President-elect Donald Trump's decision to empower his running mate Mike Pence to steer the presidential transition gives the soon-to-be vice president a powerful hand in shaping the incoming government and could foreshadow that he will play an outsized role in the White House. "Trump has learned to trust Pence and Pence has years of experience in Congress," said Larry Sabato, head of UVA’s Center for Politics. "I think it's dawning on Trump that he's now got enormous responsibilities and needs.”
“Typically, the president’s party loses ground in the House and Senate during that person’s time in office. This is particularly true in midterms, where the president’s party usually does poorly,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the political prognosticators at UVA.
“They are not proposing to build any new renewable facilities with this rider. Not one. Not a single kilowatt of new energy,” said Cale Jaffe, director of UVA’s Environmental and Regulatory Law Clinic. “(They’re) just going to shuffle some papers and repackage those as a renewable tariff. ... A rider that inhibits competition and inhibits free market choices for renewable energy, that’s a step backward.”
I read about a fascinating study by Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at UVA’s Darden School of Business, who wanted to dig deeper into what made successful entrepreneurs so different. Through rigorous interviews and research, she concluded that successful entrepreneurs rely on what she calls “effectual reasoning.”
After more than 11 years as president and CEO of the University of Virginia Alumni Association, Tom Faulders has announced plans to retire in June.
In general, the long and complicated path to today's conscientious objection law in the U.S. helps explain why battles over the appropriate way to balance religious liberty with nondiscrimination protections seem far from over. "The debate over military service got heated at times, and in some ways, it's the highest-stakes example of the religious exemption," said Douglas Laycock, a UVA law professor, to the Deseret News in 2013.
“Trump has learned to trust Pence and Pence has years of experience in Congress,” said Larry Sabato, head of UVA’s Center for Politics. “I think it’s dawning on Trump that he’s now got enormous responsibilities and needs the help of every experienced, competent person he can find.”
UVA politics expert Larry Sabato said it remained to be seen which of the two Mr. Trumps won out. But he noted that there was something in the Republican president-elect that recalled a 1968 Richard Nixon. “Nixon was very flexible. There is a bit of Nixon in Trump. He’s inclined to be pragmatic if given the opportunity,” Sabato noted.
Research suggests that new courses at liberal arts colleges these days may increasingly be coming from practical fields. David W. Breneman, a former UVA dean who has written several papers about what he sees as an erosion of the liberal arts within liberal arts colleges, said via email that he thought the approach taken in the paper was valid. "The authors have performed an important service in delving deeply into actual course and curricular changes at four liberal arts institutions of varying size and wealth," Breneman said.
Tony Filiano, a postdoc in Jonathan Kipnis’ lab at the University of Virginia, tries not to worry about his career prospects and instead stays focused on the work at hand. “Day to day you just try to do great science and hope that all the pieces fall together when that time comes,” he says. “I don’t know how much more I can do other than that.”
(By Saikrishna Prakash, UVA professor of law) Like all new presidents, President-elect Donald Trump has a crowded agenda for his first 100 days. Unlike his predecessors, Trump faces or is pursuing a slew of civil lawsuits, perhaps as many as 75.
Political analysts and academics interviewed for this story said they don’t believe the strained relationship between the governor and Trump and New Mexico’s confirmed status as a blue state mean it is bound to lose out under his administration. But they also said that neither Martinez nor the state should be expecting any big favors from the White House during the next four years. “Trump is going to have a plate full of problems. While he is famously retaliatory and has the memory of an elephant for slights, I doubt Trump will take overt actions against Martinez or the state...
The views of the alt-right are widely seen as anti-Semitic and white supremacist. Most of its members are young white men who see themselves first and foremost as champions of their own demographic. However, apart from their allegiance to their "tribe," as they call it, their greatest points of unity lie in what they are against: multiculturalism, immigration, feminism and, above all, political correctness. "They see political correctness really as the greatest threat to their liberty," Nicole Hemmer, University of Virginia professor and author of a forthcoming book “...
(Commentary) Many people, including me, think block scheduling is an attractive but unproductive fad. A 2006 UVA study said students in high school block schedules did somewhat worse in college sciences than those who had regular schedules.
UVA students are working with a nonprofit to increase the national pool of bone marrow donors.
UVA leaders are considering options for reducing tuition costs for students, possibly by dipping into a multibillion-dollar strategic investment fund.
This year, 14 academics and writers – most from the commonwealth – were chosen to receive a quiet, private office in Charlottesville to work away from the usual demands of their lives, according to Jeanne Siler, assistant director of the fellowship program. Each fellow is given a $15,000 stipend to help with the cost of living and they are granted the status of UVA faculty to use the libraries and other resources.
“What they’ve done is, they’ve used these light, stiff structures in a way that makes the whole structure deformable,” says Haydn Wadley, a UVA professor of materials science and engineering who works on deformable, but strong lattices of shape-memory alloys. “This is the kind of thing, you could imagine a wind turbine that changes the shape of an airfoil to determine the amount of energy it sucks out of the wind.”
UVA’s ROTC programs are honoring American service members. The annual vigil march began Monday at the McIntire Amphitheatre.
The UVA community is remembering a trailblazing professor who dedicated more than four decades of his life to the school. Sunday, hundreds of people came together for a memorial service to celebrate the legacy of Ruhi Ramazani.