(Commentary by Chad Wellmon, associate professor of German studies) Before he philosophized with a hammer, Friedrich Nietzsche counted Greek metre. In 1868, the University of Basel appointed, or “called” as German academics put it to this day, the 24-year-old Leipzig student a professor in ancient Greek language and literature. For several years, Nietzsche played the professional philologist, publishing erudite articles, arguing with fellow scholars over minutiae, and introducing students to the discipline of philology. By 1875, he had had enough.
(Commentary by Cale Jaffe, assistant professor of law and director of UVA’s Environmental and Regulatory Law Clinic) The Supreme Court will decide in 2019 whether a Virginia law that bans uranium mining is preempted by the Atomic Energy Act, the U.S. law governing the processing and enrichment of nuclear material.
Reject the lesser candidate. Confront the lazy employee. Give critical feedback on that project right away. Your office will be happier for it. That’s advice from a recent study published in the journal “Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin” which found that feeling ignored or unacknowledged is worse for a person’s mental health than receiving bad news. “Ostracism is more powerful than we think,” says study co-author Andrew H. Hales, a UVA postdoctoral researcher.
Gaining excessive weight during pregnancy has been linked to a higher risk of macrosomic babies, those who are significantly larger than average. Macrosomic babies are more likely to become obese by the time they reach kindergarten, according to a 2017 study by researchers from the UVA School of Medicine.
UVA has been announced as the 2019 innovation award winner in the 'Higher Education Energy Efficiency Technology' category. The award honors the University's Delta Force initiative, in which the institution identifies internal energy savings potentials, funds them and recovers 125 percent of the funding out of utility savings.
Two Canadians working in the U.S., UVA professor Gillian Frank and Jamie Duong, challenged Canadian voting restrictions after being unable to vote in the federal election of 2011. At the time, the law said non-resident citizens could not vote if they had lived more than five years abroad.
What would happen if the president decided to declare a national emergency and divert military funds to build the wall? What statutes could he rely on? And would such an action be constitutional? Host Jeffrey Rosen and guests Mark Tushnet of Harvard Law and Sai Prakash of UVA Law explore the constitutional clauses, cases, and laws at issue in this hotly contested debate.
A Virginia study launched in response to reports of a surge in bullying at schools across the country following the 2016 presidential election has found a rise in abuse in areas of the state that voted for President Donald Trump, compared to those that supported his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. The study, which was undertaken by Francis Huang of the University of Missouri and Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia and published Wednesday in Educational Researcher, a journal of the American Educational Research Association, analyzed data from a school climate surve...
The research, conducted by professors at the University of Missouri and the University of Virginia and published online Wednesday in a peer-reviewed journal, does not blame Trump specifically for the rise. Co-author Dewey Cornell, an education professor at the University of Virginia, said in a statement: "While the ways in which the presidential election could have affected students is likely complex, educators and parents should be aware of the potential impact of public events on student behavior. Parents should be mindful of how their reactions to the presidential election, or the reactions...
After the 2016 presidential election, teachers across the country reported they were seeing increased name-calling and bullying in their classrooms. Now, research shows that those stories — at least in one state — are confirmed by student surveys. Francis Huang of the University of Missouri and Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia used data from a school climate survey taken by over 150,000 students across Virginia. They looked at student responses to questions about bullying and teasing from 2015 and 2017. Their findings were published Wednesday in Educational Researcher, a peer-r...
Times at the University of Virginia are changing and the uncomfortable truths are being told. A memorial to enslaved laborers at UVA has been in the making for over 10 years, and now it’s finally becoming a reality.
While former Rep. Tom Garrett, R-5th, intended to amend his bill honoring Army Capt. Humayun Khan with the renaming of a post office in Charlottesville, the version that was signed by the president instead renames a contract postal unit. Now, Virginia’s U.S. senators are working to correct the situation. HR 3184, signed by President Donald Trump on Dec. 23, designates the McCormick Road site near the University of Virginia as the “Captain Humayun Khan Post Office,” honoring the only UVA graduate to be killed in action during the Iraq War.
In animal experiments with mice, researchers led by UVA’s Jonathan Kipnis have found that mice bred without the receptor for interferon gamma, or that are incapable of producing interferon gamma, become severely antisocial.
Tropical forests store about a third of Earth's carbon and about two-thirds of its above-ground biomass. Most climate change models predict that as the world warms, all of that biomass will decompose more quickly, which would send a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But new UVA research presented at the American Geophysical Union's 2018 Fall Meeting contradicts that theory.
Donald Trump fueled his rise to the presidency with a campaign promise to build a border wall. He is now under pressure from conservatives to follow through, according to UVA analyst Larry Sabato. "Essentially, they said, 'If you don't push harder for your wall and you don't get billions of dollars to build it, then your base, and we represent that base, won't be there for you in 2020,'" he said.
A presidential historian on Monday tried to figure out which president told Donald Trump that he wants the Mexican border wall built — and noted that they must not be alive. The report noted that aides to Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama also denied that they expressed approval for the wall to Trump. Given those facts, presidential history author and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics Larry Sabato pointed out that Trump wouldn’t be the first to speak to portraits. “What about the dead Presidents?” Sabato added. “After all, Nixon talked to the p...
The researchers also studied the magnitude of the win in each community. For every 10 percentage point increase in voter support for Trump, the researchers found an 8 percentage-point rise in reported bullying and a 5 percentage-point increase in bullying because of a student's race or ethnicity. By contrast, from 2013 to 2017, there was no difference in school bullying rates between Republican- and Democrat-leaning communities in the commonwealth's biannual school climate survey, according to study authors Francis Huang, an associate professor of statistics, measurement, and evaluation in edu...
President Trump delivered his first speech from the Oval Office, an historic spot to use the presidential bully pulpit, to a polarized nation. There was not the slightest sign of melt to show for Trump's efforts. "This Oval Office speech did not change 100 minds: We all know what we think of this president. His base cheers whatever he says and the remainder of America sees his giant credibility gap," tweeted UVA opinion expert Larry Sabato.
Experts predict that marital decisions will change drastically in the coming years, thanks to divorce tax laws. “The research indicates that tax policy does influence decisions about getting married and staying married, but this influence is modest,” said Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and a UVA sociology professor. “Changes in tax-related alimony deductions are not likely to have a huge impact on either the timing or likelihood of divorce for married couples in America.”
“We found differences in teasing and bullying rates that were linked to voting preferences, which we didn’t see prior to the 2016 presidential election,” said Francis Huang, an associate professor at the University of Missouri, who conducted the study with UVA professor Dewey Cornell. Huang and Cornell examined the survey responses of more than 155,000 seventh- and eighth-grade students across Virginia’s 132 school districts. Students were asked if they had been bullied at school and if they had observed harassment of others, including students being targeted due to their race or ethnicity. Th...