The University of Virginia recently introduced the Institute of World Languages as the first of many initiatives in its latest series of interdisciplinary programs.
In 2013, race is inescapable in pop culture. Perhaps the Trayvon Martin killing, the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington or the racially tinged debates of Barack Obama’s presidency have spurred this trend, but whatever the causes, the theme has been everywhere.
For Governor Chris Christie, the path to reelection started with a storm — Superstorm Sandy, that is.
Today’s political rhetoric often involves the perceived dangers or benefits posed by big government, and various government interventions into people’s private lives are often met with much hostility.
Since New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s sweeping victory last week — and before it — many pundits consider Christie the likely GOP nominee for president in 2016.
October, with its endless midterms, interminable stress and great parties, has finally ended. With it came the end of another source of angst: Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
A recent New York Times article recounts the story of a college applicant whose explicit and offensive tweets were noticed by the college admissions officers at the school to which she was applying.
About 99 percent of U.S. meat comes from industrial farms. I am by no means a vegetarian, but I propose there are significant moral, environmental and health costs associated with these contemporary methods.
Why does it matter what words we use to talk about higher education? Because the terms we employ often stack the deck one way or the other. It is hard to argue against what you perceive as the corporatization of the academy if you are compelled to speak in corporate language.
While much of the election coverage was good, other parts left me troubled.
I commonly overhear students categorize themselves as either humanities-oriented or math-and-science-oriented. We tend to believe that we are predisposed to be good at one or the other, but not both. Yet new studies prove otherwise.
Opportunity at U.Va. comes in many different shapes and forms. It can be taking a class that you wouldn’t have taken otherwise, because you realize that this may be the last semester you will ever have to sit in a classroom and have the opportunity to learn about a new concept. It could be exploring what the University has to offer in the way of the arts. It could even be as small as checking out the observatory and having the opportunity to gaze at the stars.
I don’t care if you’re an Echols scholar. I don’t care if you got a great writing SAT score, and I don’t care if you got a 5 on your AP English Language exam. There should be no exemptions from the first writing requirement.
At schools like the University where there exists a student-governed honor system, an honor code is a social contract between each individual and his or her peers. The honor code creates a culture of integrity on which students pride themselves.
What would life be like for gay Virginians had Cuccinelli won the gubernatorial contest?
All media is expressive, and all media houses the traces of its makers. It seems to me that any sort of interaction with a text will yield a story, whether it be by Nook or dog-eared paperback.
For University professors and administrators to take the intrinsic-value argument seriously, for them to make it forcefully to external parties, would mean that they would be asserting another claim at the same time. They would be insisting that the purpose of college is more than just job preparation. They would be saying that college is something more: it is about creating people who can make a life, not just make a living.
The humanities exist, and will continue to exist, because we are human. Because we exist not to build bigger buildings and computers that are more powerful but just to be: to be happy, sad, angry, wistful, passionate, horrified, winners, losers, friends, lovers, parents, leaders, followers. Does it matter that the humanities serve no practical purpose, if they give pleasure? I don’t think so. Do you?
There was a place named Reality, the twin city of Illusion, and its inhabitants were in retrospect not all that different from U.Va. students at their most stressed and chronically overcommitted. Day in and day out, all these people just trying to get through Reality were so relentlessly preoccupied with traveling straight from point A to point B that they never even looked up long enough to notice something astounding: their entire city had become invisible.
The humanities use its tools to pop the bubbles, to take apart the shed and put it back together — occupy it, learn its every panel and stand outside of it — from an outside perspective it doesn’t seem like anything is being done, but anyone in the humanities will smile because there is no instruction manual to what we do.
