May 17, 2026

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Grothe Pens FLS Letter to the Editor on Clean Energy Act

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Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Pamela Grothe

Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Pamela Grothe

Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science Pamela Grothe penned a letter to the editor of The Free Lance-Star, along with Julie Kay of the Climate Reality Project and Amanda Stebbins of Fossil Free Fredericksburg. Entitled “Cost of Clean Energy Act overblown,” the op-ed addresses the newspaper’s criticisms of clean energy and other efforts to combat climate change. The authors advocate on behalf of the Virginia Clean Economy Act, legislation that will help move the commonwealth away from reliance of fossil fuels and toward clean carbon-free energy. Read more.

Stommel Comments on Surveillance Platforms to Curb Cheating

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Jesse Stommel, Senior Lecturer of Digital Learning

Jesse Stommel, Senior Lecturer of Digital Learning

Jesse Stommel, a senior lecturer in Digital Studies, offered comments for an Inside Higher Ed article entitled, “Is the fight against cheating during remote instruction worth enlisting third-party student surveillance platforms?”

Jesse Stommel, senior lecturer in digital studies at the University of Mary Washington and co-founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab, said “cheating is a pedagogical issue, not a technological one. There are no easy solutions.”

The work doesn’t begin “with an app or a license for a remote proctoring tool,” he said. Instead, teachers have to start by talking “openly to students about when and how learning happens,” so they take ownership of their educations.

“We have to start by trusting students and using approaches that rely on intrinsic motivation, not policies, surveillance and suspicion.” Everyone wants this pivot to all-online instruction to work, Stommel added, and anxieties about testing are high. But maintaining “the status quo isn’t possible and so-called solutions like remote proctoring tools will create many more problems than they solve.” Read more.

Farnsworth Comments on Trump’s Attacks on Mail-In Voting

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Stephen Farnsworth, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies.

Stephen Farnsworth, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies.

Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, was recently interviewed by Courthouse News about Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting.

Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, which is nestled inside Fredericksburg, wasn’t surprised by the increased absentee turnout. In a phone interview, he said voters not only enjoy the convenience and safety of voting by mail, but it is commonplace even in some red states.

“Trump is trying to make absentee voting a partisan issue but it’s really not. Some of the most Republican states in the country have mail-in ballot systems statewide,” Farnsworth said about the president’s Twitter outburst. Read more.

Richardson Column in The Free Lance-Star

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UMW College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson

UMW College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson

College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson’s weekly column in The Free Lance-Star discusses setting routines and limits to your work schedule. Read SCHEDULES AND BOUNDARIES.

 

One of the biggest challenges of teleworking concerns schedules and boundaries. While some folks have adapted well to working from home, others would say they are failing.

Let’s start with college students. As I talked with faculty and students weekly during the last half of the spring semester, one of the recurring themes was the inability for many students to create a schedule for themselves.

It was especially difficult if the course had become asynchronous—it was not meeting at its regular time. Instead, faculty were posting videos of lectures and expecting students to watch the lectures and take quizzes or complete assignments to indicate they were “attending class,” albeit virtually. Some students, without the structure their face-to-face class schedule provided, were struggling to re-create their schedules at home. Read more.

President Paino Column Published in Richmond Times-Dispatch

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Mary Washington President Troy Paino. Photo by Suzanne Carr Rossi.

Mary Washington President Troy Paino. Photo by Suzanne Carr Rossi.

UMW President Troy Paino had a column published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “The importance of community in times of COVID-19,” on April 25.

Loneliness, isolation, social distancing. Our lives have been disrupted in ways we could not have imagined just a few weeks ago. While we know that now is not the time to leave our homes or relax our commitment to social distancing, now is the time to think about our lives after the pandemic ends. What will we have learned?

I am dubious of attempts to explain the particularities of anyone’s sorrow or the reasons for the more general suffering visited upon humanity in times of war, famine, natural disasters or pandemics. But amid the suffering, it is important to try to learn what the experience has taught us about ourselves and the world in which we live.

While nobody welcomes what we are going through, we have an opportunity to find meaning and purpose amid our collective suffering. In fact, suffering lays bare those things that infuse our lives with purpose in contrast to those things, while costly in time, energy, and money, that offer little in the way of enduring happiness and meaning. Read more.

Grothe Selected for American Geophysical Union’s ‘2020 Voices for Science’ Program

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Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Pamela Grothe

Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Pamela Grothe

Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science Pamela Grothe was recently selected for the American Geophysical Union’s “2020 Voices for Science” program. AGU President Robin Bell shared the following with Earth and Environmental Science Chair Jodie Hayob-Matzke:

This program is available to U.S.-based scientists with strong communication skills and an interest in sharing the value and impact of Earth and space science with key decision makers, journalists, and public audiences, to increase the widespread understanding of and support for science. As a member of the 2020 class, Pamela was selected from a highly competitive applicant pool based on demonstrated leadership and the potential to positively influence the local community.

Voices for Science provides its participants with many resources, including unique skills-building workshops and toolkits focused on communications and policy; hands-on support from AGU staff in conducting and organizing outreach opportunities; and expense-paid travel to Washington, D.C. for an April workshop (made virtual this year but with a possible, later in-person component) and to San Francisco, CA for the AGU Fall Meeting in December. Beyond the professional development opportunities in the program, Pamela will also network and collaborate with the 39 other scientists selected for the program, and the 65 members of the past two year’s cohorts. 

The scientific enterprise depends heavily on federal support, and, as we are seeing now, the critical challenges of our time can only be solved if we let strong science inform our decisions. Now more than ever, it is essential for scientists to interact with policy makers, the public and the media on a regular basis. Lawmakers need to hear about critical issues both directly from scientists and from their constituents, and Pamela’s efforts to reach out to legislators on Capitol Hill and galvanize the local community can and will make a difference. 

Collectively, the Voices for Science participants will help to amplify science and its worth and help both policymakers and the broader community see that our nation continues to support and benefit from our scientific enterprise. With the help of their community of peers and AGU’s resources, these participants will be able to successfully connect with these audiences even when not speaking with them in person.

Pamela’s enthusiasm for developing and using communication and advocacy skills as part of the 2020 Voices for Science program shows a tremendous dedication to promoting science for the benefit of the scientific community and humanity at large, and AGU would like to commend her.

Hansen Receives Stanton Foundation Award for Co-Authored Article

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Economics Professor Bradley Hansen

Economics Professor Bradley Hansen

Economics Professor Bradley Hansen was awarded a prize from the Stanton Foundation, which recently launched a weekly contest to identify and reward the best new applied history article or op-ed that illuminates the current coronavirus crisis. An advisory panel from the Applied History Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center assisted in the screening process.

Co-authored with American University Economics Professor Mary Eschelbach Hansen, the article Hansen submitted, “Making it easier to declare bankruptcy could avert economic catastrophe,” ran in The Washington Post on April 24, 2020. On its website, the Stanton Foundation wrote: “The Selection Committee was particularly impressed with the detailed legal history of bankruptcy in the Great Depression that makes a clear, compelling argument for a concrete policy prescription.” Read the article.

Barrenechea Publishes Book Review in Top American Studies Journal

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Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea

Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea

Antonio Barrenechea, professor of English, recently published a review of Richard Cándida Smith’s “Improvised Continents: Pan-Americanism and Cultural Exchange” in the prestigious Journal of American Studies.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-american-studies/article/richard-candida-smith-improvised-continent-panamericanism-and-cultural-exchange-philadelphia-university-of-pennsylvania-press-2017-4500-pp-352-isbn978-0-8122-4942-2/14753E52975F3650D11232B3A27A0F91

 

Farnsworth Delivers American University Online Lecture on Political Humor

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Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, recently delivered an online lecture to American University students entitled, “Political Humor and the Donald Trump Presidency,” which was drawn from his new co-authored book, Late Night With Trump: Political Humor and the American Presidency. More info on the book is available here.

Liss’ Intensive Parenting Study Featured in Refinery29.com Series

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Professor of Psychological Science Miriam Liss

Psychology Professor Miriam Liss’ study on intensive parenting was featured in an article on Refinery29.com as part of a series entitled “No Bad Moms.” The article states that modern mothers are chastised whenever they speak openly about being the “center of their own world”

Not only is this narrow definition of motherhood stifling, it’s also harmful. In a study on the effects of intensive parenting — a style of over-involved parenting where moms and dads heavily involve themselves in all the decisions and aspects of a child’s life, leaving little space for the parent to exist outside the child — University of Mary Washington psychologist Miriam Liss found that women who believed parenting should be child-centered had reduced life satisfaction. Read more.