Researchers are tracking down a new stash of letters from Martha Washington. Edward Lengel of The Washington Papers project at the University of Virginia tells NPR's Rachel Martin what's in the trove.
In circus jargon the expression “all out and over” is used when the performance is finished and the audience is leaving the big top. That moment arrived Tuesday for LaVahn Hoh in a University of Virginia classroom as he concluded his popular course on the history of the American circus. On May 24, after 46 years of teaching at the university, Hoh officially will retire at 72.
A group of lawmakers, law enforcement officials, and alcohol experts appointed by the Governor met for the first time Monday to take a long, hard look at Virginia’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control after the controversial arrests of two students at the state’s flagship university. “Our interactions with ABC seem to be extreme,” panel member and University of Virginia Student Council President Abraham Axler said.
The training of ABC agents in dealing with college students or cultural diversity is only as effective as the expectations set at the top, said Harrisonburg Mayor Christopher Jones, who was appointed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe to a 20-member panel on ABC law enforcement after two encounters between agents and University of Virginia students.
The Sil'hooettes or Sils as they are affectionately known around UVa, are one of nine official a capella organizations on grounds and one of the three all-female groups, so what sets the sils apart? "We try to strike a balance between popular and unpopular, but always kind of an edgier, dark side to it, with lots of heavy bass, so lots of the lower voices we really like," said Anna Rigby, incoming president of the Sil'hooettes. Outgoing president Mackenzie Newman said it is also the fact that each young woman in the group gets to try their voice at everything, from soloist, t...
Students and faculty at the University of Virginia Curry School of Education are working to preserve stories from the civil rights movement. Over the last few months, Curry School professor Derrick P. Alridge and his team of researchers have conducted 25 interviews with educators from all over the nation for the Teachers in the Movement project. They are documenting the experiences of teachers who worked to promote change in their schools, classrooms and communities during the civil rights movement.
The 2016 election could come down to just seven swing states, or virtually the same Electoral College map from the last presidential election, says analyst Larry Sabato, but that doesn't mean the Democratic Party already has a clear advantage going into the race. "The past is often not a good guide to the future," said Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, in a column written for Politico along with Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, the managing editor and associate editor for Sabato's Crystal Ball.
With the early-education field continuing to grow nationally, it's increasingly clear that the key to good programs is teacher quality. As a recent reminder of this, Robert Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, published an opinion piece in The Washington Post in February on the urgent need for accountability in teacher preparation. His essay underscores the fact that education degrees do not necessarily lead to teacher effectiveness—and that education professors are resistant to making sure that they do. As Pianta wrote, &quo...
As scientific research is applied to more areas of education, teachers remain conflicted about its usefulness, according to celebrated cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham of the University of Virginia. Battle lines, he said, are often drawn up between teachers who are unwilling to give up practices they have used for years and colleagues who point to evidence that these particular methods either do not work or can be replaced by something better. In a keynote address at the first researchED conference in New York, which aims to improve research literacy in schools, Professor W...
The court used to be a more decorous institution. A new computer analysis of about 25,000 Supreme Court opinions from 1791 to 2008 identified three trends that have transformed the court’s tone. The justices’ opinions, the study found, have become longer, easier to understand — and grumpier. The new study, to be published next year in the Washington University Law Review, is the work of Daniel Rockmore and Keith Carlson, computer scientists at Dartmouth College, and Michael A. Livermore, a law professor at the University of Virginia. It is part of a cottage industry...
Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated the business impacts of design thinking, a powerful discipline that can be applied in B2B and B2C settings. Design thinking has been used effectively for improving internal processes and culture at for-profit and non-profit organisations, as described in the book ‘Solving problems with design thinking: ten stories of what works.’ Authors Jeanne Liedtka (U.Va.), Andrew King and Kevin Bennett describe useful tips and tools for design thinking via a range of 10 practical stories. The 216-page book makes for an absorbing re...
Gov. Chris Christie's already arduous road to become a top presidential contender has taken another damaging diversion with the Bridgegate charges Friday, political experts agree. "If he were indicted or directly implicated in approving this nutty plan, his presidential plans would be over and his governorship would be in jeopardy, but we don't have that," agreed Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
When her husband died, Martha Washington destroyed almost all the letters the couple had exchanged during decades of married life, an era that included the Revolutionary War, the formation of the country and his presidency. Only a few are known to remain, including two, both tender and fraught, that George Washington wrote just before he left for war. Now researchers are launching a major new initiative to track down, transcribe, research and publish all of the Washington family’s papers. The joint effort by the Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia and the Fred W. Sm...
Iran’s seizure of the Maersk Tigris cargo ship probably stems from a $3.6 million judgment in a decade-long dispute over 10 shipping containers, the Maersk Group said. Myron Nordquist, a maritime law specialist at the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, said the seizure of the vessel may violate international law, even if it was in Iran’s territorial waters, if the ship was operating within internationally recognized transit lanes.
Every day brings another presidential preference poll. Clinton leads the GOP field in North Carolina! Walker has the edge over the other Republicans in Iowa! Jeb Bush is has a slight margin over Hillary Clinton in Virginia! So are these polls remotely relevant to who will take the oath of office in January, 2017? They are not. I will add one caveat, courtesy of the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato. Early polls, he wrote here at usnews.com last month, “open or close many donors' wallets. When the polls look good for a candidate, the war chest fills. The early polls als...
This is the last of five posts I am publishing this week by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, all dedicated to reading and based on his new book, “Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do.” Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of several books, including “Why Don’t Students Like School? and “When Can You Trust The Experts? How to tell good science from bad in education.”
Scientists reported Thursday that they had identified an important new potential driver of aging, a finding that could have vast implications for human longevity and the treatment of diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's. "This is a beautiful example of how genomics, human stem cells and the new gene-editing technologies conjoin to provide major insights into human disease," said Rick Horwitz, executive director of the Allen Institute for Cell Science, who is on leave from his position as a professor at the University of Virginia. "This is an early example of wha...
Goodpasture Christian School sits on a sprawling, bucolic campus seven miles north of downtown Nashville, where 900 students ready themselves for adult lives of college, career and loving the Lord. Right next door sits the United Fellowship Center, a planned church where adults will ready themselves to have sex with each other after enjoying a little BYOB togetherness. It’s the newest incarnation of The Social Club, a whispered-about swingers club in downtown Nashville that left for the suburbs when a building boom took its parking lot. All the courts would have to do in the swingers clu...
Republican presidential hopeful and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul blames the recent outbreak of violence in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray on the lack of family structure for the residents of that community. A report authored by Robert I. Lerman, professor of economics at American University and W. Bradford Wilcox, professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia presented American Enterprise Institute in 2014 supported the statement made by Rubio a year prior.
The University of Virginia’s main research library, built in 1938, has never had a major renovation. And when funding for such a project comes through, some faculty fear 2 million of Alderman’s 3 million books will be shipped to the Ivy Stacks, off-campus storage on Old Ivy Road, never to return. English professor David Vander Meulen rang the alarm at an April 17 lecture attended by former UVA president John Casteen, and accused the library staff of being secretive about plans that he believes will gut Alderman of its printed books, leaving digital versions with “irreversible...