If you happen to come across someone who looks a lot like Richard Dreyfuss tomorrow, it might really be Richard Dreyfuss.
The acclaimed Hollywood actor will be at the Darden School of Business on Tuesday to address the annual conference of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground partnership. He’ll be joined by director Ron Maxwell (“Gettysburg,” “Gods and Generals”); both have a keen interest in civics and history education.
Sixth-graders at Sutherland Middle School will have their chance to be discovered, as they will show off history films they produced with the help of the folks at Monticello.
Attendance at the conference is by registration only.
According to the organization’s website, “The Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership is a non-profit organization dedicated to raising national awareness of the unparalleled history in the region, which generally follows the Old Carolina Road (Rt. 15/231) from Gettysburg, through Maryland, to Monticello in Albemarle County.”
An interesting blog post from Bob Bruner, dean of the Darden School, about how “perfect” can be the enemy of “good” for job-seekers, particularly in a very weak job market.
Darden | Thursday, February 18th | By: Dan @4:08 pm | 0 Comments
Dibeyendu Ganguly of The Economic Times in India wrote an article today lavishing praise on Darden Dean Robert Bruner’s very well-done blog. (We’re still waiting for our first overseas review … Actually, we’re still waiting for a domestic, or even local, review. Sigh.)
U.Va.’s Darden School of Business regularly hosts heavyweights in the business world. On Wednesday, the headliners on the Abbot Auditorium stage were Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, and Walt Shill, Accenture’s managing director for North America.
Shill took on the role of interviewer, while de la Vega discussed his childhood in Cuba, his emigration to the U.S. at age 10, and oh yes, the mega-deal he helped broker between Apple and AT&T that paved the way for the iPhone.
(Both have ties to the Darden School. Shill earned his MBA there in 1986, while de la Vega completed Darden’s Executive Program in 1996.)
Complete video of the hour-long talk after the break.
Frank Batten Sr., a 1950 alumnus of the College of Arts & Sciences, generous benefactor to U.Va. and several other educational institutions and former chairman of Landmark Communications, died early this morning in Norfolk. He was 82. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot has the obituary.
Batten may be best known at the University for two major entities that bear the Batten name. In 1999, he gave $60 million to the Darden School of Business to establish the Batten Institute, and then in 2007 gave $100 million — the largest gift in University history — to establish the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.
A fascinating five-minute video came my way from the Darden School. It’s a case study featuring a Cleveland-based company called Nottingham-Spirk Associates, which has a two-fold mission: reinvent everyday products, making them better; and figure out a way to sell them inexpensively.
The case in point focuses on a prime example of the company’s work: the humble residential mailbox.
I missed this two weeks ago during the business of Graduation, but Darden’s Dean Bruner decided at the last minute, as rain was threatening the B-School’s ceremony, to forgo his remarks.
Great story on UVA Today about three Darden students whose business plan for “Clean India” is earning numerous awards:
If success can be measured in dollars, University of Virginia graduate business students Baijnath Ramraika, Ravi Yekula and Chip Ransler recently reached a milestone – winning more than $100,000 in cash and prizes from business plan competitions.
The Darden School students’ “Clean India” business plan, which describes a for-profit model to recycle contaminated water discharged by Indian garment-makers, has now taken first place seven times, along with a second-place finish in a major national competition in April.
On May 2, the students – who are scheduled to receive master’s of business administration degrees Sunday – won two of the three divisions of the 2009 Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition, sponsored by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Washington-Baltimore and hosted at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business in Washington.
UVA Today has the story on a pretty cool honor for Darden — they’ll be the one and only business school in the nation being used to test Amazon.com’s latest version of the widely popular Kindle e-book reader.
Online retailer Amazon has selected the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business as the world’s only business school to participate in a new Kindle education project.
Leaders from Darden were in New York City today as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the new Kindle DX and announced the details of the program.
The project is a two-semester pilot program in which students will use the Kindle DX, Amazon’s latest generation wireless reading device with a large screen, to access academic materials. In addition to Darden, Amazon selected four other schools spread across a broad range of academic disciplines, to participate in the project: Princeton University, Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University and Oregon’s Reed College.
“The sky is the limit in terms of the positive outcomes this project can produce,” said Dean Bob Bruner, who is in Singapore today to address the Eighth Annual Darden International Finance Conference. “It has the potential to have a great impact on technology, environmental sustainability, student and school savings, teaching and learning. I’m pleased that Amazon selected Darden as the business school to participate in this important pilot program.”
Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, will be the keynote speaker at the Latin American Student Association Conference at the Darden School of Business. The event will be held in Darden’s Abbott Auditorium at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28. Fox’s visit is co-sponsored by the Darden Leadership Speaker Series.
Step away from watching the NCAA tournament on your computer and read what U.Va. Professor George Geis had to say about the recent AIG bonus imbroglio. Geis is a Darden professor specializing in contract law and gave an in-depth interview to the Wall Street Journal on the legality of what the government can and can’t do.
Earlier in the week I posted a link to a thought-provoking New York Times article that posed the question of what/if at all, Business Schools needed to change in their curriculum in response to the current recession. (Original NYT story here).
I threw the blog post out to the Darden student bloggers and six of them have responded with their thoughts:
If you happen to come across someone who looks a lot like Richard Dreyfuss tomorrow, it might really be Richard Dreyfuss.
U.Va.’s 
Frank Batten Sr., a 1950 alumnus of the College of Arts & Sciences, generous benefactor to U.Va. and several other educational institutions and former chairman of Landmark Communications, died early this morning in Norfolk. He was 82. 
I missed this two weeks ago during the business of Graduation, but Darden’s Dean Bruner decided at the last minute, as rain was threatening the B-School’s ceremony, to forgo his remarks.
Online retailer Amazon has selected the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business as the world’s only business school to participate in a new Kindle education project.