“Sunday Morning Wake-up Call” host Sean McCord talks to Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Professor of the Department of Media Studies and Law at UVA, about the confluence of media and politics.
A UVA fraternity is taking a stand against discrimination and hate speech. This week, they're asking students sign pledges to take action.
UVA ranked No. 11 in the top 25 graduate schools in this year's rankings.
UVA recently honored the centennial of one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers on urban planning. “I heard about Jane Jacobs in the same way that on Grounds you hear about Thomas Jefferson,” said Ila Berman, dean of UVA’s Architecture School.
Major changes are coming to Birdwood Golf Course and Boar’s Head Inn tennis facilities that will greatly impact and enhance the UVA men’s and women’s golf and tennis teams.
A college student from Arkansas is among 32 Americans selected as Rhodes Scholars and will pursue post-graduate studies at Oxford University in England. Little Rock resident Lauren C. Jackson is a senior at the University of Virginia where she is majoring in political and social thought.
A Maryland woman is among 32 Americans selected as Rhodes Scholars to pursue two or three years of post-graduate study at Oxford University. Aryn Frazier from Laurel, Maryland is a senior at the University of Virginia, where she is double-majoring in African-American and African Studies and the Honors Program of the Department of Politics.
As for another major promise, that he would create a “deportation force” to round up 11 million illegal aliens, Trump told “60 Minutes” he would instead deport “2 million, it could even be 3 million” undocumented immigrants with criminal records. Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics, said Trump’s shifts show that “he’s situational more than ideological. I only know one thing for sure: President Trump is going to be full of surprises.”
Also voting no on landslide was Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics. "Calling a 306 electoral-vote victory a ‘landslide’ is ridiculous," Sabato told us.
“The entire state is running well below normal precipitation over the last 30 days, particularly a large swath of Southside Virginia through parts of Southwest Virginia,” said Jerry Stenger, director of the State Office of Climatology at UVA. “Many of these areas have received virtually no precipitation in that period. Some areas like around Martinsville are shaping up for the driest November on record. The other dry region is Northern Virginia.”
Barack Obama, facing the imminent handover to his bombastic successor, has plenty to be concerned about this week. But he took the time to express his concern about the impact of fake news online when he spoke to reporters on Thursday. “As long as Mark Zuckerberg refuses to understand his own system, there is no hope for Facebook reforming itself,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA professor of media studies.
The U.S. and others have previously alleged that China suppressed the value of the yuan so its exports would be cheaper. "In fact, the evidence is that they have been propping up their currency, for all sorts of different reasons," according to William J. Antholis, CEO of UVA’s Miller Center.
Even with Clinton’s shortcomings, Democrats fared well in states with the fastest-changing demographics. Clinton won Virginia and Colorado handily, and Nevada more narrowly. She also cut into the GOP’s victory margins from 2012 in Arizona, Texas and Georgia. But in North Carolina and Florida – two battleground states expected to trend blue in the future – Democrats fell short of expectations. “Unfortunately for Democrats, not every state looks like Virginia or Colorado,” says Kyle Kondik, who analyzes elections for UVA’s Center for Politics.
Among the counties that led Trump to unpredictable victories were dozens of Pennsylvania localities that had previously voted for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 – but not in the numbers that led Trump to take the state for the first time since 1988. According to UVA political analyst Kyle Kondik, the shift in Pennsylvania alone was massive.
Several universities are partaking in a $1 million initiative to track seniors’ activities of daily living, in the hopes of predicting when they might need to move to assisted living or bring in home health care. A software system developed by the University of Virginia, called Piloteur, will collect data from the homes.
D. Michael Donathan, professor emeritus of music at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, has gifted the college with a generous donation to purchase a music dictionary collection for the college library in memory of his brother, the late Peter Donathan, a musician, educator and chef who passed away last year.
The UVA Health System kicked off construction of a 520,000-square-foot addition and renovation. The project will feature a new emergency department, interventional platform, operating rooms and 180-bed patient tower, which converts most semi-private rooms to private rooms.
Rural areas “have an entirely new challenge now,” said Terry Rephann, a regional economist at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, “and that is, getting the workers that they have locally to fill the jobs that are available that require greater degrees of training.”
In January, Tim Davis became UVA’s first executive director for student resilience and leadership development. Ten months into his new role, he is teaching a course for first-year students on resilient leadership, coaching students to become more effective leaders, and training staff members in the Division of Student Affairs on how to shift students from a "fixed mind-set" to a "growth-oriented" one.
UVA international law professor emeritus David Martin said the NSEERS program is constitutionally sound, but fraught with issues as a matter of policy. He said even when it was in effect, NSEERS was “more and more seen as potentially counterproductive” as the Sept. 11 attacks receded in America’s rear-view mirror and the government developed “more of an appreciation that doing certain things that singled out Muslims and were seen as discriminatory were strategically unsound.”