John Freeman is coming home. The Crozet native was officially named the University of Virginia’s radio play-by-play announcer for football and men’s basketball on Monday by the school’s athletics department and Playfly Sports Properties. Freeman had been handling the role on an interim basis since the departure of Dave Koehn.
In an era where there are many firsts for women, [UVA alumna] Val Ackerman, commissioner of the BIG EAST Conference, has been a staple trailblazer and role model in the world of sports for over 30 years. She was the first woman staff attorney and special assistant to the late commissioner David Stern at the NBA, and she was the first president of the WNBA. Notably, she has held leadership positions in both men’s and women’s sports at the collegiate, professional, national and international levels.
That power shift could mean a lot for the fate of the state’s “right-to-work” law that says employees don’t have to pay dues to a union, and alter the trajectory of some Democratic priorities for labor reform, according to J.H. Verkerke, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who studies labor law. “With a Republican governor-elect and Republican control of the House of Delegates, there is no prospect whatsoever that the [right-to-work] law will be repealed until the 2026 session at the earliest,” Verkerke said. Some observers had hoped that the right-to-work law would be repe...
The ballots in Virginia and California can provide lessons for the 2022 midterms, with GOP candidates clamoring for Trump’s blessing and Democrats fearing they could lose their majority. “Glenn Youngkin effectively distanced himself from Trump just far enough to reclaim Never Trump Republicans,” said William Antholis, CEO of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Ever since [the insurrection at the US Capitol on] 6 January, they have been looking for ways to get around Donald Trump, and they think they’ve found it using this Virginia race. “It’s to not ignore him, because he will lash out and you’ll lose his base, but it’s to say good things and to make sure you have emissaries, which is what Youngkin did, who are keeping him informed and in the loop and telling him how important he is. And then just never being able to get together. ‘We just can’t get the schedules...
Analysts say Youngkin’s hazy messaging worked to his advantage when cobbling together a coalition of voters to make him the first Republican elected Virginia governor in more than a decade. “Youngkin seems friendlier, nicer, more normal. Who knows if he really is?” says Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “We know nothing about him, really. That is what [his campaign] wanted: tabula rasa. You write on that slate anything you want.”
Youngkin was raised here as a teenager. Winsome Sears, the lieutenant governor-elect, was a state legislator in the early 2000s for the 90th District, which includes parts of Norfolk and Virginia Beach. And Jason Miyares, who defeated two-term incumbent Democrat Mark Herring for attorney general, currently represents the 82nd District, which encompasses parts of Virginia Beach. “In terms of having maybe a home region boost, the Virginia Beach area is a pretty good area to be from,” said J. Miles Coleman, University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
One of two pending infrastructure bills in the U.S. could have implications for DeFi exchanges and other services, according to a warning from University of Virginia law lecturer Abraham Sutherland. Sutherland drew attention to an amendment to tax code section 6050I, which he noted is different from the “so-called ‘broker’ provision that attracted public opposition.” Rather, Sutherland says that this amendment to the tax code would require recipients of “digital assets” in value amounts greater than $10,000 to report sender names, addresses, and SSNs to the government upon receiving the funds.
Vidya Mani, Professor of Business Administration, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, said that with the global economy restarting again in bits and pieces, and at different rates of speed depending on what part of the world you live in, shortages of products across various sectors can be expected. As a result of these unpredictable reopening policies and subsequent challenges in accurately forecasting future demand, manufacturers are struggling to keep up with these new jolts of demand as they continue to experience supply crunches in components and raw materials.
For other programs without support from the federal government, exclusionary discipline may be all the teachers have ever known. So that’s all their students ever know, too. This is why more than just a ban of seclusion and expulsion is needed, according to Amanda Williford, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning. “Soft” suspensions refer to uses of exclusionary discipline may not count as suspensions or expulsions in name, but have the same end result of removing students from the classroom.
Brian Nosek, a psychology scholar who has long considered the unintended effects of open science, is the co-founder and executive director of the Center for Open Science and a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He notes that the open movement in science has placed a lot of emphasis on the end of the research process -- results. But he said a core incentive problem needs to be fixed if scholars are going to operate in a results-oriented system. “Publishing is the currency of advancement,” Nosek said. “I, as a researcher, have a conflict of interest in what’s good for me in t...
Several doctors and an expert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told USA Today influenza is seasonal. The claims that flu activity is tied to sugar intake and that viruses are “part of our genome” are not based in fact. “Dr. Hamel’s comment that all viruses are just part of our genome and released due to stress is silly,” Dr. Patrick Jackson, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Virginia, said in an email.
To help understand the back-to-basics movement, Hudson recommends an article called “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew B. Crawford, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. “I think a lot of it can be laid at the feet of manufacturers,” he said. “I’m echoing the Crawford line. I don’t think companies want you to be able to fix your stuff, and people have just gone along with that for the most part. Crawford writes in that article about how you need a set of strange screwdrivers to get into a lot of today’s machines. That’s right. They could hav...
(Podcast) The Learning More Podcast recently released a podcast episode discussing conservatorships in the light of the #FreeBritney Movement. University of Virginia law [rofessor Naomi Can is featured on the podcast.
More than 90% of a person’s brain develops before age 5, which makes early childhood a critical time for children. In preschool, young children learn essential skills such as working with others and controlling their own behaviors and emotions before they head to kindergarten. “That brain development really happens through moving their bodies and exploring their environments in ways that really need to be facilitated by the design of that environment,” said Jessica Whittaker, a research associate professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development.
It’s an exciting time for internet in America. The federal government is set to spend $65 billion on Broadband funding in the new infrastructure bill — the largest single investment in expanding internet access in our country’s history. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put a tremendous dent in the Digital Divide,” University of Virginia Professor Christopher Ali told us.
(Podcast) Psychologist Ben Converse of the University of Virginia considers whether we might find geoengineering a socially acceptable approach to tackling climate change.
Dr. Michael Nelson of the University of Virginia School of Medicine emphasized the need for parents to have conversations with their pediatricians. “Providing choice to a fully risk-informed public using a shared decision-making model with their trusted providers, to me, is a pretty reasonable way ahead,” he said, adding that there were millions of high-risk children and family members who needed the vaccine.
Margaret Foster Riley, JD, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said that although vaccine requirements may not be popular among certain groups, they work — often better than more popular incentive programs such as vaccine lotteries. “Our previous experience with flu vaccine mandates in healt hcare settings shows that vaccine mandates can bring compliance up from about 70% to 90%,” she said. “Anecdotal evidence from employer mandates with COVID seem to be similar.”
But if federal religious protections are that available, why the long nights and hours of debate at the end of the Legislature’s fall session to clarify that the Illinois right of conscience law doesn’t cover rejection of the coronavirus vaccine? “It wouldn’t do much good to amend it if the same exemptions were available elsewhere,” said Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia law professor whose writings on religious liberties have been compiled into five volumes. “They are not, unless the Supreme Court changes the law.”