The Virginia Policy Review was established in 2009 on a premise that remains as urgent as ever: that rigorous, accessible policy scholarship has a legitimate and necessary role in public life. Housed within the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, VPR has grown into one of the university's foremost student-run intellectual institutions, publishing original research, opinion, and analysis across a physical journal, a digital blog, and a podcast, and cultivating a community of writers and thinkers who take seriously the relationship between ideas and governance.
That relationship is more consequential than it is often given credit for. Policy is not an abstraction confined to legislative chambers and regulatory agencies. It is the structure beneath ordinary life: the quality of a public school, the accessibility of healthcare, the condition of infrastructure, and the distribution of economic opportunity. To study policy seriously is to study the terms on which people actually live. It is, at its core, a humanistic enterprise, even when its methods are empirical. The Batten School was built on that same understanding, and VPR is proud to carry it forward.
This conviction shapes our theme for the 2026–2027 academic year: Virtue in Action. The phrase is a provocation as much as a program. It asks what it means for scholarship to be not merely correct but consequential, to move from analysis into the world and do something there. Through initiatives like Beyond Bias and Academical Angle, VPR is extending its reach beyond the printed page and into genuine public dialogue, because we believe that is where the obligation of serious scholarship ultimately leads.
The work collected here reflects that ambition. Some contributions advance original arguments; others complicate received wisdom or excavate the roots of problems we have grown too comfortable navigating around. All of them ask something of their readers: intellectual honesty, a willingness to be challenged, and the discipline to hold complexity without retreating into certainty.
We are proud to serve as Co-Presidents of an institution with VPR's history and potential, and we are grateful to every contributor, editor, and reader who makes this work possible. The University of Virginia has long held that an informed and engaged citizenry is the precondition of self-governance. The Batten School was founded to train the next generation of leaders who will act on that belief. VPR exists to ensure that the ideas informing that action are as rigorous, honest, and far-reaching as possible. We take that charge seriously. We hope you will too.
Ava Michaux & Peter Sullivan
Co-Presidents of the Virginia Policy Review, 2026–27