Author: jplucas

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, which saw some of the fiercest Vietnam War protests in the nation, is shedding its long-standing antimilitary image by hiring a military historian and teaching a new course for military officers.

The university also has improved services for veterans after hiring an assistant dean with a military background last year.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has launched a new online retirement class.

Judy Ettinger, an emerita senior outreach specialist at UW-Madison’s Center on Education and Work, said a lot of people are confused about how to prepare for retirement. Much of the information out there right now focuses only on money and doesn’t cover the full range of issues.

Quoted: “It’s probably not a good thing to have the exact same philosophy about money, ” says Ken Robbins, M.D., a clinical professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “But financial issues are best to resolve early on. You want to decide who is going to pay the bills, how much discretionary spending is reasonable, and how you’re going to keep track of it all.”

Heres something you might not know from media coverage of the UW-Madisons plans to remake the tip of Picnic Point: The plans are actually quite controversial.

“There were people who were extremely emotional,” says Ron Wallace, co-director of the UW-Madisons creative writing program, of the June 9 campus meeting he attended on the subject. He estimates about half the 50 people there were “vehemently opposed,” and was stunned to see a TV news report that did not mention this.

The university wants to combat shoreline erosion and remove invasive species from the tip of this mile-long peninsula, and build a stone stairway to the waters edge. For a link to a PowerPoint slideshow of preliminary plans, see here; another public meeting will be held this Sunday in the UWs Health Sciences Learning Center, 750 Highland Ave., 7 p.m.

An “almost campuswide” power outage at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Wednesday is leaving many in the dark.

UW official Faramarz Vakili said the university’s heating and cooling system went down, effecting much of the campus. He said that while some buildings are without power as well, their primary focus is to restore the heating and cooling system.

The elegant Abraham Lincoln statue atop the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bascom Hill marks a notable milestone.

The replica of sculptor Adoph Weinman’s original of Lincoln seated in thoughtful pose is being cleaned and waxed for its 100-year anniversary celebrations in July and September. The events will include Lincoln impersonators and explanations about Lincoln’s connections to Wisconsin.

This week marks the centenary of a landmark known to UW-Madison alumni everywhere: the statue of Abraham Lincoln seated in front of Bascom Hall.

The sculpture was a duplicate made by Adolph Weinman, who created the original for Lincoln’s birthplace. When he agreed to cast a single replica, requests came from around the nation, but Madison won the bidding. Philanthropist Thomas E. Brittingham covered the cost in honor of the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth.

A 21-year-old McFarland man, who struggled with mental illness and was accused of making telephone threats that locked down the UW-Madison campus in 2007, killed himself Monday night, three days after his arrival in a state prison where he was in solitary confinement.

The Department of Corrections is reviewing the circumstances surrounding the death of Jesse A. Miller at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, where he was found by staff during rounds at 11:58 p.m. Monday “lying face up on the floor, motionless and nonresponsive” with torn fabric from a sheet or pillowcase wrapped around his neck, spokesman John Dipko said.

Power has been restored at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Wednesday after a widespread outage left many in the dark earlier in the day.

The “almost campus-wide” power outage lasted nearly three hours Wednesday, WISC-TV reported.

The power outage forced those on campus to make some adjustments Wednesday.

One hundred years ago, on June 22, 1909, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Abraham Lincoln statue was unveiled atop Bascom Hill.

The Abraham Lincoln statue is a replica of Adolph A. Weinman’s original, erected in Lincoln’s native town of Hodgenville, Ky. Weinman was commissioned by UW-Madison alumnus Richard Lloyd Jones, who purchased the farm where Lincoln was born in 1905.