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.
Things like love, hate, the despair that comes when your laptop won’t work right before you’re supposed to submit an article for The Cavalier Daily — these are things we don’t understand from observing; we understand these things from being.
Tía Ysa did not have beautiful hands. They were scarred and sliced from the sharp crack of machete against sugar cane. I turned her hand over in mine, poked and prodded the raised, white scars that were like spider legs crawling in her palm and asked again what would happen if you found a set of eyes while cutting.
Choosing a tentative list of courses with Lou’s List based on intellectual interests, before whittling it down with the Course Forum and Rate My Professors, is a better option than relying only on the possibly unreliable and outdated grade distributions put forward by the Course Forum.
Why should the stupidity of a few isolated groups make vaccines mandatory? Because their stupidity does not put only them at risk. Many people cannot get vaccines without risking major health complications because of specific conditions, medical treatments or age. The prevalence of vaccines in the general population is the best defense these people have against many diseases to which they would otherwise be susceptible.
With so much festive spirit in the air, it’s time to resurface that perennial debate: which holiday is the best? Is it the raucous debauchery of Halloween? The joy of Thanksgiving? The timelessness of Christmas?
We’re mostly just glad that the gubernatorial race — one of the most toxic and intellectually unproductive in recent memory — is over. But unpleasant as the race was, the results point to some interesting developments in Virginia politics. They also confirm some traditional wisdom.
Overall, however, I take the most issue with the idea that losing a holiday’s religious sentimentality automatically detracts from the holiday itself. I would argue that, in cases where the holiday promotes messages beyond simply religious sentiments, ignoring a holiday’s religious base does little to diminish the good that the holiday may promote.
Progressives on Election Day should engage in a collective act of nose-holding, go to the ballot box, and counteract reactionary voters who will always turn out no matter what. To say there are no differences between the candidates, as Brand suggests, is disingenuous and ignores the consequences of those differences for regular people.
More U.S. college students die from suicide than from alcohol, according to a 2011 study commissioned by James Turner, executive director of Student Health at the University of Virginia. And one in 12 college students makes a suicide plan, a 2002 report co-sponsored by the National Mental Health Association found.
To promote hazing as a desirable form of bonding might go against anecdotes from those who have emerged from the other side of the process, but it directly contradicts empirical and clinical evidence.
Our federal government’s increasing reliance upon the Internet and technology for the implementation of legislation, reflected in the Affordable Care Act, calls for a corresponding development in our nation’s bureaucracy.
