MADISON (WKOW) – Wisconsin championship women?s hockey team is losing assistant coach Tracey DeKeyser, head coach Mark Johnson announced today. DeKeyser has been with the program since it started in 1998-99, and has done everything from recruit to serve as coach during Johnson?s one-year sabbatical to coach the 2010 U.S. women?s Olympic team.
People know me as: Samantha Crownover, executive director of Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society. It?s my mainstay and I?ve been at it for 13 seasons. BDDS is celebrating its 20th season and that is very exciting for a chamber music festival in Madison.
I also do some art consulting, ranging from projects such as the Art Enterprise Initiative at UW-Madison to helping clients select and hang visual art in their home or business. I also manage a historic building downtown, the Baskerville Condominiums, because the level of detail and craftsmanship in many of our older buildings is so beautiful and worth caring for.
After a successful 10-year run, “In Wisconsin” has been cancelled by Wisconsin Public Television. Patty Loew, a professor at UW-Madison and the show?s host, said she was disappointed by the cancellation of the news and documentary program, but has fond memories of her time with the show.
“It was a program that reached into communities all over the state and I worked with some really talented people,” she said. The show?s cancellation comes after a large number of staff retirements and turnover, according to Kathy Bissen, director of production at WPT.
Dear Editor: The Rat/Her signs along Dane County highways present a false choice. Medical experiments are not done on children. These billboards are the product of the research industry front group, Foundation for Biomedical Research. They are running scared from the expose of cruel, unnecessary and ineffectual experiments on animals. This foundation and its extended network of companies and researchers that feed off animal research are not concerned about cute little girls. They are worried about their huge lucrative grants drying up from the National Institutes of Health that fuel this outdated, costly research.
Go back to school. Yeah, there?s the tried-and-true “stay active and eat right” health advice. But it turns out the degree you have ? or don?t have ? matters when it comes to determining who?s likely to get and beat cancer.
There?s nothing magical about a diploma. But when those extra years of education mean the difference between a job with health insurance and a job where the only benefit is a discount on a cheeseburger, the upside of a degree becomes strikingly clear. Data from the American Cancer Society finds men with the least amount of education died at rates more than twice that of those with college degrees. Women saw less striking differences, but nonetheless the trend was mirrored.
The University of Wisconsin women?s basketball team suffered another future personnel loss stemming from the Badgers? coaching change. Nicole Smith, a 6-foot-4 center from Rockton (Ill.) Hononegah who was to join UW in 2012, has opted to play for Iowa, according to the Iowa City Press-Citizen. Smith is the second recruit to defect after Lisa Stone was fired this spring.
The best of Big Ten Conference from 2010-11 will be front and center Monday night when the Big Ten Network airs its fourth annual awards show at 7:30. As a team or individually, the University of Wisconsin is nominated in seven of the nine categories.
We are two extremely lucky people. We lived through the horrific experience of being the targets of a pair of students who, in separate crimes, carried guns into college classrooms at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, and at Northern Illinois University on Feb, 14, 2008. All around us, the lives of our classmates were senselessly ended. It was the most intense, stressful and frightening experience of our lives.
Wisconsin state politicians believe the way to deal with such campus violence is to allow college students to bring loaded, hidden guns onto campuses. This provision is part of the concealed carry legislation that passed the Wisconsin Senate and is set for a vote in the state Assembly on Tuesday.
Gov. Scott Walker has vowed that Wisconsin, on his watch, will generate 250,000 new private sector jobs by 2015 — a promise being followed closely by both the governor?s supporters and detractors. But a report released Friday by a liberal UW-Madison think tank says governors actually have little control over job creation in today?s global economy.
Quoted: Joel Rogers, director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategies
Toni R. (Pankow) Mills, 68, died peacefully in her sleep on Thursday, June 16, 2011. She retired from University Hospital in 2010 after seven years of service.
Former Madison resident, Dr. John F. Morrissey died Tuesday, June 14, 2011, at home in Bend, Ore. He spent his entire career at the University of Wisconsin where he retired in 1989 as an emeritus professor of medicine in the field of gastroenterology. From 1973 to 1984 he was vice chair of the Department of Medicine. He was a pioneer in the use of the gastric camera and established the first endoscopic training program in the United States.
William “Bill” Hilsenhoff passed away on Thursday June 16, 2011, in Middleton. He became a project associate with the UW Entomology Department, and eventually full professor. He received a UW Faculty Meritorius Emeritus award. in 1999. In June 2010, he received the North American Benthological Society’s Award of Excellence and Environmental Stewardship Award. Among his other achievements was the development of the Hilsenhoff Biotic Index used world-wide by water resource managers to gauge water quality.
Do you sometimes wonder if Wisconsin has the least-educated legislature in America? Wonder no more. The answer? Not even close. The percentage of Wisconsin?s state legislators with at least a four-year college degree is slightly higher than the national average, according to an analysis of the 7,000-plus state representatives across the United States by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Who are the top candidates to lead the University of Wisconsin-Madison while it searches for a permanent replacement for Chancellor Biddy Martin, who announced Tuesday she?s stepping down to lead Amherst College?
I posed that question to more than a dozen campus insiders over the past few days, and three names were consistently mentioned as top options: Paul DeLuca, John Wiley and Gary Sandefur.
….Insiders say the search to replace Martin will likely take eight months to a year, so whoever is named interim chancellor will have an opportunity to make a significant mark on campus.
Despite having one foot out the door, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin could have a hand in some key campus decisions before leaving next month for her new post as president of Amherst College.
Although no one is suggesting Martin would do anything to harm the university, several key campus players confided to The Capital Times that they?d nonetheless have a problem if she made any significant moves now that she has decided to leave town for a different job.
Don?t let legislators who voted for Gov. Scott Walker?s trash-and-burn budget try to tell you they believe that all women are full citizens with equal rights and equal protections under the law. They don?t.
Republican state senators, such as Alberta Darling and Sheila Harsdorf, voted for a budget that actually increases expenses for the supposedly cash-strapped state in order to fund discrimination against women.
Although no one is doing back flips because of an impending cut of $250 million in state taxpayer support over the next two years, University of Wisconsin System officials are generally pleased with the budget bill now awaiting Gov. Scott Walker?s signature. System leaders are most excited about the measures in the bill granting campuses across the state some long-sought freedoms from state oversight when it comes to construction, personnel systems, procurement and accountability reporting.
Images with a message are the subject of the Chazen Museum of Art?s current exhibition of prints, drawn from the 16th century to the present.
Remember the outrage generated earlier this year when the Republican Party of Wisconsin made UW-Madison professor William Cronon a target of an open records request, a move roundly criticized as an attempt to intimidate an academic for offering his perspective on political issues? Apparently, as far as political payback goes, things could have been worse. Much worse.
PARK RIDGE, Ill. — The Big Ten and CBS Sports said they have reached a multiyear agreement to broadcast basketball games through the 2016-17 season. The announcement came Thursday. Terms were not disclosed.
It?s commencement time and, for newly minted grads facing a long and potentially futile job search this summer, there?s at least one bit of good news. According to its recent Spring Salary survey, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that starting salaries are up 5.9 percent for 2011 college grads.
The news is not so good, however, for young women starting new jobs. In a separate study, the same organization found that the average Class of 2010 female with a new bachelor?s degree received a $36,451 starting salary ? 17 percent less than the $44,159 her average male peer received.
(This column appeared first in the Washington Post)
Celebrated quarterback prospect Russell Wilson made a great impression when he visited Madison last week, but he kept his intentions very close to the vest while checking out the University of Wisconsin football program. A source who has spoken with Wilson said he gave the impression his toughest decision was not which college he would attend, but rather which sport should be his priority at this point.
University of Wisconsin Chancellor Biddy Martin was, during her relatively short tenure as the head of the state?s flagship institution of higher learning, a relatively controversial figure.
That does not mean that Martin, who has announced that she will leave this summer to take over as chancellor of Amherst College, was a bad player. She was, in many senses, an engaged and effective administrator. And we wish Martin well in her next endeavor. But we hope that the next chancellor will be very different from the departing one.
Martin did not ?get? Wisconsin, and that prevented her from playing the role she might have in shaping the UW?s future. Her attempts to radically restructure the Madison campus?s relationship with the rest of the UW system and with the state never really took off.
For the first time in five seasons, a University of Wisconsin football game apparently won?t be televised ? at least in the traditional sense. The Badgers? game on Sept. 17 against Northern Illinois at Soldier Field will kick off at 2:30 p.m., the Mid-American Conference announced Wednesday. It?ll be live streamed on ESPN3.com, an online-only channel that is available free to subscribers of Charter Communications and many other providers nationally.
During the two-week statewide Click It Or Ticket seat belt campaign, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department conducted 208 traffic stops, issued 134 traffic-related citations, wrote 39 warnings, made two arrests for non-traffic criminal offenses and arrested one person on a outstanding warrant.
….The UWPD said they are urging motorists traveling through the campus area to follow traffic safety laws due to the large numbers of pedestrians in the area. During the summer months, the University is host to many summer camps for persons of all ages and traffic safety is of utmost importance. If plans are made to travel through the greater campus area, extra time should be also be allotted in travel plans as many of the area roads are under construction.
Bo Ryan is one of 12 athletes, coaches and executives who will be inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame later this year.
Two UW swimmers will compete in the World University Games in Shenzhen, China. Ashley Wanland will swim for the United States, while Daniel Lester will compete for his native Australia.
A growing sense of determination to change the balance of power in Wisconsin can be weighed in the profusion of organizations ? many new, some existing ? that lined up to counter the Walker agenda: Wisconsin Wave, We Are Wisconsin, United Wisconsin, Defend Wisconsin, Defending Wisconsin, Recall the Republican 8 and more. They joined labor unions in mounting a sometimes dizzying spin of actions that were noisy, messy and exuberant.
None of the organizations is dominant now, but the absence of tight organizational structure is not necessarily a barrier to success, says Pamela Oliver, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of sociology who researches protest dynamics.
There were times, not so long ago, when Biddy Martin envisioned spending the rest of her career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But after getting embroiled in a contentious debate with other higher education leaders across Wisconsin about how best to garner long-sought freedoms from state oversight, the 60-year-old UW-Madison chancellor announced Tuesday she is taking her talents to at least one more stop.
Madison?s Forward Theater Company came on the scene in 2009 with ?All About Eve,? broadcast as a radio play on Wisconsin Public Radio. In the leading role of Broadway star Margo Channing was none other than one of the area?s grande dames of performance: Colleen Burns.
A graduate of UW-Madison, Burns had appeared on well-known stages across the country, including in New York, Chicago and Milwaukee. Her works as a playwright and composer with collaborator Jack Forbes Wilson premiered at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre and Madison Repertory Theatre and won the writing team the Dale Wasserman Award for Musical Theatre Composition. Burns also was a founding member of Beloit?s New Court Theatre and its artistic director in 2007 and 2008.
Jeremi Suri, the prominent history professor who is leaving the University of Wisconsin-Madison in frustration to join the faculty at the University of Texas, emailed me today about his analysis of university Chancellor Biddy Martin?s resignation posted today on his blog at Global Brief. It is passionate and blunt, a great read.
Biddy Martin is leaving her post as chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become the next president at Amherst College, a highly regarded liberal arts school of 1,600 students located in Massachusetts. Martin made her announcement in an email sent to the campus community Tuesday morning. She started her post in Madison in September of 2008 after serving as provost at Cornell University.
The sight of a life-sized Spider-Man doll being hanged by its neck from a balcony of a Langdon Street home near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is prompting a stern response from school officials. Students who live on Langdon Street said the doll that some believe represented a black man hung for two or three days last week before it was taken down. But many said it never should have been put there at all.
Timothy Scott Connelly, age 51, passed away unexpectedly Saturday, June 11, 2011, at his camper on the Wisconsin River. He was born in Madison, on April 18, 1960, to James J. and Norma R. Abramson Connelly. He was employed in construction until he started working for UW-Madison, where he has been employed for more than 20 years. He worked at Campus Services and delivered campus mail.
Dear Editor: My colleagues and I brought the Internet to the University of Wisconsin System and to other higher education institutions in Wisconsin, and to public schools and libraries throughout the state through a nonprofit association called WiscNet. The budget proposal that would prohibit future work of this kind is a travesty. Research depends on using the very latest communications tools and capacity to be competitive, and these tools are not provided in Wisconsin by telecommunications companies.
Dear Editor: Shame on the UW-Madison for slipping an item into the state budget bill to exempt animal researchers from Wisconsin anti-cruelty laws.
New Orleans coach Sean Payton slept with the Lombardi Trophy after his team won Super Bowl XLIV. Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy just seems to be taking it everywhere he goes.
?I?m noticed a little bit more because of this thing,? McCarthy said Sunday afternoon during a news conference at the American Family Children?s Hospital on the University of Wisconsin campus.
Should scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison be exempt from state statutes pertaining to crimes against animals as long as the investigators are “engaged in bona fide scientific research?”
Scientists at colleges and universities across the state were granted these protections June 3 by the Joint Finance Committee in a measure tucked into an omnibus motion see item No. 27 in this document which mostly deals with UW System budget issues — including the new freedoms and flexibilities state campuses were awarded from state oversight.
There are ways for universities to reduce tuition for illegal immigrants, even if state lawmakers vote to stop offering them in-state tuition, according to a lawyer for the University of Wisconsin System. Chancellors have wide discretion in offering students lower tuition rates, UW System General Counsel Tomas Stafford said Thursday. For example, schools have access to a pool of institutional aid that could be used to reduce tuition for illegal immigrants.
Following a seven-month national search, UW-Madison on Friday announced the names of four finalists for the position of vice chancellor for research and dean of the Graduate School. The job is the university?s top research post. The finalists were identified by Bill Tracy, a UW-Madison professor of agronomy who headed a 16-member search-and-screen committee.
TOWN OF SAUKVILLE ? Wisconsin researchers released tiny parasitic wasps into the wild as part of an effort to slow the population growth of a destructive beetle species that has destroyed millions of trees. UW-Madison entomologists released 800 stingless Asian wasps from four plastic cups Wednesday at the Riveredge Nature Center in Newburg, so they can feast on the larvae of the emerald ash borer.
“That?s opportunity knocking for all of us now.”
Gov. Scott Walker got his biggest applause line for that off-hand remark, made midway through his keynote address Thursday at an annual housing conference at UW-Madison. It came right after four hard, booming knocks ? clearly audible over Walker?s words in the packed Fluno Center auditorium ? as protesters opposed to the governor?s budget-cutting policies pounded their disdain on the outside walls of the building.
The UW Board of Regents vowed Thursday to fight legislation that would force the University of Wisconsin System to return millions in federal grant money and cut off support for a statewide Internet provider.
“This is the largest threat I?ve seen to our enterprise since I?ve been here,” UW-Madison Provost Paul DeLuca told the Regents.
Larry M. Thompson, age 66, of Reeseville, died on Wednesday, June 8, 2011, at his home surrounded by his family. He worked for UW-Madison as a police officer for many years.
Two animal rights groups are asking Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne to investigate whether UW-Madison researchers broke the law by conducting lab experiments in which mice fight. In a letter to Ozanne, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Madison-based Alliance for Animals allege UW-Madison scientists violated a law that says “no person may intentionally instigate” a fight between animals.
On June 3, the state Legislature?s Joint Committee on Finance slipped several policy items into the state biennial budget that would change the way the Internet service provider WiscNet operates and require the University of Wisconsin to return more than $32 million in federal grant money awarded in August 2010 for a broadband expansion project.
The proposed changes to WiscNet could result in schools, libraries and institutions of higher education paying two to three times more for Internet access from for-profit providers. Actually, it?s more accurate to say that taxpayers would foot the increased bill, or library patrons and students would no longer have the access they need and want. The policy changes would also disrupt the ability of the UW to pursue its research and education mission.
Spider-Man was seen hanging around Langdon Street on Thursday, but not in a good way. UW-Madison officials were disturbed by reports they received of a life-size Spider-Man doll hanging from a balcony at an apartment building on Langdon Street on Thursday.
A dozen silent demonstrators wearing zombie makeup and protest T-shirts were arrested early Wednesday afternoon after lying down on the floor of a legislator?s Capitol offices and refusing to leave.
As new University of Wisconsin men?s golf coach Michael Burcin toured the campus and University Ridge Golf Course last week, he kept searching for something missing from the program that was holding it back. He came up empty.
Assumptions are unwise, especially in the case of Dorcas Akinniyi and Jessica Flax. Both are members of the University of Wisconsin women?s track and field team who qualified for the heptathlon in the NCAA outdoor championships that run through Saturday in Des Moines, Iowa.
The plan to be outlined in an information-only presentation to the Urban Design Commission calls for seven buildings with a total of 408,000 square feet of build-out, plus three parking structures with a total of 1,400 stalls.
As the University of Wisconsin football program made its pitch this week to land North Carolina State transfer Russell Wilson, Ohio State was waving goodbye to the troubled Terrelle Pryor era. Those two significant developments involving quarterbacks ? which unfolded at basically the same time ? could have a drastic impact on the Big Ten Conference landscape in the fall.
….When I speak on college campuses, students will often say they don?t believe that a woman?s attire makes it justifiable for someone to rape her, but ? and there almost always is a ?but? ? shouldn?t women know better than to dress in a suggestive way? What I try to explain to those students is part of what the SlutWalk protests are aiming to relay on a grander scale. That yes, some women dress in short, tight, ?suggestive? clothing ? maybe because it?s hot outside, maybe because it?s the style du jour or maybe just because they think they look sexy. And there?s nothing wrong with that. Women deserve to be safe from violent assault, no matter what they wear. And the sad fact is, a miniskirt is no more likely to provoke a rapist than a potato sack is to deter one.
As one Toronto SlutWalk sign put it: ?Don?t tell us how to dress. Tell men not to rape.? It?s this ? the proactive, fed-upness of SlutWalks ? that makes me so hopeful for the future.
(This column appeared first in The Washington Post.)
Rebecca Martin, the senior vice president for academic affairs with the University of Wisconsin System, is resigning her post to take a new position with the U.S. Education Delivery Institute in Washington, D.C.
For the first time, graduation ceremonies from Madison high schools this year will be shown live online via the school district?s media portal, www.mmsd.tv….Close to 1,600 students will graduate from Madison high schools this week. Ceremonies take place at the Kohl Center.
Red Line Report, an independent international scouting service, came out with its final prospect rankings for the 2011 NHL Entry Draft this week. Left winger Michael Mersch, a 19-year-old sophomore-to-be with the University of Wisconsin men?s hockey team, is 50th, which projects to him being chosen in the second round when the draft is held June 24 and 25 in Minneapolis, Minn.
Madison city officials and housing advocates are reeling from a one-two punch delivered by new GOP legislation that threatens to erase several decades worth of renter protections enacted here and Mayor Paul Soglin has come out swinging in response.
The term “you?re killing me” will take on a whole new life in Madison on Wednesday, as college students from across Wisconsin protest what they call anti-student legislation. The students will be “dying” and then dragging their returned-to-life zombie bodies around Capitol Square at noon Wednesday in a protest planned by the United Council of University of Wisconsin Students.
Dear Editor: As an obstetrician/gynecologist, I would like to underline every point that Claire Coleman makes about contraception in her column, ?Don?t take birth control for granted.? As Coleman demonstrates, family planning services protect and improve our welfare, as individuals, as families, and as societies. Piles and piles of research support the importance of contraception, and every day, my colleagues and I see more evidence of its benefits in our patients? lives.
If everything falls into place, Wisconsin could land a high-tech facility to manufacture a valuable medical isotope used to detect heart disease or cancer. SHINE Medical Technologies of Middleton announced Tuesday it has secured $11 million in venture capital funding as part of its effort to develop the plant, which could create up to 100 permanent jobs.
