E-NEWSLETTER: UNIVERSITY NEWS
Dean Woo stresses reseach, global learning
U.Va. takes top marks in state on environment
U.Va. welcomes new high-tech dorm
Virginia Film Festival adopts “alien” theme
Dean Woo stresses research, global learningSource: UVaToday
L to R: Betsy Foote Casteen, wife of U.Va.President John T. Casteen III; Jahan Ramazani, chair, English Department; Meredith Jung-En Woo, dean, College of Arts & Sciences; James Galloway, professor, Environmental Sciences Department
Photo by Jane Haley |
Meredith Jung-En Woo, the newly appointed dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, outlined her goals for the next five years to the Faculty Senate in September.
Woo, who was marking her 100th day on the job, listed her five-year priorities as upholding the excellence of the undergraduate experience, putting a greater emphasis on research, expanding the college’s commitment to global learning, stressing basic science and coping with funding issues.
"The bedrock of the college is the undergraduate education and experience,” she said. “I have met hundreds of students and they are happy to be here. That speaks well of the faculty.”
Woo said she is impressed with the diversity of the undergraduates in their “skill sets, backgrounds, ways of thinking and ways of looking at a situation.” She added, “It is a new world and the students have skill sets we cannot comprehend.”
She called for a greater emphasis on research, saying that excellence in research creates a mindset of excellence in other areas as well. She stressed the need for foundational science.
"There is a lot of applied science being performed,” she said. “But we need the basic science for the applied science.”
Woo also sees new opportunities to combine serious research with foreign study, suggesting that astronomy professors could bring students to use foreign telescopes and physics professors could bring students to work with the recently opened European particle accelerator.
“We want to combine worldly experience with true learning,” she said.
This is in line with Jefferson's vision, she pointed out. “Thomas Jefferson was the most global of our presidents,” she said. “The first faculty members of the University were either foreign or foreign-born.”
Woo cited another, less felicitous, parallel between Jefferson’s day and modern times: difficulty in financing the University. Money is still an issue; she said she has been asked to prepare for a 6.2 percent cut in her budget, which is forcing her to re-examine all the accounts and ask “hard questions about priorities.”
U.Va. takes top marks in state on environmentSource: Charlottesville Daily Progress
The University of Virginia has topped a list of 10 Virginia schools participating in a national survey that rates the country’s greenest campuses.
The College Sustainability Report Card 2009 shows that U.Va. was rated overall as a B. The university rated overall as a B- in the 2008 report card and received a D+ in 2007.
For U.Va., the rating comes the day after the school hosted an annual community briefing at which officials stressed how the university is making itself more environmentally friendly.
The report has been released annually since 2007 by the nonprofit Sustainable Endowments Institute, which this year rated 290 schools in the United States and Canada.
This year the institute sent surveys to schools with the top 300 endowments, and only 10 schools did not respond to at least one survey. The surveys solicited information from schools about their environmentally sustainable building practices, dining services and the way each is conserving energy, among other things.
The grades released today were based on schools’ responses to the surveys and on independent research, according to the institute.
“We look at both the depth and the breadth,” Mark Orlowski, SEI’s executive director, said.
The report card encourages schools to look at how they stack up sustainability-wise and gives prospective students an insight into what schools are doing to become greener, Orlowski said.
Among the categories in which U.Va. rated an A included those for transportation and green building.
On the encouraging-people-to-drive-less side of the sustainable transportation plans, the bus routes maintained by the university were recently reconfigured — after being the same for 20 years — to make them more efficient, said Rebecca White, U.Va.’s director of parking and transportation.
On the building side, David Neuman, architect for U.Va., said that even as the university continues to expand with new buildings, it is also looking at ways to renovate and reuse old buildings — such as New Cabell Hall, scheduled for renovation after completion of the South Lawn Project in late 2010.
In other report card categories, U.Va. dropped to an F rating when it came to the transparency of its endowment, a category that, in part, rates the ability of the public to access a school’s endowment investment holdings.
Eight of the 10 Virginia schools scored an F in the endowment transparency category. Virginia Commonwealth University scored an A and the University of Richmond scored a B in the category.
U.Va. made one of its largest strides in the food and recycling category where it was rated a D in 2007 and an A this year, having planned a composting program of food waste — scheduled to launch this fall — and turned to using biodegradable to-go food containers in its dining halls since 2007.
U.Va. is one of only three Virginia universities — including the University of Richmond and Washington and Lee — to participate in the survey all three years.
Grades for all participating schools can be viewed at GreenReportCard.org.
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U.Va. welcomes new high-tech dorm Source: NBC29-WVIR
 The Kellogg House was officially dedicated Monday (Sept. 29). The ceremony honored the legacy of a member of the University of Virginia community and kicked off a new trend in high-tech housing.
The Kellogg House, a first-year dorm housing 200 students, is the first in the next wave of residence halls on Grounds. The dorm is located on the side of Observatory Hill. U.Va. Chief Housing Officer Mark Doherty explained, “What we're trying to do here is build first-year housing at the university for the next 50 years.”
Six more buildings like Kellogg House will be built in the next 10 years as the rest of the Alderman Road dorms are torn down. Complete with wireless Internet, quiet study rooms, entertainment lounges and the student favorites, such as air conditioning and elevators, the reason behind construction is two-fold.
According to U.Va. President John Casteen the building was constructed “in part by the need for adequate utility spines for high speed computing and similar things and frankly, in part by the fact that some of the planning we did a generation ago did not hold up very well.”
The building is named after the late Robert Kellogg, a former dean and English professor. In addition to honoring his legacy and providing students a place to call home, the university hopes the dorm will also further their ultimate mission.
Doherty said, “We believe that a major portion of the educational mission of students really does occur in the residential setting and what we did was to be able to provide the physical environment students would find helpful in that.”
The entire dorm replacement cycle is set to be complete in 2017 and cost around $200 million.
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Virginia Film Festival adopts "alien" themeSource: Charlottesville Daily Progress
 The schedule’s set for stunning. When the 21st annual Virginia Film Festival opens Oct. 30 with its “Aliens!” theme, Charlottesville will be the landing zone for films and discussions about immigrants, exiles, extraterrestrials and outsiders of all kinds.
Festival organizers recently announced major guests and outlined a busy week that will explore otherness with an array of film screenings, panels, workshops and an out-of-this-world film series at the McCormick Observatory.
This year’s opening-night film is “Lake City,’’ a Southern gothic story about a mother and son that was filmed mostly in Richmond. Charlottesville residents Sissy Spacek and Dave Matthews star in the film, which was created by three University of Virginia alumni — co-director Perry Moore, producer Mark Johnson and one of the executive producers, Weiman Seid. Moore, Johnson and Seid will attend the screening.
The festival will be the final one for artistic director Richard Herskowitz, who has been at the helm since 1994. Starting in December, he will be the curator of a new festival for the Cinema Arts Society of Houston slated to launch in November 2009, and he will teach and design exhibitions for the film studies program at the University of Oregon.
Herskowitz’s wife, Jill Hartz, former head of the U.Va. Art Museum, headed west earlier this year when she was named executive director of the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnizter Museum of Art in May.
“This has been quite an exciting 15 years, fulfilling and gratifying,’’ Herskowitz said while introducing a new commercial for the festival that played on a “War of the Worlds’’ theme. The festival will observe the 70th anniversary of Orson Welles’ controversial radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds,’’ a drama that duped millions into believing extraterrestrials were attacking Earth, with a rebroadcast Oct. 30 at the observatory.
This year’s featured guests will include:
• Guillermo Arriaga, a Mexican screenwriter and novelist who is known for “21 Grams,’’ will be on hand for screenings of his “Amores Perros,’’ “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’’ and “Babel,’’ as well as the Virginia premiere of his directing debut, “The Burning Plain,’’ which stars Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger.
• Gregory Nava will attend the 25th-anniversary screening of “El Norte,’’ the 1983 story of a brother and sister’s efforts to survive as newcomers in America, and lead a shot-by-shot examination of the film. He picked up an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay.
• Peter Riegert starred as an American alien in Scotland in “Local Hero,’’ also marking its 25th anniversary, and he will present a screening of the film. He also stars in “The Response,’’ a new film dramatizing the case against a Guantanamo detainee.
• Abderrahmane Sissako, a Mauritanian director who was raised in Mali and lives in exile in France, will be on hand for screenings of his films “Life on Earth’’ and “Waiting for Happiness.’’ His 2007 film “Bamako,” a courtroom drama, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
In an interesting twist on the festival’s theme, one guest will appear via Skype online hookup after experiencing visa problems.
Herskowitz said that Ghazel, an Iranian-French video and performance artist, battled what she considered “humiliating’’ roadblocks in her attempt to secure a visa to attend the festival in person.
Virginia ties will be explored in “The Great Seal of Virginia,’’ an animated film about the U.Va. mascot by alumni Irwin Berman, Michael Wartella and Sam Retzer; Robert Griffith’s “Moviemaking in Virginia,’’ his new documentary on the state’s film scene; the regional premiere of “Sunshine Cleaning,’’ a Sundance Film Festival hit by Richmond writer Megan Holley, who won the Governor’s Screenwriting award at the film festival in 2003; and the American premiere of “Little White Feather and the Hunter,’’ a film on Pocahontas and English explorers by British artist Anna Lucas, which will be shown with “Wasteland’’ by local filmmaker Derek Sieg.
Film scholar Hamid Naficy, the first Virginia Film Festival Fellow, also spoke at Thursday’s announcement. Naficy, who praised Herskowitz for integrating the festival into an academic setting, will lead a one-week mini-course on the festival theme that’s set to begin Oct. 27 and last until the festival concludes Nov. 2. For registration details, send an e-mail to Judy McPeak at jam5wx@virginia.edu.
The festival will bring back its Family Day for a second year, teaming up with the Virginia Discovery Museum to present events at the Paramount Theater. Paul Reisler, Terri Allard and local schoolchildren in the Kid Pan Alley program will accompany silent films with live music, and director Meni Tsirbas will introduce the regional premiere of “Terra,’’ a new animated film about a planet rattled by an invasion of humans.
There also will be a salute to Oscar winner Stan Winston, a past festival guest and U.Va. graduate who died in June, with screenings of his films “Aliens’’ and “Galaxy Quest.’’
To stay on top of additions and announcements about the festival, visit http://www.vafilm.com.
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