University receives grant to address alcohol abuse

Saying goodbye to summer

Matt Kelly

Students returned to Grounds Aug. 25, reducing opportunities for quiet moments in the sun. See photographs from move-in day.

Littlepage is named new AD

Staff Report

Craig Littlepage has been named athletics director, the first African American in the Atlantic Coast Conference to hold the post. He succeeds Terry Holland, who stepped down at the end of May to become a special assistant to U.Va. President John T Casteen III.

Littlepage, 50, had served as interim director since June and held the same post for six months after Jim Copeland resigned in 1994. Littlepage has been a member of the U.Va. athletics administration since 1990, most recently as senior associate director. Full story.

U.Va. distance learning goes all the way to South Africa

Photo by Tom Cogill

Gene Block (foreground), who becomes UVa. vice president and provost Sept. 1, Dr. Richard Guerrant, professor of international medicine (left), and others participate in a videoconference with the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

By Fariss Samarrai

It was an unprecedented conference call -- an international videoconference held Aug. 20 between administrators and faculty at U.Va. and the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) in South Africa.

The time was 10 a.m. in Charlottesville, 4 p.m. in Johannesburg. The purpose -- conducted in real-time, across an ocean and seven time zones -- was the signing of an academic partnership agreement between the two institutions for a distance-learning project in the environmental sciences. A third partner, the University of Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique, is also participating.

The agreement was simultaneously signed during the videoconference by Gene Block, U.Va. vice president and provost, at Zehmer Hall, and in South Africa, by Norma Reid, vice chancellor of WITS. The agreement opens the door to new collaborative research and education projects in infectious disease study, telemedicine, nursing, environmental law, African American Studies, history and other areas. Project leaders are hoping to exchange faculty and students as well as develop highly innovative distance-learning courses. Full story.