Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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Casteen Meets with Wage Protesters

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 15, 2006 in UVa. 11 Comments

UVa president John Casteen and several other high-ranking UVa officials have met with the seventeen living wage protesters staging a sit-in, Chris Hall reports for The Cavalier Daily. Between 1:15am and 2:55am the parties engaged in negotiation talks, after which food was allowed to be given to the protesters, who have begun to run out. Casteen has posted a letter to the students on his website in which he proposes that they leave Madison Hall and that they work together in addressing the matter in a less disruptive manner. The students were given until 2pm today to provide a counterproposal; there’s nothing on the students website about that just yet.

Interestingly, none of these goings-on qualify as “The Latest News About the University of Virginia”—the university makes no mention of the protest on the site.

Out of curiosity, I’ve crunched the numbers on the cost of the living wage. I used Melanie Mayhew’s numbers on full-time and part-time employees at UVa that would be affected, assumed that part-time employees average twenty hours a week, and that all employees are paid for 51 weeks of work each year on average. That’s an additional cost of $42,120 each week, or $2,148,120/year. That’s less than the combined salary of just five UVa employees: Prof. Arthur Garson, Dr. R. Edward Howell, Prof. Irving Cron, Prof. Robert Harris, and Dr. Robert Cantrell. (The five best-paid employees at UVa, as of 2004.) Perhaps that provides a sense of scale.

Blogging Round Up

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 14, 2006 in Blogs. 1 Comment

Here are some of my favorite Charlottesville blog entries from the past week.

Dan Kachur discovered that we’re not as jaded about celebrities as we like to think that we are, demonstrated by Steve Carell and Molly Shannon.

Chuck Beretz reviews “The World’s Wife,” currently playing at Live Arts. He rules it good, but not great, but still recommends going.

Trish visited Orange and took lots of pictures. It’s a nice town, and often worth a Saturday visit. (I live as close to Orange as I do to downtown Charlottesville.)

C.R. is signing off—he’s graduating and moving home to Northern Virginia. It was a good run. I’ll keep reading, even if he’s not a Charlottesville blogger.

Anoop Ranganath continues his food reviews. Christian’s delicious. Café Europa great. Arch’s hit the spot. Take It Away OK. Amigo’s still uninteresting. La Taza average. Oakencroft wine worth buying, Hilltop Berry a lot of fun. Wine, Anoop? Sounds like you’re taking things up a notch. You should get together with Wineona.

David is pissed off about MLB steroid use, writing that they’ve deliberately turned a blind eye towards the problem. He prescribes five steps that must be taken to clean up baseball, some of which are both startling and smart.

Sean Tubbs podcasts an interview with The Thomas Jefferson Center’s Robert O’Neill about this year’s Muzzle Awards. Bob is absurdly intelligent. Listening to him speak for more than two minutes makes me feel like a drooling moron.

Marijean has an open letter to the woman at Harris Teeter. I got a good laugh out of it.

Rick Sincere reports on his birthday weekend in London, complete with birthday pictures and promises of show reviews, natch.

Jeannine doesn’t understand why Walker Square lets a homeless woman live in the utility closet next to her apartment. Having followed her blog, I think this may just be par for the course for Walker Square. That place is sketchy.

Zoe Krylova blogs about the Burning Spear concert at Starr Hill, finding its aromatheraputic aspects beneficial.

Darlene and Chris make a typical American meal. Typical chickpea gravy and typical pan-fried tofu. You know, regular stuff.

Finally, Laura took part in the UVa living wage protest, leading the protesters in “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “We Shall Overcome.” Complete with photos.

RSWA Decides: South Fork Pipeline

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 13, 2006 in Development. 4 Comments

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has debated what to do about the Central Virginia water shortage for years. Expand the reservoirs? Build a new reservoir? Pipe water from the James River? Do nothing at all? In today’s Daily Progress, Jessica Kitchin breaks the news that the RWSA has decided to expand the Ragged Mountain reservoir and build a pipeline between it and the South Fork Rivanna reservoir. That will capture the 97% of the precipitation that flows right over the dam on the Rivanna and store it in the 133-acres-larger Ragged Mountain. No timeline is described in the article; presumably this will take many years. At $130.5M, it’ll certainly be expensive.

Living Wage Sit in at Madison Hall

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 13, 2006 in Business and UVa. 33 Comments

Seventeen student living wage activists are in their second day of staging a sit-in at Madison Hall, Stephanie Fees and Sarah Peeden report in the Cavalier Daily. It was just a month ago that UVa agreed to raise their minimum wage from $8.88 to $9.37/hour, but the newly reestablished living wage campaign at UVa is demanding $10.72 for the 809 UVa workers below that threshold. The students claim to be prepared to stay for the next couple of weeks. A rally was held at the rotunda, featuring NAACP chairman Julian Bond, and Professor Wende Marshall was arrested for trespassing yesterday evening when she attempted to enter Madison, the building that houses the office of President John Casteen.

UVa to Accept All VCCS Applicants

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 13, 2006 in Education and UVa. 11 Comments

PVCC students have long been told that there’s an unofficial standard of UVa accepting all applicants who have completed the “transfer module,” the set of courses that UVa wants to see transfer students have under their belts. Now the schools have made it official—UVa will guarantee admission to any Virginia Community College System student that meets a basic set of requirements, Melanie Mayhew reports in today’s Progress. Those requirements include a 3.4 GPA, a grade of C or better in every course, and 54 transferrable credits distributed among seven types of courses.

This is a part of a statewide restructuring of higher education, so that more students can start off at a less-expensive community college before moving on to a four-year university. It saves students money, it saves colleges money, and it saves the state money. One likely effect will be students that would otherwise have started at a state university choosing to spend their first two years at their local community college, and those community colleges will need to have their capacity increased accordingly.

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