PEWAUKEE (AP) – Ody Fish, an activist in the Wisconsin Republican Party and longtime member of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, died Tuesday, his family said. He was 81.
Wisconsin needs more residents with bachelor’s degrees to be competitive in the knowledge economy, but a turf battle could be looming as to the roles the UW’s two-year colleges, four-year universities and the Wisconsin Technical College System will play in meeting that need.
The largely internal debate has been brewing for some time, but this week is significant on two fronts. The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents will vote on policies that technical colleges say unfairly restrict their ability to add pre-professional and liberal arts transfer programs. And today, David Wilson, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin’s two-year colleges and extension programs, was scheduled to make a public push for broadened programs that could include offering four-year liberal arts degrees.
Engineers help drive innovation throughout the U.S. economy and often play leading roles in helping good ideas become commercial products. That’s why major efforts to bolster the education of engineers at Marquette University, the Milwaukee School of Engineering and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are welcome developments for southeastern Wisconsin.
University of Wisconsin basketball player Kirk Penney took a promising freshman under his wing four years ago and showed him the ropes.
Alando Tucker never forgot those lessons.
Whatever Ody J. Fish did, he appeared to do very well, and that included serving on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents even though he never went to college.
Fish died of esophageal cancer Tuesday at his Pewaukee home. He was 81.
Two years after an idea to merge the University of Wisconsin campuses in Milwaukee and Waukesha first materialized, its future remains uncertain.
The state Legislature should quickly approve Gov. Jim Doyle’s request to expand tax credits for angel investors.
Quoted: Heather Abercrombie, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
An animal disease expert with 12 years of experience in dealing with the implications of livestock diseases nationally and internationally has been chosen to head the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.
Thomas McKenna is director of the Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory in Plum Island, N.Y., where he has worked since 1995.
As a physician and researcher who specializes in alcohol problems, I’d like to inject some science and logic into the discussion on the downtown alcohol density plan.
It’s a fact that most downtown crime, violence and disturbances involve alcohol. It’s a fact that numerous scientific studies show that neighborhoods with high alcohol outlet density have higher rates of crime, violence and disturbances than those with low density.
….Let’s opt for some medicine now while our disease is treatable. Let’s not wait till downtown hits bottom, when urban fright, flight and blight become a vicious circle.
Richard L. Brown, M.D., associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Jeff Sauer is back behind the bench, leading a hockey team that’s as dear to him as any he has ever been a part of.
In fact, if commitment and connection are any measure, this team may be more closely associated with Sauer than any of the teams he led at the University of Wisconsin and Colorado College.
A DECADE ago, when Jay Blasi was a senior at Middleton High School and a member of the school golf team, The Capital Times made him the subject of a “prep profile.”
Blasi was asked to answer a series of questions, the last of which was to name his “career goal.”
Blasi replied, “To design a golf course that would play host to the U.S. Open.” Today, at 28, he may already have done it.
Were he not able to keep everything in proper perspective, former University of Wisconsin quarterback Jim Sorgi might feel he’s the least welcome player at Super Bowl XLI. “I’m the guy nobody wants to see play,” he joked this week.
University of Wisconsin end defensive end Jamal Cooper, who last season struggled in the classroom and on the field as he attempted to bounce back from a serious knee injury, has been dismissed from the team by coach Bret Bielema, according to sources.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison climatologist Stephen Vavrus.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Declaring that the political debate is over, Gov. Jim Doyle is calling on Congress to pass legislation expanding government-financed embryonic stem cell research, despite President Bush’s promise to veto it.
“I think the president’s position is becoming more and more untenable,” Doyle said Wednesday after meeting with Senate Democrats on the issue. “The political debate on this is over.”
Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton is telling middle school students that the state of Wisconsin will reward their accomplishments and ensure their access to a college education through a new program called the Wisconsin Covenant.
But Pam Nash, Madison’s assistant superintendent for middle and high schools, said today she would not dangle the carrot of financial aid to students until it is absolutely clear that the money will be available to them.
Gov. Jim Doyle met with Democratic lawmakers Wednesday to push for expanded federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, an issue on which Congress and the White House appear headed for another standoff.
(AP) – The prepared text of Gov. Jim Doyle’s State of the State address to the Wisconsin Legislature Tuesday night:
Even the Legislature’s most vocal critic of the University of Wisconsin praised Gov. Jim Doyle’s plan for a “Wisconsin Covenant” to give eighth-graders a state-funded college education if they maintain a B average in high school and stay out of trouble.
“I think there is some merit in the covenant,” said Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, “but it clashes with the UW admissions proposal that would lessen academic requirements.”
Moreover, proposals in the governor’s State of the State speech Tuesday to increase graduates in fields such as nursing and engineering will depend on the money available in a budget faced with a $1.6 billion deficit, said Nass, who chairs the Assembly’s Colleges and Universities Committee.
With interest at an all-time high and its future looking bright, University of Wisconsin football has never been a hotter ticket.
John Jentz, UW associate athletic director for finance, figures fans would probably pay $50 per game, maybe more. He just doesn’t think they ought to pay that kind of money.
However, the athletic department is planning a $4 per-game hike in football season tickets for the 2007 season, a request outlined Tuesday during a presentation to the UW Athletic Board Finance Committee.
Conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza, who has drawn outrage for his new book that blames “the cultural left” for 9/11, spent half of his talk at the University of Wisconsin Tuesday night defending the war in Iraq.
Iraq has become, perhaps unwittingly, the centerpiece for the war on terror, D’Souza told a group of about 800 in the Union Theater who had come to hear the speaker as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series.
Architect Rodolfo Machado likes what he sees of the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art.
What he sees in his architectural dreams will determine the shape of the museum’s new expansion.
That structure will double the size of the state’s second-largest art museum. And it may turn what was considered a crown jewel building on the UW-Madison campus into something far more magnificent.
The state will end the current fiscal year on June 30 with about $110 million, but budget shortfalls in four state programs of nearly $100 million would use up most of that surplus, according to a memo released to lawmakers on Tuesday.
The new Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates also projected how much the state will collect in tax revenue through June 30, 2009. Its estimates were just $12.8 million less, or 0.04 percent, than the $38.8 billion the state Department of Revenue projected in November.
I am looking for someone with an interest in UW football and an appreciation of Super Bowl history. Having a good computer and too much time on your hands wouldn’t hurt, either….
I called the UW athletic department Monday and asked someone in communications if they had a record of all the former Badgers who had played in the Super Bowl, and how their teams fared. They promised to get back to me on it, but I’m still waiting.
Marquette University on Tuesday announced a $5 million contribution toward a “transformation” of its College of Engineering, which if successful would advance the region’s scramble to compete in research, technology and scientific innovation.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Aurora Health Care and the City of Milwaukee are discussing Aurora Sinai Medical Center in downtown Milwaukee as the site for a school of public health.
Gov. Jim Doyle on Tuesday called for reforms to provide affordable access to health care to nearly every Wisconsin resident and to retool the state’s public colleges and universities with new investments.
Although University of Wisconsin officials appear poised to raise season-ticket prices for football for the second time in three seasons, the increase discussed Tuesday would still leave UW with only the seventh-highest price among Big Ten Conference schools.
State Sen. Ted Kanavas unveiled a new batch of economic development incentives last week that included tax credits for investors in start-up companies and in companies springing from nanotechnology research in the Chippewa Valley. Noticeably absent: the Biomedical Technology Alliance.
The alliance, a consortium of five universities, has been a catalyst for collaborative research since it was launched more than two years ago, and Kanavas (R-Brookfield) has been a key supporter in the past.
Quoted: Fran�§ois Ortalo-Magn�©, a real estate economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: UW-Madison history professor Alfred McCoy
….So what is UW-Madison philosophy professor Lester Hunt doing in an article in the Observer (of England) about the actress Angelina Jolie?
….The Feb. 5 issue of Time magazine includes a piece titled “The Paradox of Supermax” – a stinging rebuke of the constitutionality and effectiveness of draconian prisons like the one in Boscobel, which is referenced in the story. UW-Madison history professor Alfred McCoy, who has written extensively on torture, tells Time that solitary confinement amounts to “no touch torture. It sends prisoners in one of two directions – catatonia or rage.”
Randy McElhose said his son Adam has good grades, took advanced placement courses, has an ACT score of 27, is in the National Honor Society, is an Eagle Scout, has led backpacking expeditions, delivers 400 newspapers every day – and is wait-listed at UW-Madison.
“Whatever the secret sauce it is … he ain’t got it,” McElhose added, though his son, a senior at Edgewood High School, has been accepted at three other universities – the University of Hawaii, the University of Colorado and UW-La Crosse.
Quoted: Judd Aiken, a prion researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody/ I’ve got some money ’cause I just got paid/ Now, how I wish I had someone to talk to/ I’m in an awful way …
It came to him unbidden, that song from his college days. Only now it meant something completely different. There was a man on a stretcher before him, draped in a poncho. Blood dripped off the end of the stretcher, the only sign of life from a lifeless body. It was 1967, but Howard Sherpe had already decided that the war in Vietnam was pointless, that the dead man before him had died for nothing.
….At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, scholar Craig Werner and Vietnam vet Doug Bradley have found that music is a highway into veterans’ memories of the war.
WISCONSIN SPORTS fans have a couple of reasons to salute Rick Reilly this month.
First is the celebrated Sports Illustrated columnist’s early valentine to UW basketball coach Bo Ryan, whom Reilly calls “my new favorite coach” in the Jan. 29 issue of SI.
Reilly on Ryan: “I swear, you’ve never met anyone like him. He could talk the freckles off Opie. He once persuaded an engaged woman into calling off her wedding and marrying him instead. Thirty-two years later she’s still convinced. And he can flat coach. With his patented Swing offense and his obsession with detail, he could win 20 games a year with five large parking meters. He’s the most unheralded winning machine in the country and headmaster of the No. 2-ranked Badgers.”
Endeavors like Sunday’s “Raise the Roof” campaign at the Kohl Center aren’t without an inherent risk – namely, falling flat on your face in front of first-time witnesses who might never come back if they don’t like what they see.
Like five years ago, for example, when the University of Wisconsin women’s basketball program was successfully able to “Cram the Kohl,” then didn’t fulfill its end of the bargain once it came time to actually play the game….
There were several big winners here Sunday, including Gilda’s Club of Madison, which collected over $10,000 in donations, including a check from Stone for $4,285.50. Plus, it was another landmark day for women’s basketball.
WASHINGTON – The overnight bus ride from Madison to the nation’s capital didn’t faze the 162 Wisconsin students and activists traveling to Saturday’s “March on Washington” peace rally on the National Mall.
“They climbed out like they had just gotten out of the shower. They were so refreshed, so excited,” said Ben Ratliffe, a University of Wisconsin graduate and intern at the Wisconsin Network for Peace & Justice, which is part of a nationwide coalition formed in 2002 in opposition to the Iraq war.
The three busloads of Wisconsin students joined with groups of grandmothers for peace, veterans for peace and even nerds for peace in an anti-war demonstration under a sunny sky in front of the nation’s Capitol.
A new relationship blossoming between the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and manufacturing giant Rockwell Automation could be a watershed in Chancellor Carlos Santiago’s efforts to expand research at UWM.
Escalating a legal battle between the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and a former dean, state lawyers have filed a lawsuit to try to recapture school money they say the dean improperly spent on computers, furniture, travel and his personal consulting business.
What do you think the admissions requirements for the University of Wisconsin System should be?
The system’s Board of Regents will vote on changes to its freshman admissions policy next month. But before it votes, the board wants to hear what the public has to say.
Gov. Jim Doyle says he will provide enough money in his budget for the University of Wisconsin System to meet its goals for graduating more students, expanding research and holding tuition down to an average increase of about 2.5% over the next two years.
William F. Thompson didn’t just love history and politics. He vigorously lived both.
Through his work as director of research and later as the state historian at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, he edited what’s considered the definitive history of the state, a six-volume series. The sixth volume he wrote himself.
A UW doctoral grad and Madison civic activist, Thompson died Jan. 13 at age 77.
MILWAUKEE (AP) – Chancellor Carlos Santiago has proposed building two additional campuses for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
….”We are too many people, doing too much, in too little space,” Santiago said.
Paula Wilkins does not consider herself to be a risk-taker.
Yet she openly admits she’s taking a chance by leaving a Penn State women’s soccer program that is among the nation’s elite for an opportunity to build one up in Madison.
Buoyed by a warm audience reception, Li Chiao-Ping seemed happy to be home.
The UW-Madison dance professor, who last performed here in May before taking a leave of absence to teach at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., was all smiles as she took her bows Thursday night.
The last time the water froze this late on Lake Mendota, America was in the depths of the Great Depression.
The Wisconsin State Climatology Office confirmed Thursday that ice first covered Lake Mendota in Madison on Saturday – Jan. 20.
Carlos Santiago embarked on the next phase of his ambitious plan to boost the role and visibility of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Thursday, and the bare outlines that the chancellor sketched in a speech to faculty are intriguing and worth supporting.
At a time when large numbers of soldiers are returning home injured from Iraq and Afghanistan, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee announced Thursday that it will open a new center that uses the latest technology to help veterans who have lost limbs in combat.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Carlos Santiago announced Thursday that he wants to establish two new campuses for the school to ease the cramped corridors of its east side campus and strengthen the region’s research infrastructure.
Gov. Jim Doyle is putting $30 million in his budget to help get all health care providers in the state to switch from paper to electronic medical record keeping systems.
The initiative would “reduce the cost and improve the quality of health care in Wisconsin,” Doyle said at a news conference this morning at Dean Health System’s East Clinic.
Doyle said health information now is often incomplete and filled with errors, which compromises patient health. He cited statistics from the U.S. Institute of Medicine that found that up to 98,000 people in the United States die annually from medical errors.
….While environmentally conscious consumers today disdain planned obsolescence and disposable products, looking instead to recycling, in the 1960s things disposable often embodied a spirit of transience, a free-wheeling sensibility that captured the rebelliousness and youth-oriented pleasure of the Generation Gap generation.
Music and visual art are more familiar for the way 1960s values and aesthetics found public expression. But you can get a sense of that same sensibility at a new exhibit that opens this weekend at the UW Design Gallery, which is featuring disposable dresses.
Ash trees are on their way out on the UW-Madison campus.
Fear of the aggressive, wood-eating emerald ash borer has led university officials to order the gradual removal of most ash trees, which are known for their straight trunk, diamond-shaped bark, compound leaves and oblong crown.
The plan is an attempt to stay ahead of the beetle, which has invaded several states but has not yet been found in Wisconsin.
The streak lives.
After winning its last four games by an average of 5.2 points, the Wisconsin men’s basketball team won its nation-best and school-record 16th straight game Wednesday, scoring a 71-58 victory over Michigan in front of a sellout crowd of 17,190 at the Kohl Center including former standout Devin Harris.
University of Wisconsin offensive line coach Bob Palcic, who last season returned to college after a lengthy stint in the National Football League, has no plans to leave UW and return to the NFL.
Friends and family of a 23-year-old Wisconsin college student killed over the weekend gathered to mourn in Stevens Point Tuesday afternoon – around the same time an Onalaska man was in court in La Crosse on a murder charge.
As national interest in ethanol and other forms of bioenergy surges, the UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences is hoping to become a leader.
On the same evening that President Bush was calling for a sharp increase in the amount of alternative fuels, the dean of the UW agriculture college announced a proposal to bring a $125 million federal bioenergy research and development collaboration to Wisconsin.
One of America’s most acclaimed architectural firms – Machado and Silvetti Associates of Boston – has been chosen by the state of Wisconsin to design the expansion to the Chazen Museum of Art at 800 University Ave.
The award-winning firm, which has designed many museums, will work on the 62,000-square-foot project in association with Milwaukee-based Continuum Architects and Planners.
Bad news, Madison film fans. The UW Cinematheque has passed on the chance to show the original cut of French director Jacques Rivette’s “Out 1,” just because it’s over 12 hours long.
You laugh, but when the free on-campus film series showed Bela Tarr’s “Satantango,” which clocks in at a brisk 8 hours, 45 people showed up to see it. Perhaps more impressively, all but eight of them were still there when it was over.
