UVA, which received a record 48,000 applications – a 14% increase – announced that it would continue applying the test-optional policy for two years. UVA President James Ryan explained that the administration felt this would be a “reasonable and human response” to the pressure that many incoming students are feeling because of the pandemic.
UVA is sticking with its new policy saying applicants don’t need to submit an SAT or ACT score. The policy started for the class of 2021 because of due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but now it’s carrying over to the classes of 2022 and 2023. One reason the University decided to continue the policy is that testing dates in the upcoming months may be cancelled due to the virus.
Students applying to UVA over the next two years will not have to submit either ACT or SAT scores. The decision, announced Friday, extends a policy first implemented in June for those who applied this past fall. Several other universities also have eliminated the requirement for standardized test scores during the pandemic, which disrupted the administration of the tests.
(Commentary by Melvyn Leffler, history professor emeritus) As President Joe Biden and his team turn their attention to designing a new national security strategy, they face a formidable task – one never encountered before in American history. For the first time, the biggest threats facing the United States stem not from great power rivals or geopolitical configurations, but from stateless and even nonhuman actors such as viruses and climate change.
Interviews are underway for the UVA Miller Center of Public Affairs’ latest oral history project about the career of Hillary Clinton. The project is the first time the center has tackled an oral history about a woman and one of only a handful about a non-president.
(Video) Los Angeles Rams linebacker Micah Kiser talks about what Black History Month means to him, and details his time at UVA during the 2017 violence in Charlottesville.
(Commentary by Robert Louis Wilken, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity) During an illness, Marcellinus, a deacon in the church in Alexandria, had spent his days studying the Bible, especially the psalms, and he wished to know the meaning contained in each psalm. In his response, Athanasius writes that all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, “yet the Book of Psalms is like a garden which besides bearing fruit that is found elsewhere, exhibits things of its own in song along with the words.”
Arizona’s senators had been watched in past years when Republicans John McCain and Jon Kyl wielded outsized clout in the chamber because of their seniority and because of Kyl's status as a GOP leader.Now, in a closely divided Senate, Sinema and Kelly’s centrism could position them as power players despite their relative newness. "They are right in the middle of the fulcrum in the Senate," said Larry Sabato, the director of UVA’s Center for Politics.
Edward Lengel, editor in chief of the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia, told PolitiFact in 2015 that he's "as certain as he can be" that Washington never spoke the words from the Facebook claim.
“The people we serve are paying too much for energy month after month,” said Del. Sally Hudson, D-Charlottesville, a labor economist and UVA assistant professor who is sponsoring parts of the new legislation. “I knocked a door in my last campaign with a woman crying on her stoop because she was losing her housing. What she thought of as the thing that was really pushing her over the edge was her electric bill.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA professor of media studies, says the law needs to be updated, but that it will not be a simple process. “Really cruel, harassing stuff is protected by Section 230,” he said. “There are ways, with deep study and long interrogation, we can come up with changes to Section 230 that can protect the vulnerable and allow these companies to continue to try to filter responsibly.”
“If China doesn’t need U.S. movies, Hollywood studios will have to dramatically reduce their spending on big-budget blockbusters,” UVA media studies professor Aynne Kokas, the author of “Hollywood Made in China,” said. “The current budgets are unsustainable without access to the China market. That could fundamentally change the model of the U.S. film industry.”
HBO’s decision to back the film stands in contrast to another recent case of a political documentary from an acclaimed filmmaker, Bryan Fogel’s Jamal Khashoggi movie “The Dissident." Global streamers passed on the film, possibly because of fears of economic reprisal from the Saudi government. Aynne Kokas, a UVA professor and author of “Hollywood Made In China,” about their relationship, said a film’s popularity was a key variable in China’s reaction. But “if it does go viral I can see possible penalties for other HBO shows and significant impact for broader Warner Media distribution.”
Several apologies appeared in 2018. National Geographic hired John Edwin Mason, a historian at the University of Virginia, to review its archives for an issue dedicated to race. He found that, until at least the seventies, the magazine depicted people of color in exoticized ways, often nude and as “happy hunters, noble savages – every type of cliché,” Susan Goldberg, the editor in chief, wrote.
Sarah Milov, a UVA associate professor of history, says there are lessons for environmentalists to take from anti-smoking crusaders, whose history she chronicles in dazzling detail in the book, “The Cigarette: A Political History.” I spoke with Milov to discuss the comparisons between Big Oil and Big Tobacco, the innovations and flaws of nonsmokers’ protest methods, and the unique challenges facing climate activists.
“In the early days of The_Donald, there was an interesting mix of gleeful disbelief around the success of the subreddit,” said Lana Swartz, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “New Money: How Payment Became Social Media.” Their stated goal, after all, was “to make a meme president.”
Coronaviruses mutate more slowly than other so-called RNA viruses — such as influenza, HIV and hepatitis C — because they have a "proofreading" function to correct errors as they replicate in cells. This function is necessary because SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses have a longer genome to copy, said William Petri, an infectious disease professor at the UVA School of Medicine.
COVID-19 has killed Americans of color out of proportion to their numbers in the general population, but that disparity can only be corrected in the context of the larger racial and economic inequalities in American society. That was the central message to emerge from the recent webinar, “Color and COVID-19: The Virus’s Disproportionate Impact,” hosted by the MJH Life Sciences COVID-19 Coalition. Participants included Dr. Taison Bell, a critical care and infectious disease physician at the University of Virginia and director of the medical ICU, and Dr. Ebony Hilton, associate professor of anes...
Given the supply bottlenecks and confusion that have plagued the vaccine rollout so far, UVA health business expert Vivian Riefberg urged people to be patient. She noted that the vaccine rollout is “one of the greatest mass mobilizations we’ve ever had.”
A new art installation is on display at the UVA Medical Center’s south tower after a Lexington woman created and donated it to honor health care workers. Barbara Crawford says she was moved by the dedication of the front-line staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also by the way UVA staff cared for her husband who had cancer for 10 years.