Category: Culture wars
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Outrage Over Reason at UVA Law
“Are we teaching people to think or just teaching them to judge?” At a recent Federalist Society panel discussion, UVA Law professor Xiao Wang described the response from students and colleagues to his role in winning a unanimous ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in Ames vs. Ohio Youth Services. The ruling ended the “heightened…
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Also Worth Reading…
The first university has admitted to race-based hiringby Scott Douglas Gerber in The Hill Money quote: After Students for Fair Admissions was decided, [Interim President Paul Mahoney] wrote, the university had received new guidance that “commits us to cease using race as a criterion for employment.” Of course, the university cannot “cease” using race in employment…
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Pragmatic or Partisan?
Will Abigail Spanberger fight for DEI or for intellectual diversity in her dealings with UVA? by Joel Gardner Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger states that she wants to have an administration that reflects pragmatism rather than partisanship. But her Democrat colleagues in the state senate have already exhibited a degree of partisanship vis-à-vis the University of Virginia…
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Tomorrow’s Election and Immaturity on the Left
by Aurelius Grimm The electoral stakes in Virginia this year are not existential in the sense of national survival. No one is claiming the Commonwealth is about to fall off the map. But the stakes are extraordinarily significant for one overriding reason: there is no moderating force left on the left. When Democrats held total…
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No Kings: Aging Hippies with a Bloodlust
by Kerry Dougherty Like most normal Americans I was too busy on Saturday to even notice the No Kings protests. I was doing what many of us do on Saturdays in the fall: Watching college football. In fact, I’d forgotten all about the protests until I checked Facebook Sunday night and saw that several of…
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UVa to Trump: No Thanks
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The University of Virginia has declined to sign the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” proposed by the Trump administration. In exchange for agreeing to a long list of terms, institutions signing the contract were offered “allowance for increased overhead payments where feasible, substantial and meaningful federal grants, and other federal…
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Who Owns the Statues?
And who controls their fates? by Patricia N. Saffran and Ann McLean LA’s Monuments Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which opens this month, is being funded to desecrate figures from American history. As a result, culture battles are heating up over whether or not to send magnificent Confederate Beaux Arts monuments to Los Angeles.…
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Parental Involvement an Afterthought in Fairfax County Public School Prayer Rooms
by Stephanie Lundquist-AroraRepublished with permission from IWFeatures On September 8, during the Religious Liberty Commission’s hearing at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump announced upcoming guidance from the Department of Education regarding prayer in public schools. He said, “I am pleased to announce this morning that the Department of Education will…
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Support Anti-Fascism by Burning the Flag of the Country that Defeated Fascism!
by Tom Neale Many of you are no doubt unaware of a UVA Law student group called “Friends Against Fascism.” They are not an officially sponsored UVA CIO student organization. As you see in their flier, they sponsored a tailgate October 3rd ostensibly condemning fascism in America. The capital letters in the title spell out…
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Opportunity or Faustian Bargain?
by Dick Hall-Sizemore (Author’s Note: The following article is unusually long, even by my standards. The subject is a federal policy document recently sent to the University of Virginia and eight other institutions of higher education. The document is ten pages long and contains numerous provisions which could have a significant impact on higher education…
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Off the Interstate: A National Monument to a Virginia-born Slave
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Nestled among the commercial development and luxury homes along Smith Mountain Lake along Rt. 122 between Bedford and Rocky Mount is a National Monument to a slave born in Virginia. Booker T. Washington was born in 1856 in the community of Hale’s Ford in Franklin County. His enslaved mother, Jane, was the…
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The Pediatrician-in-Chief
by Dick Hall-Sizemore At his press conference last week, President Trump railed at length against giving young children multiple vaccinations at once. In his view, doctors were pumping all this stuff into those “beautiful bodies.” At times, he alluded to 80 vaccines, as if children were being given every vaccine available. At other times, he…
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A Call for Civility
Virginians are desperate for a change in tone. The Charlie Kirk memorial at UVA hit all the right notes. I was proud of the University of Virginia students speaking last evening at the Charlie Kirk memorial held in Cabell Hall. The message was pitch-perfect: a celebration (as advertised) of free speech and civil dialogue. The…
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“Comeback Tour” at Virginia Tech to Honor Charlie Kirk
by Scott Dreyer As our region and nation reel from the senseless violence that recently stole the life of conservative icon and free-speech advocate Charlie Kirk, there is also a sense among many that a kind of invisible line has been crossed: not only how has political violence struck America again, but how can some…