Sidney Milkis is part of UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. He and others at the Miller Center are specialists on U.S. political history. Milkis says that, when it was created in the late 1700s, the U.S. presidency was unlike any other position in world history. “For thousands of years before the American Constitution people thought a strong executive power and a democracy – what Jefferson called self-government – were incompatible. Because how could a sovereign people delegate tremendous responsibility to one individual and still consider themself a democracy, even a representative democr...
Overall, people have become more cautious amid the pandemic, said sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. “This caution is making them less likely to get divorced, less likely to get married, less likely to have a child,” he said.
These presidents were using the word in a way that stems from its centuries-old legal definition, said Barbara A. Perry, a professor and director of presidential studies at UVA’s Miller Center. “As a concept of fairness of the law, equity is meant as a remedy: If someone hurts you the person can be punished and assessed compensatory damage to make you whole again,” she said. That legal sensibility shows up in usages by many former-lawyer presidents, from William Taft to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson (a law school dropout), who at times came close to using the word as Biden has...
“China’s market is now central to any major release,” said Aynne Kokas, a UVA professor of media studies. “Diminishing market share presents a worrying picture for Hollywood studios” that may have been relying on China to recoup blockbusters’ budgets, she said.
Surveys show most Republicans still embrace Trump. “In fact, 70% of Republicans believe that Joe Biden was illegally elected president,” said Barbara Perry, an analyst at the University of Virginia. That’s something Republican leaders admit is false. But the analyst said Trump supporters got the policies they wanted. “They got lower taxes, fewer regulations, conservatives on the federal bench, conservatives on the Supreme Court,” she said. They also got an aggressive foreign policy and a hard line on border issues.
Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics, said Trump’s legal team mounted a defense that played to that political divide. “They basically turned this into an ultra-partisan event, knowing that they just had to minimize the number of Republican defections,” Sabato said. “All they had to do was beat Democrats to a pulp and basically say to Republicans, who have all fought Democrats to win office and fight them every single day, ‘Do you want to side with your enemies? Or are you going to stick with your team?’”
(By Kimberly A. Whittier, assistant professor at the Darden School of Business) The pandemic caused a rapid shift in business practices toward more virtual and digital consumer experiences. To better understand these insights, I turned to Jason Rose, chief marketing officer of Pure Storage. Below are his thoughts on four virtual/digital trends that better companies are leveraging for advantage.
(By Bridget Hamre, research associate professor at UVA’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning) Even before the outbreak of COVID-19 and resulting mass closures, high-quality child care was in short supply. Between 2018 and 2019, half of states actually saw a decline in the number of child care centers. This is among the reasons why results from recent elections, in which voters turned out in droves to back pre-K investments, were exciting for the early childhood education community.
Under the state’s Clean Economy Act, Virginia is committed to adding more solar and wind power to the grid. Lawmakers cited concerns about climate change in casting their votes, but a new study from UVA shows another reason to go green. It’s cheaper and more reliable.
The anxiety or fear of missing out (FOMO) on fun events is a real phenomenon that most people have probably experienced from time to time—especially college students. Lalin Anik, assistant professor of business administration at UVA, analyzed the ways in which FOMO has continued through the pandemic. “We wanted to see what might happen to FOMO during this time of COVID-19, when people are stuck at home, largely unable to travel, attend large gatherings or do many of the things we would normally do for fun. FOMO in the pandemic stems from the difficulty of catching up with all of the things bei...
A UVA professor is developing a new tool that he hopes will help Black men diagnosed with prostate cancer. Black men are more than twice as likely than men of other races to die from prostate cancer, according to UVA nurse scientist and professor Randy Jones, who is leading a National Institutes of Health study that is developing a tool for Black men to consider their options if diagnosed with the disease.
A pending budget proposal could ease the financial strain on an advanced manufacturing research center outside of Petersburg and create a new research facility driven by powerful computers and high-speed internet outside of Richmond. All of it is aimed at economic development driven by data technology that has become central to Virginia’s economy. The House budget proposal begins with $20 million in currently approved state bonds to build a headquarters for yet another center of excellence – the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Logistics Systems, a research partnership that includes VCU, Virgi...
UVA researchers say a group of HIV-preventing drugs could prevent age-related dry macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness, and they hope to begin clinical trials later this year.
Blood testing for COVID-19 antibodies showed only 2% of Virginians had antibodies to the virus as of mid-August. Officials at UVA Health estimate that now around 18% of Virginians likely have antibodies. “We are not at herd immunity now. We’ve got a ways to go,” said Dr. Eric Houpt, the chief of UVA Health’s Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health.
A published study by the University of Virginia investigating antibodies and herd immunity found Hispanic participants had the highest rate of exposure to COVID-19. The report references “Latinx individuals have been reported to account for a disproportionate number of COVID-19 cases, including in Virginia, in which they account for 33.8% of cases but only 9% [of the population].”
Dr. Bill Petri, a UVA infectious diseases professor, and others are studying the impacts of COVID-19. “Having additional vaccines is always a good thing,” Petri said. His team is in the process of creating a COVID-19 vaccine that’s not a shot, but rather a spray.
Epidemiologists at UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute outlined three potential scenarios for the upcoming months, taking the variants into account.
For students who don’t test well, the pandemic proved a blessing as most colleges and universities announced they would not require SAT or ACT scores. At UVA, Dean of Undergraduate Admission Greg Roberts thinks that’s behind a 17% increase in the number of applicants.
Valencia Robin’s poems often connect her life to larger moments in American history. “I never set out to write about history or current events; I begin with my own lived experience and it’s through that experience that I connect to our country’s broader narrative,” the Charlottesville-based poet said during a recent interview. So if she’d been living anywhere else in the country, it’s doubtful that she would have written a poem about August 2017.
In the last few years, several economists who should have won the Nobel Prize have passed away. The most egregious omission, in some economists’ opinion, is former UVA fauclty member Gordon Tullock, who was born today in 1922 in Rockford, Illinois, and who passed away on Nov. 3, 2014.