Some highly selective colleges went test optional for a year, citing the pandemic. Now many of them [including UVA] are extending those bans.
The majority of the 106 active student cases of COVID-19 at UVA were discovered through pre-arrival testing, according to Dr. Mitchell Rosner, who chairs the University’s Department of Medicine.
UVA students returned to class Monday to begin the spring semester. Due to Sunday’s snowfall, the University suspended all in-person classes prior to 10 a.m. Monday. After that, classes resumed as normal.
UVA students came back in full force Sunday, the day before their first day of class for spring 2021. During what may be the height of the pandemic, UVA is welcoming back thousands of students to Grounds, but some students felt safe last semester with the University’s COVID regulations, and are hopeful for the spring.
The 27th annual Virginia Festival of the Book will present more than 40 virtual events during this year’s event, which will take place from March 13 to 26, mostly over Zoom and Facebook Live.
One valuable yet often overlooked leader in the fight for Black equality is finally getting his due in [the late UVA history professor] Julian Bond’s “Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.” The late author’s lectures from his prolific teaching career, assembled here for the first time, are full of firsthand lessons from his direct involvement in the civil rights movement.
About 22,000 students returned for classes at the University of Virginia Monday, and the school’s president says UVA is ready. A look at how things have changed since the fall, and what new limits students will face.
Six players joined the Virginia Baseball Hall of Fame on Friday night, the program announced. The group of 2021 inductees includes Steve Bryant, Nathan Kirby, Branden Kline, Mike Papi, Josh Sborz and Brandon Waddell. The Virginia Baseball Hall of Fame was created in 2017 and 28 members now belong in the exclusive club after this year’s selections.
In 2005, in a bustling University of Virginia library lobby better suited for socializing than studying, Reddit entered the world humbly. A small plaque now hangs next to the clunky desktop computer where Reddit’s cofounder Alexis Ohanian, then an undergrad at the state school, registered the now-ubiquitous domain name. It marked just another day for dozens of students printing essays nearby, but whether they realized it or not, they were witnessing history: The birth of a social media site that would send Wall Street into crisis mode (and make billionaires out of a few lucky investors) 16 yea...
It was a year so weird, so wild, so wacked out that it often felt like a twisted version of chess, with every move the wrong one and every piece out to pawn off the king and queen. Thanks to Ashburn siblings Lindsey, Melissa and Kevin Hart, two of whom are UVA graduates, the fun of “now what?!,” which defined 2020, can be relived again and again through their card game, The 2020 Game.
One of “the symbols and tropes of white nationalist ‘troll’ culture” that has been adapted to Mormonism involved the concept of “redpilling,” said Stephen Betts, a UVA doctoral student in religious studies. “Redpilling normies” is an alt-right process, suggesting that someone who has awakened from liberal thinking can wake up “normies,” or normal people, Betts wrote in an unpublished paper. In the LDS version, “normies” have become “Mormies.”
I’m planning on sending a couple letters this weekend – maybe I’ll even use the old typewriter I forgot I had. Whomever I write to, I’ll recommend they listen to my college professor Rita Dove reading her poem “Last Words” on The New Yorker’s website.
COVID-19 has changed what we watch and how we watch it, which has impacted movie theaters. “The issue with everyone being in their home watching movies on their devices is it doesn’t stop after the vaccines,” said UVA communications professor Anthony Palomba, a former Nielsen researcher.
The headline-grabbing matter of Trump’s account is little more than a distraction, critics say. “The fact that Donald Trump is unable to express himself on Facebook is less important than the fact that all of his followers and supporters continue to express themselves on Facebook,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA professor of media studies, who is not affiliated with the alternative board. “The phenomenon that we should be worried about is the aggregate message that undermines democracy, divides societies, spreads hatred. That continues, and Facebook either can’t or won’t do anything about it.”...
Louisiana teetered into potential civil war yet again. Terror-backed Democrats forcibly seized the Louisiana House, seating Democrats in contested seats. Yet again, the military ejected the claimants. “Sheridan wires Washington to tell Grant and the War Department that all these Democrats are banditti and have to be executed, and what unfolds unleashes a storm of criticism in the white North,” Caroline Janney, an American history professor at UVA, said. “Grant is condemned, running what people call a ‘government by bayonet.’”
For Biden, his first week has been disciplined and orderly, which is a reflection of how he ran his campaign, said Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at UVA’s Miller Center. “A moderate persona and personality” is how Perry described Biden, “someone who’s not a great orator, not going to set the world on fire, but is well-meaning, a good soul, feels people’s pain.”
Political scientist Bill Antholis, 56, who has been the director and CEO of UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs since 2014, has a deeper knowledge of the goings-on in Washington than most people. … Antholis, who is Greek American, spoke to Kathimerini about the Biden administration’s new policies related to Greece, Turkey, Europe and NATO, while also providing useful insights regarding the recent developments in U.S. politics that marked the tumultuous ending of the Trump era.
Melvyn Leffler, UVA’s Edward Stettinius Professor of History Emeritus, said the Cold War analogy grossly exaggerates the nature of the threat that lurks in the international environment. The renowned historian on U.S. foreign policy said that the geopolitical and ideological contexts in the late 1940s were totally different from the current situation.
Two of the biggest obstacles to access, health experts say, are in the ways people can sign up for vaccines and where they can actually go to get the shots. “Right now [we’re] using hospitals and we’re using pharmacies, of which 70% of those health care resources are in predominantly white communities,” said Dr. Ebony Hilton, UVA associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care. “They are still using the Internet for people to sign up, right? And what we know is that … our children were directly impacted by the fact that we don’t have WiFi at the same access to WiFi as other communities...
Jennifer Givens, director of the Innocence Project at UVA’s School of Law, said research suggests that the “error rate” in capital cases nationally is more than 4%. That means, she said, that at least 100 of the 2,500 death row inmates across the country are actually innocent. “If we want to eliminate the risk of executing innocent people, the only way to do that is to pass this bill,” Givens said.