Estimates from the University of Virginia, released earlier this year, pin the national share of the population over age 65 at 18.4 percent, putting the Bay State well above the country’s average.
Cash-strapped colleges across in the country, including in Virginia, are relying increasingly on low-paid adjunct professors to close teaching gaps, especially when schools increase the number of students without adding faculty. Fully-trained and capable professors with PhDs are teaching seven, eight or nine courses a year and pulling down barely subsistence-level money. The predicament is breathing new life into a flagging labor movement that sees adjunct professors as attractive recruitment targets.
One of the recommended books is "Sense and Sensibility: An Annotated Edition," edited by U.Va.’s Patricia Meyer Spacks.
(Editorial) “There’s an increasing understanding among the public and voters that hard party gerrymandering is counterproductive and hurts good governance,” said Bob Gibson, executive director of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. He said the current system produces hyper-polarized districts that lead to gridlock in the legislature and challenge the democratic nature of the American political machine.
(Commentary) The time has come for Virginia to consider implementing a statewide university system for its public four-year institutions of higher learning. The system already in place for the two-year community colleges provides a model of how it could be done.
The University of Virginia's Rohr Chabad House held a lighting of a menorah on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville. This was the twelfth year the Chabad House has lit a menorah on the mall.
Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, sees Obama’s speech primarily as a way of “changing the subject from Obamacare to a subject that polls show is the public’s premier concern,” and that is falling further behind economically. “Obama can forget about playing major league ball on the economy and most everything else,” Sabato added. “My early prediction is that congressional numbers will only worsen for him after November 2014.”
Talks with Marxist rebels after a half-century of conflict stir thoughts of past and future suffering, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said Wednesday at the University of Virginia. “We have to take into consideration the victims, but we also have to take into consideration the future victims,” Santos said during an intimate session in the Rotunda with an exclusive group of about 110 University of Virginia students and faculty. “We couldn’t wait another 50 years.”
(Commentary) In his book, “Political Obligations,” University of Virginia political science professor George Klosko wrote, “[I]t is generally held that obedience to government is not unconditional. Though we have significant moral requirements to obey, these can be overridden by countervailing factors. For instance, a government that becomes tyrannical can lose its right to be obeyed, while obligations to obey specific laws that are unjust can also be not binding.”
(Commentary) Soon after the shutdown ended, the Scholars Strategy Network released a brief by political scientists Craig Volden of the University of Virginia and Alan Wiseman of Vanderbilt University showing that women are more effective legislators than their male counterparts.
Demographic researcher Dustin Cable over at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service recently put together an incredible visualization that does just that. His racial map – which contains one dot for every American, based on 2010 Census data – shows how the nation self-segregates. We pulled out 10 big cities from the map and reproduced them below, without labels. Can you guess which is which?
E.D. Hirsch, noted author and professor emeritus of education at the University of Virginia, has said "that increasing general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success. Schools have an enormously hard time pushing through the deficiencies with which many children arrive."
But officials who monitor the disease are troubled by the recent outbreaks in California and New Jersey, in part because of the number of cases but also because each involves the uncommon “serogroup B” type of bacterial meningitis, for which the country has no approved vaccine. “This is a very, very serious infection,” said James Turner, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Virginia who oversees the College Health Surveillance Network, which tracks student health trends. “It’s rare and it’s unpredictable.”
Max Wintermark, MD, chief of neuroradiology at the University of Virginia, who was not involved in the study, said the technique would be especially beneficial in this young population, since it doesn't require contrast agents and uses non-ionizing radiation.
One of the leading applied network scientists, Rob Cross, an associate professor at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce, offers a critical development in understanding networks: “Traditionally, self-help books on networks focus on going out and building big mammoth rolodexes…What we’ve found is that this isn’t what high-performers do. What seems to distinguish the top 20% of performers across a wide-range of organizations is not so much a big network. In fact, there is usually a negative statistically significant likelihood of being a top performer a...
Three outgoing CEOs – including U.Va.’s R. Edward Howell – and two who represent the next generation of health care leadership discuss their careers, what leaders will have to do to prepare for change and the best leadership advice they have ever received.
(Press release) The National Association of Basketball Coaches, the Women's Basketball Coaches Association and Allstate Insurance Company today announced the 201 nominees for the 2014 Allstate NABC and WBCA Good Works Teams. The award recognizes a select group of college basketball student-athletes who have made significant contributions to the greater good of their communities through volunteerism and civic service. U.Va. has two nominees: men’s basketball player Joe Harris and women’s basketball player Lexie Gerson.
(Commentary) Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, discussed his book titled “The Kennedy Half Century” on C-SPAN's After Words program with Craig Shirley, author of a book on President Reagan titled “Rendezvous with Destiny.”
In an examination of a new secret society at Vanderbilt University, U.Va.’s Seven Society is held up as an exemplar: “The Seven Society has completed so many good deeds for Virginia – including fundraising and support for scholarships and fellowships – that the group’s value is self-evident. It also possesses the moral courage to try and address campus-wide crises: Last winter, amid a period tarnished by the death of a student, a bevy of sexual assaults and an alleged hate crime, the Society hung massive public banners from seven academic buildings that called for...