On Wednesday, the Center for Politics will kick off its yearlong “JFK100” celebration with an exhibit featuring nearly 80 unreleased photos of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
UVA economist James Harrigan shares how economic inequality has grown since 1980 and why those in the top 1 percent are earning more than 18 percent of the country’s total income.
A wildly successful “Brotherhood of the Traveling Pants” campaign with clothing company Vineyard Vines introduced Matt and Kristina Loftus to high-end retail. Two years later, the newly married Darden students launched their own activewear line.
Dec. 20, 2007 — University of Virginia law student Amy Woolard has been named the 2007 recipient of the Law School's Powell Fellowship in Legal Services, an award given each year to a graduating student pursuing a public service career. Woolard will use the fellowship to work for the Legal Aid Justice Center's JustChildren program in Richmond and Petersburg, advocating on behalf of youths in the educational, foster care and juvenile justice systems.Named for former United States Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., the Powell Fellowship provides a $35,000 salary for one year, with the expectation of renewal the second year, allowing recipients to work at no cost to a partner public-interest organization. Recipients' loan payments are paid for the duration of the fellowship by the Law School's Virginia Loan Forgiveness Program.Woolard was thrilled when she got the news on receiving the fellowship. "It seemed impossible," she said. "You design your dream job and then you get it. In a situation where these jobs are so few and far between, it's amazing to be doing the exact thing that you want to be doing."Woolard is focused on education issues for children who are at risk of entering the juvenile justice system."What I really love about JustChildren and the Legal Aid Justice Center is their comprehensive approach to community change," Woolard explained. "It's investing in the community and helping parents become their own advocate that benefits the community as a whole."JustChildren Legal Director Andy Block, whose staff help teach and supervise the Law School’s Child Advocacy Clinic, sponsored Woolard’s project and recommended that she work in their Petersburg and Richmond offices."We have known Amy since her first summer in law school and have always been impressed with her dedication to this work," he said. "I am confident that Amy’s project will have a real and positive impact on the educational opportunities available to children in foster care in the Richmond region. There is a real need for the work she has proposed and we are excited to have her join our team."Woolard's path to law was circuitous, but grounded in her love for writing. A U.Va. graduate in English, she also earned an M.F.A. in poetry writing from the University of Iowa's famed Writer's Workshop. Later Woolard earned a master's degree in communications at the Adcenter, part of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Mass Communications. Although she's worked in San Francisco's dot-com industry, Woolard has lived many years in Charlottesville, where she once worked as a restaurant manager and later for SNL Financial's news department.The camaraderie at SNL sparked long-dormant issues in Woolard's mind. "I began to see how much time I spent thinking about all the problems in the world and how little time I spent actually doing something about it," she said.Woolard decided to enter law school, where her focus has since remained on public service. She has been actively involved in the Public Interest Law Association, CARE (Child Advocacy, Research and Education), the Domestic Violence Project, and the Conference on Public Service and the Law.Before she applied for her first summer law job, Woolard sought the advice of her older sister Jennifer, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University, whose own career has involved work with juvenile justice and family issues. She steered Woolard to JustChildren, a program based in the Legal Aid Justice Center's Charlottesville office.That summer's work changed her direction completely. "I went into the Child Advocacy Clinic right after that," Woolard said. "All the decisions I made regarding law school from then on were focused on the goal of working with kids."She spent her second summer clerking for the District of Columbia's Juvenile Trial Division of the Public Defender Service."I really wanted to see the other end of the ‘schoolhouse-to-jailhouse' experience. I wanted to know what these kids thought about how they got there and to look for ways to get them out and back to the other side." Woolard added, "Once they're in, a lot of them are just gone for good."Although she's turned her career toward law, Woolard sees a place for her creative writing energies as well. "Creative writing tells you to keep looking at things, and if something isn't working, to look at it from another angle." She hopes to conduct writing workshops for kids in foster homes and detention centers as an ancillary project.— Reported by Ken Reitz
Sept. 19, 2007 — Just days after President Bush followed Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s testimony before Congress with an address to the nation announcing a limited troop draw-down, the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs inaugurated its National Discussion and Debate Series with a spirited conversation about the United States’ best interests in the Middle East — and how the U.S. should proceed in Iraq.
The debate was first of five that the center, in partnership with MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, will host during the 2007–08 academic year on various issues of the day.
Produced in an “in the round” format in the Dome Room of the University’s Rotunda, the debate featured four of the country’s leading experts on Iraq and the Middle East, debating the resolution: “Keeping troops in Iraq is vital for American national interests in the Middle East.” Margaret Warner, senior correspondent for "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," moderated the discussion. Fred Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and lead architect of the “surge” plan, and Reuel Marc Gerecht, an American Enterprise Institute fellow and former Central Intelligence Agency Middle East specialist, argued for the resolution. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Chas Freeman, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and president of the Middle East Policy Council, argued against it.
In the first 20 minutes, each participant had five minutes to make a case. Kagan and Gerecht argued that the U.S. must remain in Iraq to continue fighting Al Qaida in Iraq, and to prevent Iran from radicalizing its Shia population and further destabilizing the region.
“[Al Qaida’s] continued existence in Iraq, if it were not checked, would pose a great danger to American interests throughout the region, and ultimately I believe throughout the world,” Kagan said. The global Al Qaida movement has indicated that it regards Iraq as the central front in the war against the United States, Kagan said, and pulling out of Iraq would allow the group to take advantage of what would be perceived as a U.S. defeat.
But the problem with the U.S. mission in Iraq, offered Mathews and Freeman, is that we see it only through the lens of the American effort, which distorts the picture of what’s happening inside the country. Current U.S. policy, combined with an extremely unstable and dangerous situation, makes an ongoing involvement futile, they argued.
“[I]n a struggle like this, an insurgency against a foreign military power, in a political struggle for power, there is universal truth,” Mathews said. “And that is that there is no military solution. There is only a political solution. This was true for the French in Algeria. This was true for the Russians in Chechnya. It is true for the Israelis with the Palestinians. It is universally true.”
Warner asked the questions in the next, more free-form segment, and addressed the influence of Iran in the Middle East politics and Iraq’s internal politics, the importance of benchmarks, and how the military is affected by keeping troops on the ground. A third segment allowed the debaters to respond to questions from the audience both in the Rotunda and on the Miller Center web site.
While the debate took place in the Rotunda, a separate event at Newcomb Hall, co-sponsored by the Arts and Sciences Council, offered U.Va. students and the general public an opportunity to watch a live feed and to ask questions of Warner, Freeman and Gerecht afterward.
The debate was webcast live and archived on the Miller Center Web site at www.millercenter.org/debates. It aired on PBS affiliates in Charlottesville, Richmond, Roanoke, Norfolk and Central Virginia, as well as on WVTF public radio, and will air on the new PBS World digital television channel later this month. The conversation continues via interactive Miller Center group pages on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Google and Yahoo.
The National Discussion and Debate Series, the Miller Center’s newest initiative, was created by Miller Center director Gerald L. Baliles as way to educate and engage the public on issues of national importance to the governance of the country. The goal, Baliles said, is to “elevate the level of civility in the public discussion of the complex questions of our time.”
“Too often, the idea of ‘debate’ in this country is overtaken by sound bites and heated arguments rather than a reasoned, informed exchange of ideas,” Baliles said. “This series is an extension of the Miller Center’s mission to examine important issues, and through it we aim to contribute to the national conversation with a genuine, thoughtful give-and-take that will both inform people and provoke dialogue.”
The second debate, set to take place on Nov. 13 in Washington, will look at how technology and national security affect the privacy rights of citizens; the participants will debate the resolution: “In the light of technological advances and the war on terror, Americans should lower their expectations for privacy?” Future events in the series will address health care, immigration, and the changing nature of “family” in America.