When Sara Bauer was going through the process of choosing a college, she always thought she would prefer one in the eastern United States, something fairly close to her home in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Then, she visited Madison and saw the University of Wisconsins hockey team in action.
Cash bail of $6,000 was set Thursday for Bradley Zika, 31, of Mount Horeb, who was arrested for his third drunken driving offense after he allegedly ran over an 18-year-old woman as she crossed Langdon Street in front of the Memorial Union.
“Mr. Zika is just out of control at this point,” Dane County Criminal Court Commissioner Jason Hanson said as he ordered bail on condition that Zika not drink or drive for the duration of the case.
….How serious is Chryst about returning to the NFL? That will be one of the questions that he has to answer for himself and (Badger head coach Bret) Bielema.
But it speaks to the fluid nature of the profession, especially at this time of the year. Adding to the traffic has been the seven head coaching changes in the NFL.
Should coaches be paid more than the chancellors and deans who run a public university?
Should a head football coach be paid $1.3 million for one year, even if his team did have a 12-1 record and the money he’ll make comes from funds generated by athletic programs?
Ask around on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus (and a little outside it) and you’ll get widely differing views on the new contract for Badger football coach Bret Bielema.
For the third time in five years, a team of UW-Madison accounting students has won a national case competition.
“Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.”
Assistant State Climatologist Ed Hopkins was answering a question about a recent international report supporting global warming released this month when southern Wisconsin was suffering from very cold temperatures.
Quoted: Galen McKinley, assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic science, and John Magnuson, professor emeritus of limnology.
Gov. Jim Doyle says he can’t understand why hospital officials aren’t applauding his plan to tax hospitals.
The two-year state budget proposal envisions a 1 percent tax on gross revenues at the state’s 132 hospitals, which Doyle said would generate $418 million that would bring in $575 million in federal matching funds. Most of the money would be used to increase reimbursements to hospitals for care provided to low-income people under the Medicaid program. The rest would apparently cover other Medicaid and health costs.
Most questions I get from readers this time of year refer to financial aid. Once students have completed their admissions applications, families are stunned by the harsh reality of college: College is expensive.
Public colleges range from several thousand to more than $20,000 a year, and private colleges are usually about double the cost of public schools. Most families have not saved enough for four years of college, and many have not saved at all.
…public education must be our highest priority, and somehow we must find the money to fund schools properly; the UW and civil servants could develop a computer system to overhaul Workforce Development, create voter rolls and figure out who is eligible to vote.
We need strong civil service and confidence in our university. Not more outsourcing or privatization.
University of Wisconsin offensive coordinator Paul Chryst will interview for an assistant coaching job with the Dallas Cowboys, according to a report today on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Web site.
Chryst, who has engineered record-setting offenses the past two seasons for the Badgers, has one year remaining on his contract with Wisconsin. He was the highest-paid assistant on coach Bret Bielema’s staff last season at $200,000, and is believed to be in line for a substantial raise.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=565654
Although University of Wisconsin offensive coordinator Paul Chryst is set to receive a pay raise, he is being courted by the Dallas Cowboys and will interview for a position on their staff.
The University of Wisconsin finished strong and left town with yet another road victory.
The Badgers shot 55.6% in the second half of a 75-62 victory over Minnesota Wednesday night in front of 13,820 at Williams Arena to improve to 25-2 and, at 11-1 in the Big Ten, remained tied with Ohio State atop the conference standings. Wisconsin also tied the school record for victories in a season, equaling the total of the 2003-’04 and 2004-’05 teams.
The assistant director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison marching band resigned Tuesday after an internal investigation found he behaved in an “unwelcome, intimidating, and frightening” way toward a female colleague during the band’s trip to the University of Michigan.
Republican leaders are gearing up for a fight over more than $1 billion in proposed tax and fee increases in Gov. Jim Doyle’s budget for the next two years
.But some acknowledge that because of how Doyle has targeted the tax increases – taking aim at oil companies, hospitals and smokers while offering tax breaks and other help for middle-class families – his proposals may be hard to beat back.
Tom Fairchild, one of the state’s top judicial minds, spent 70 years in public service, right up until his death Monday in Madison at age 94.
(A group of Fairchild’s former clerks set up the Fairchild lecture series at the UW Law School, where every April or May they bring in important legal speakers.)
The University of Wisconsin marching band’s assistant director has resigned after an internal report criticized his treatment of a female colleague during a rowdy band trip to Michigan last fall.
The report by an investigator said Michael Lorenz engaged in “unwelcome, intimidating, and frightening” behavior after he entered a part-time employee’s hotel room in the early morning of Sept. 23.
Wisconsin’s motto is “Forward.” And, despite the wrongheaded efforts of conservative legislators to turn their petty bigotry into public policy, Gov. Jim Doyle has chosen to keep Wisconsin in step with forward-thinking states on the question of how to treat same-sex couples.
As part of his budget proposal, Doyle is calling on members of the Assembly and Senate to extend domestic partner health insurance to all state employees.
ROBERT EARL Kinyon is alive and well and living in Oklahoma City. He was stunned Tuesday by the news that letters he wrote 60 years ago – letters I wrote about in Tuesday’s column – have resurfaced.
“What a small world,” Kinyon, 80, said when I reached him by phone in Oklahoma.
The Dalai Lama will be here May 2-5 to give a public talk at the Kohl Center, teach a four-session class at the Alliant Energy Center Coliseum and bless construction of a new temple at Deer Park Buddhist Center, near Oregon.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=565381
Contrary to what critics say, the University of Wisconsin campuses will not start taking race into account as a result of a new admissions policy the Board of Regents adopted the other day. The campuses started doing that about 35 years ago.
The new policy merely means that admission officers will take a closer personal look at each student who applies. In the past, outside of UW-Madison, admission was basically by the numbers: scores on the college entrance exam, high school grades, class rank, etc. In other words, a simple computer program could select the students.
The holistic approach treats the applicant as a person, not just a set of numbers. Human judgment beats a computer program for choosing a freshman class.
Gov. Jim Doyle on Tuesday traded targeted tax increases – on smokers, hospitals and oil companies – for more health care and stable funding for the states transportation system.
IT WOULD make a nice Valentine’s Day surprise if someone around Madison knows whatever happened to Robert Earl Kinyon, who grew up in the area and attended UW-Madison in the 1940s, after serving in the Marines.
One person who would like to know is Alice Catherine Parrish, 83, who lives in Florida. Last November, Parrish got a letter from Kinyon, postmarked from Madison. The thing is, the letter was postmarked Feb. 17, 1947.
For the third time in five years, a team of UW-Madison accounting students has won a national case competition.
The UW team won the PricewaterhouseCoopers xTAX competition in Washington, D.C. Each student won more than $3,000 and a small silver Tiffany and Co. bowl.
The competition involved teams offering the best solution to a real-world tax policy problem.
An 18-year-old woman, who was walking from the State Street mall to the Memorial Union, suffered a fractured skull, a broken nose and abrasions when a car hit her Monday night at the Langdon Street crossing.
Police found Patricia Q. Wagner, 18, underneath the car, a Volkswagen Jetta, when they arrived on the scene at about 7 p.m.
Deafening train whistles, drunks spilling onto the sidewalks at bar time, rowdy behavior on King Street.
Downtown Madison can be a rather noisy place, says Bert Stitt, former president of Capitol Neighborhoods Inc.
Quoted: UW-Madison psychology professor Colleen Moore.
Experts say people who feel bombarded by loud noise often feel helpless to do anything about it. Why? Because police and local governments tend to treat noise as an annoyance rather than as a potential health hazard. Ted Rueter says it’s time to fight back.
A political science professor at Beloit College, the 50-year-old Rueter has been waging a one-man crusade against excessive noise since 2001, when he taught at UCLA.
Letter writers opine on UW admissions; UW-Milwaukee-UW-Waukesha merger.
Jake Warner lashes out when his classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison protest the war. Katie Nelson, a junior at UW-Milwaukee, gets confused by her financial aid. Four years after enrolling at UW-Oshkosh, Todd Johnston still feels lonely; he misses having friends by his side 24 hours a day.
A slew of government benefits, including a new Wisconsin G.I. Bill, is propelling record numbers of veterans into Wisconsin’s colleges and universities. But even with the financial assistance, the transition to college can be difficult, as veterans can attest.
THE ONLY real surprise in this week’s announcement that the UW-Madison Center for Real Estate will be renamed in honor of the late James Graaskamp is that it took this long for it to happen.
….Graaskamp’s students revered him. Time and again I come across news accounts of projects all over the country in which the developer lists Graaskamp as a mentor.
Gov. Jim Doyle will propose offering group health insurance benefits to domestic partners of all state employees – including University of Wisconsin faculty and staff – when he presents his 2007-09 state budget to lawmakers next week.
The move broadens Doyle’s attempt two years ago to offer domestic partner coverage to employees of the University of Wisconsin, which was rejected by Republican lawmakers.
This time, Doyle faces a slightly friendlier reception in the Legislature.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0702110384feb11,1,7103108.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
Quoted: UW-Madison education professors David Williamson Shaffer and Kurt Squire.
Wisconsin football coach Bret Bielema was rewarded Friday for his highly successful first season with a new five-year, $7.5 million contract. The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents approved an amended contract on Friday that will increase Bielema’s salary from $750,000 to $1.3 million this year.
To score 2,000 points in the Big Ten is scarcely a backhanded compliment, but it does imply the kind of longevity not always associated with greatness. The really special ones – the Magic Johnsons, the Isiah Thomases, the Glenn Robinsons – didn’t hang around long enough to qualify for the semi-exclusive club.
Alando Tucker became the 24th member Saturday when his Wisconsin Badgers continued their Panzer-like swath across the college basketball landscape with a 74-62 victory against Iowa. Tucker is a senior, a rarity for a player who projects as a first-round NBA pick, yet it was a series of injuries that helps account for his full undergraduate experience.
Less than 14 months ago, Bret Bielema was an unknown commodity armed with a modest contract for a rookie head football coach and faced with the daunting task of maintaining the level of success Barry Alvarez established at the University of Wisconsin.
Today, barely more than one month after guiding UW to one of its more successful seasons in the history of the program in his rookie season, Bielema has a new five-year, $7.5-million contract that should lift his national profile and enhance his credibility with recruits.
Quoted: Jonathan Foley, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
More than one opposing player has identified Alando Tucker’s recognition skills – or vision – as one of his defining strengths. Vision, that is, in the context that the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball player has shown the ability to read the floor. That has allowed Tucker to create some scoring opportunities for his teammates while attacking vulnerable areas in a defense. “He finds seams well in the zone,” Penn State’s Jamelle Cornley observed after Tucker scored 24 points in Wednesday night’s victory over the Nittany Lions. “He’s an exceptional player.”
And person.
(Other Badger athletes are also included in this article.)
The University of Wisconsin-Stout will require athletes to undergo random drug testing, a response to December police searches that netted steroids and other drugs from the homes of two football players.
School officials said Thursday that the football team’s 100 players will be tested this spring for commonly abused drugs such as cocaine and marijuana, and a quarter will be randomly tested for steroids. Players in other sports at Wisconsin-Stout will undergo random drug testing starting in the fall.
World-renowned chemist and UW-Madison graduate Alan G. MacDiarmid, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 2000 for his work on plastics conducting electricity, has died after suffering a fall at his home near Philadelphia Wednesday. He was 79.
LAKE DELTON – Major roadblocks remain before human embryonic stem cells could be transplanted into humans to cure diseases or replace injured body parts, a research pioneer said Thursday night.
University of Wisconsin scientist James Thomson said obstacles include learning how to grow the cells into all types of organs and tissue and then making sure cancer and other defects are not introduced during the transplantation.
A controversial University of Wisconsin System admissions policy that includes the consideration of race was approved by the Board of Regents today on a 16-0 vote, but a legal challenge is likely to follow.
The policy says freshman applicants should be judged according to a long list of criteria including academic records, test scores and leadership qualities, but the item on the list that has riled conservatives is the one that looks at membership in a historically underrepresented racial or ethnic group.
Wisconsin hospitals are preparing to fight a new tax that Gov. Jim Doyle is expected to unveil on Tuesday when he releases his new two-year budget.
The tax would be used to pay for health care costs and other expenses, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Wisconsin State Journal reported in Friday’s editions. Doyle spokesman Matt Canter said Friday he could not confirm that the tax would be proposed in the governor’s budget, but that all sources of federal money were being looked at.
Slightly fewer babies are born with autism in Wisconsin than in the rest of the nation, but the reason for the difference remains unclear.
A study released Thursday by U.S. health officials found evidence of autism in 5.2 per 1,000 Wisconsin children born in 1994, compared to an average of 6.6 cases per 1,000 children born in 13 other states tracked for the study.
Scientists also found that autism rates in Dane County were more than twice those in Milwaukee County, according to Maureen Durkin, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
At first blush it seemed like a UW version of “greenwashing,” the term applied to corporate PR efforts to mask their polluting ways.
But researchers organizing the “Citizens’ Coalition on Nanotechnology” claim their effort is nothing of the sort.
(This column appeared in the Feb. 6 Capital Times.)
If shopping and doing a home improvement project is your idea of a busy weekend, you’ve got nothing on those who will staff the Kohl Center through Sunday.
Starting with Thursday night’s University of Wisconsin women’s basketball game, the facility is scheduled for seven events over four days. Embedded in that is a dizzying cycle of opposing teams arriving and departing, not to mention a demanding schedule of converting the building from basketball to hockey and back, and back, and back.
It’s part of the life of a multi-purpose facility like the Kohl Center….
A new state law forcing sexual predators to wear tracking devices for the rest of their lives is unconstitutional, according to three University of Wisconsin-Madison law professors.
The measure violates privacy rights and amounts to punishment and warrantless surveillance when applied to offenders who aren’t on parole or government supervision, the professors said in a letter sent to Corrections Secretary Matthew Frank on Feb. 3.
“A clearer example of governmental intrusion into personal privacy is difficult to imagine,” wrote law professors Walter Dickey, Byron Lichstein and Meredith Ross.
A new state law forcing sexual predators to wear tracking devices for the rest of their lives is unconstitutional, according to three University of Wisconsin-Madison law professors.
Milwaukee’s most prominent former college basketball coach has broadcast two University of Wisconsin games already this season and has attended Bo Ryan’s practices. He knows the UW team and is impressed as much as anyone by their play.
ESPN’s Rick Majerus will call UW’s game against Iowa Saturday at the Kohl Center.
In his Tuesday budget message, Gov. Jim Doyle is expected to propose a tax on hospitals to leverage hundreds of millions of dollars in additional federal Medicaid cash to help pay for health care reforms.
Any guarantee of admission to the University of Wisconsin System is likely to disappear today, when the Board of Regents is to vote on a policy that would require every campus to change the way it reviews applicants.
Gov. Jim Doyle said today his proposed state budget will contain nearly $200 million in tax cuts.
The governor’s proposal, which he will unveil in full next week, includes tax cuts he promised as part of his re-election campaign last fall, including:
….An expanded deduction for families with children in college. The plan would raise the amount that families can deduct for tuition, books and other supplies from $4,536 to $6,000. Doyle’s campaign estimated the costs at about $10 million to $15 million annually.
Employers can substantially help lower-paid workers by helping them do their taxes, according to new research that has prompted a pilot program in Madison.
University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics is trying out the idea, which came from John Hoffmire, director of the Center on Business and Poverty at the University Innovation Center.
Aruna Biomedical, a Georgia-based maker of neural stem cell kits for researchers, will relocate to Wisconsin if it can raise sufficient amounts of angel capital, the Wisconsin Technology Network reported.
….Aruna is a licensee of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for its human embryonic stem cell technology, and (management team member Jim) Stice told WTN the company would like to relocate to Wisconsin to take advantage of stem cell research synergies offered by the UW.
While social conservatives were expected to fight the mandatory vaccination of young girls against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, the loudest opposition in Wisconsin is coming from a more unlikely source: pediatricians.
Quoted: Dr. James Conway, an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin Medical School’s Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease and chair of the infectious diseases committee of the Wisconsin Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatricians.
If you’re looking to take lessons or participate in an art project, the Memorial Union’s Craftshop has launched a free program this semester that should appeal to a large number of people.
Forty years ago, women’s experience as a course of academic study was nonexistent. The UW-Madison gender and women’s history and women’s studies programs were among the first and strongest of their kind.
Today, hundreds of college programs in women’s studies exist nationally. What sets the UW-Madison programs apart still is their diverse faculty expertise and, in turn, the subject matter they can offer students.
A growing number of students in Wisconsin and the nation are taking AP courses and exams, which can help them earn college credit for class work done in high school.
According to the third annual Advanced Placement Report to the Nation, released this week by the College Board:
� The percentage of U.S. public high school graduates who took an AP Exam in high school increased from 15.9% in 2000 to 24.2% in 2006. In Wisconsin, that percentage grew from 15.2% to 23%.
ââ?¬Â¢ Wisconsin’s passing rate – the percentage of public school graduates who earned a score of 3 or higher on the 5-point scale of at least one AP Exam – was 15.8% in 2006, higher than the national rate of 14.8%.
As Bret Bielema sat in the University of Wisconsin football offices Wednesday, he chatted on the phone with recruits and watched TV coverage of national football signing day.
It’s how children and bureaucrats deal with things that go bump in the night: Close your eyes and don’t say anything, and maybe it will just go away. It doesn’t work well for kids, but it often does for bureaucrats. Tough issues, scary issues sometimes disappear if the bureaucracy dithers long enough.
Is that what is happening with the 2-year-old proposal to merge the four-year campus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the two-year campus at UW-Waukesha?
Have you ever considered donating your body to science? I’m not talking about specific organs for transplant. Many of us have signed our intent to do this on the back of our driver’s license and this is an extremely valuable gift.
The donation I am referring to has to do with willing your body to a medical institution where it will be used for students in various medical fields to learn anatomy.
Economic development in south central Wisconsin is getting a multi-million dollar shot in the arm.
The Capital Region Collaboration Council, a group of volunteer leaders from business, government, education and nonprofit organizations, surpassed its goal of $2.4 million in contributions by raising $2.6 million to be used for improving the economic quality of life in the region.
