Skip to main content

March 29, 2023

Top Stories

Republican lawmakers to hold hearings on what they call lack of ‘intellectual diversity’ at UW campuses

Wisconsin Public Radio

A Republican legislator who has accused colleges of “indoctrinating students” will hold hearings next month on whether a lack of what he calls “intellectual diversity” at UW System campuses is hurting the quality of education. The push follows a campus free speech survey that found some conservative students reported self-censoring views in class.

Research

How the Gun Became Integral to the Self-Identity of Millions of Americans

Scientific American

University of Wisconsin–Madison researcher and assistant professor Nick Buttrick studies the psychological relationship that millions of Americans have with their guns. Buttrick’s research builds on the historical record to show that in the U.S.—the only country with more civilian firearms than people—white Southerners started cultivating the tradition of the home arsenal immediately after the Civil War because of insecurities and racial fears. During the rest of the 19th century, those anxieties metamorphosized into a fetishization of the firearm to the point that, in the present day, gun owners view their weapons as adding meaning and a sense of purpose to their lives.

Scientific American spoke with Buttrick about the psychological roots of the gun culture that has contributed to the more than 100 mass shootings that have occurred in the U.S. so far this year.

Higher Education/System

College Admissions Trends For 2023

Forbes

Noted: Students should also be prepared for the possibility of deferment, especially at early action colleges, as some schools are experiencing record application volume and are deferring a larger number of students than usual. For example, University of Wisconsin-Madison deferred 17,000 of its 45,000 early action applicants, while Clemson University delivered deferment messages to 15,000 of its 26,000 early applicants.

Campus life

State news

A High-Stakes Election in the Midwest’s “Democracy Desert”

The New Yorker

Noted: Donohue, who is seventy-three years old and has curly chestnut hair, grew up in Sheboygan. She has been a community-minded activist since high school, when she won the Young American Medal for Service, which L.B.J. put around her neck in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. After college, she and a friend took a ten-month trip across the country in a 1960 Volkswagen bus that they called the “flying tomato,” and then she applied to an auto-mechanics program at a technical college and to the University of Wisconsin Law School. She was rejected by the technical college but got accepted to law school. She eventually returned to Sheboygan to work on cases involving domestic-violence victims, tenant disputes, and disability benefits, among other things.

Crime and safety

UW Experts in the News

Obituaries