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Camping for a cause
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Peggy
Harrison
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Rained out Oct. 4, the student group Advocates for Diversity
in Education postponed their overnight event to celebrate diversity
on Grounds for two days and the sun shone down upon them. Faculty
and administrators gave talks and led small groups, the U.Va.
African Drum and Dance Ensemble performed, and the discussions
continued through the evening, as a small but hardy band camped
in tents set up on the lower Lawn. |
Arts & Sciences
taking aim at top-10 ranking
By
Dan Heuchert
U.Va.'s
post-campaign future is beginning to take shape, and it has an ambitious
goal: pushing the University into the ranks of the top 10 institutions
of higher education, public or private, by 2020.
University
President John T. Casteen III made reference to that goal in his
remarks to the Faculty Senate Oct. 4, when he said he would submit
a plan to the Board of Visitors at its Oct. 15-16 meeting that included
such a goal as a recommended option.
Three
days later, Melvyn P. Leffler, dean of Arts & Sciences, elaborated
on that goal in delivering his annual report to the faculty, and
returned to a familiar touchstone to justify the University's ambition.
"Jefferson
said that we should strive to be the bulwark of the human mind in
this hemisphere," Leffler said. "In today's terms, that
means aspiring to be as good as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford
and Chicago."
Leffler identified four broad areas in which he hopes the College
of Arts & Sciences -- which he called "the core of this great
university" -- can improve enough to vault U.Va. into the top
10. Three of those areas dovetail with the work of the University's
Virginia 2020 planning commissions. Full
story.
Miller Center launches
project on the presidency and the economy
By
Robert Brickhouse
Do
the carefully set economic and spending policies of U.S. presidents
have a decisive effect on economic performance?
The
public seems to think so. Former President George Bush lost his
re-election bid partly because of the perception that he failed
to maintain America's economic strength. And President Clinton has
weathered potentially crippling scandals in part because voters
believe his policies have sustained high economic growth, low inflation
and record levels of employment.
Government
officials and scholars have begun questioning the assumption. It
is often argued today that the chair of the Federal Reserve, Wall
Street and international capital markets have a far greater impact
on the economy than does the president. To address this topic, the
U.Va. Miller Center of Public Affairs is launching a research program
to examine the true relationship between presidential policy and
economic performance. Full story.
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