UVA’s Daphna Bassok asks if kindergarten is really the new first grade. The expectation that kindergarteners – aged 5 or 6 – can read is now commonplace. Yet this is counter to all the evidence. A Cambridge study comparing groups of children who started formal literacy lessons at 5 and 7 found that starting two years earlier made no difference at all to a child’s reading ability aged 11, “but the children who started at 5 developed less-positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those who started later.”
The approach fits the persona of a president who, despite boasts about his deal-making prowess, largely won office by casting himself as a “pugilistic” populist who would not allow the stagnant ways of Washington to deter him, said Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs.
The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA has received a $2 million gift from the J. Sanford Miller family to endow the directorship of the Fralin Museum of Art. The Bicentennial Professors Fund, a $75 million initiative launched last December, will match the gift with $1 million.
In the first fully funded project of the Bicentennial Professors Fund, a $2 million gift will endow the director’s position at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA. The University announced Thursday that it would match the gift from the J. Sanford Miller family with $1 million from the Bicentennial Professors Fund for a total of $3 million.
A disturbing new UVA study reveals that sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, occurs more often when babies are left with people other than their parents. SIDS is the leading cause of death for babies between the ages of one month and one year.
A study written in part by a UVA professor of pediatrics found that babies who died in the care of someone other than a parent often were placed in unsafe sleep positions or locations. Professor Rachel Moon contributed to the study, which examined infant deaths, sleep practices and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Michael Palmer, director of UVA’s Center for Teaching Excellence, who also helped develop the center’s Course Design Institute, is one of a group of authors who published an analysis of STEM teaching at 2,000 colleges and universities, finding lectures remain dominant – despite finding after finding questioning their effectiveness.
Matt Eberl must be the unluckiest college basketball fan in the country – at least this year. He’s a UVA season ticket-holder and, as the owner of five area Little Caesars franchises, was on the hook for nearly 1,500 free lunches Monday to make good on the company’s longstanding free-pizza-for-everyone promise if a No. 16 seed ever beat a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.
More than 400 psychologists worldwide are teaming up to fight a looming problem in their field: headline-making research that doesn’t hold up. As part of a new network called the Psychological Science Accelerator, the researchers are trying to fix the so-called replication crisis that’s punctured splashy findings. Brian Nosek, a UVA psychologist who led the Reproducibility Project and informally advises the Accelerator, said that both approaches have merits.
Because today’s parents, teachers and students are busier and more distracted, the family-school connection is more tenuous and parental awareness about education is slipping, says Carol Tomlinson, a UVA education professor and author of dozens of books and articles on instruction. “A lot of parents just don’t know what is happening in school – and they feel out of touch,” she says.
The UVA men’s basketball coach was named the Naismith Men’s College Coach of the Year for the second time in his career on Sunday. Bennett earned his first Naismith Coach of the Year honor at Washington State in 2007.
Ashley Deeks, a UVA law professor, noted the “ever-increasing call” for the U.S. government to be more assertive in responding to cyberattacks. “There is a strong strain of thought” inside CyberCom that “the best defense is going to be a stronger offense,” she said.
In a working paper published recently, Xiangjun Ma of the University of International Trade and Economics in Beijing and John McLaren of the University of Virginia show that U.S. import tariffs are designed to favor industries located in swing states. “Our best estimate is that the U.S. political process treats a voter living in a non-swing state as being worth 77 percent as much as a voter in a swing state,” Ma and McLaren wrote.