Gov. Jim Doyle and the Democratic majorities in the state Senate and Assembly have options to deal with the $5 billion projected budget shortfall announced Tuesday. The catch is, none of them is pretty.
Battered by a harsh economy, Wisconsin’s tax revenues are projected to go down in each of the next two years â?? only the second time that’s happened in the more than four decades on record.
The reward for information in the slaying of UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann has grown to $14,000, Madison police said Wednesday.
Quoted: “These findings confirm some of our big picture concerns about childhood obesity,” said Aaron Carrel, an associate professor of paediatrics at the University of Wisconsin school of medicine and public health. “It is a very direct link with disease.”
Quoted: “The president can do with pardoning power whatever he wants,” explained University of Wisconsin Law School professor Stanley Kutler. “It is complete and plenary unto itself.”
MADISON, Wis. — As many as 45 students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are sick with the norovirus.
Many of the students lived in the Sellery dorm hall.
Dozens of students at a University of Wisconsin dorm are sick with the norovirus.
That’s the same illness that has broken out on cruise ships.
Freshman Gina Slesar of Pewaukee just got over norovirus.
Quoted: “This is now the second study that was unable to show a beneficial effect,” said Dr. James Stein, director of preventive cardiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who had no role in the research.
A biochemist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has won a $100,000 award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help develop a “stealth” drug that can be used to battle viruses such as HIV.
Quoted: Dr. Maryl Johnson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said women who have been pregnant have slightly worse outcomes from transplants because their immune systems have been “revved up” from carrying foreign genes from their partner through the fetus.
Quoted: Robert Jeanne is an entomology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says the Buddha-shaped hive could actually be four different nests formed over a couple of years. He says if someone wants to read miracles into that, that’s their privilege.
New University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin is moving to put her stamp on the school, remaking the administration with an eye toward improving communication.
Two months after she succeeded John Wiley, Martin is moving to replace two Wiley aides with staff members of her own and to create a new high-profile communications post.
Leaving the chancellor’s office will be Casey Nagy, who played a key role in running the state’s flagship university during Wiley’s seven-year tenure. Nagy, a lawyer, was Wiley’s chief of staff and involved in many of the most sensitive decisions on personnel and other matters.
Over the past quarter of a century, Noble Wray has gone from Madison beat cop to Madison’s top cop…and Madison has changed a lot in that time.
During a recent one-on-one interview Chief Wray said, “It is becoming more and more of an urban city. It is growing by leaps and bounds, and in the last ten years has been one of the fastest growing cities in the state of Wisconsin.”
UW officials say a virus is threatening the health of students. Officials say they haven’t seen anything like this in years. But with winter approaching they’re not surprised that students have shown signs of the Norovirus.
“I am washing my hands thoroughly every single time anytime that I can.”
Quoted: Allan R. Odden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies teacher compensation, â??it would raise eyebrows everywhere, because that would be a gargantuan change.â?
State Consumer Protection is getting word out of a door-to-door scam involving people selling books in which the sales supposedly benefit UW hospital. Glen Lloyd, WI Trade and Consumer Protection Spokesman, says the hospital is not affiliated with any door-to-door crew. The swindlers have also attempted to get inside the home. He says the crew may ask to use the bathroom or come in for a glass of water. There’s been a report of a member smelling like alcohol.
UW Health officials have unveiled AWARE: All Wisconsin Alcohol Risk Education. Still think Wisconsin doesn’t have a drinking problem? Check out some numbers. Dr. Jeff Grossman is president and CEO of the UW Medical Foundation. “In 2005, underage drinkers consumed almost 17 percent of all alcohol consumed in Wisconsin, for a total of nearly $500 million,” Grossman said a Capitol press conference on Tuesday, where Grossman noted that Wisconsin leads the nation in rates of drinking by high school students.
When it comes to incidences related to safety on campus, up to 90 to 95 percent of them are due to excessive alcohol consumption.
That’s what UW-Madison Police Lt. Eric Holen told students and others at a safety forum Tuesday night.
The harsh economy will drive Wisconsin’s budget shortfall to more than $5 billion over the next 2½ years â?? the worst fiscal crisis in more than two decades and a harbinger of deep spending cuts, state job reductions and at least some targeted tax increases, Gov. Jim Doyle said Tuesday.
For the past several years, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents has demanded domestic partner benefits for its employees in its proposed budget. Sadly, the state Legislature has repeatedly blocked this request. But with Democrats winning control of both the state Senate and Assembly on Nov. 4, bringing domestic partner benefits to the university system must be a high priority for state lawmakers when the Legislature reconvenes in January.
Jeff Carnes reads his This I Believe essay. Carnes served in the Army and Army Reserves for six years, and did tours of duty in Kosovo and Iraq. He is now completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin. Carnes hopes to go back to Iraq as part of his linguistic studies.
Quoted: “In no way do I want to minimize the sacrifices soldiers are making overseas. Those are immediate risks,” says Dr. Michael Fiore, a veteran and head of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Quoted: “We are completely owned by our gadgets,” says Joanne Cantor, a former professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies psychology and the effects of media, communications and technology.
Gov. Jim Doyle said Tuesday he would do “everything humanly possible” to avoid general sales or income tax increases to deal with a budget shortfall that could pass $5 billion.
The “serious and extraordinary” problem, caused by a drop in tax collections and a national recession, will lead to state job and other cuts, Doyle said.
He did not specify what the cuts would be, but said savings would have to be found at University of Wisconsin and in public school aid. Doyle said he hoped there wouldnâ??t have to be large tuition increases at the university.
MADISON â?? The sinking economy may push up an effort to strengthen Wisconsin’s drunken driving laws.
Robert Golden, dean of the University of Wisconsin’s School of Public Health, said the state’s alcohol problem has an economic cost to society, which burdens the public at a time when the economy is troubled.
MADISON, Wis. — As many as 30 students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are sick with the norovirus.
Many of the students lived in the Sellery dorm hall.
Campus health officials said students are showing up with bad flu-like symptoms such as stomach cramps and diarrhea.
A group of health care providers is forming a coalition to push for new laws to fight alcohol abuse.
The All-Wisconsin Alcohol Risk Education â?? AWARE â?? coalition will focus on three initiatives: reducing drunken driving, decreasing underage drinking, and prohibiting health insurance companies from denying claims for accident victims who test positive for alcohol and other drugs.
University of Wisconsin-Madison police will be concentrating patrols along Langdon Street and other campus areas hit by recent violent crime.
That is one of the decisions following a meeting Tuesday night between students, campus and community officials.
Students expressed concern and brainstormed ideas to help prevent more attacks. Many said they want better lighting along Langdon Street and more blue-emergency boxes installed around campus.
Do you ever find yourself yawning in response to another person’s yawn? Some say it seems to happen often and claim there is scientific proof behind the theory that yawns are contagious.
Often times, yawns are a sign of fatigue or boredom. But the true meaning of why people yawn has stumped researchers.
“What a yawn is good for, we don’t really know,” said Mary Klink, associate director of University of Wisconsin Health’s Wisconsin Sleep.
Last week a UW student was robbed at gun point on Langdon Street just feet from her home.
Now students are working with officials to guarantee their safety.
Maggie Molter used to think her Langdon Street neighborhood was safe.
The Senate Majority Leader says the budget will be among the top priorities of Democrats in the upcoming session.
State Senator Russ Decker (D-Weston) says he’s already talking to the Governor about what needs to be done to help fight a growing budget deficit. The Governor now says the state could face a $5 billion shortfall. Decker says many options are already being looked at.
When it comes to heavy drinking, Wisconsin is regularly at the top of the national rankings.
With that in mind, UW Health announced a sweeping, state-wide coalition Tuesday, to combat alcohol abuse.
They’re calling for law-changing reforms to address the state’s drinking problem.
For years, as the stock market roared, educational endowments swelled, helping private secondary schools and colleges provide more financial aid, expand and attract better faculty. But with the financial markets in crisis, those days are over.
Quoted: James Stein of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Democrats fared well in many state elections last week, with the party gaining full control of state governments (winning majorities in both chambers of state legislatures where Democrats hold the governorâ??s office) in three places where Republicans had led at least one part of those branches. The three states are Delaware, New York, and Wisconsin, according to stateline.org.
In Wisconsin, Rep. Stephen L. Nass will no longer lead the Assemblyâ??s Committee on Colleges and Universities. The Republican has been an outspoken critic of the University of Wisconsin, criticizing its decision to adopt a freshman-admissions policy directing campuses to consider the race and ethnicity of applicants. He also called for the system to fire an instructor who had argued that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were orchestrated by the U.S. government.
Wisconsinâ??s new Democratic leaders say the faltering economy will put a damper on their biggest ideas.
So for now, state Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, says the focus will be on items with smaller price tags, like giving fringe benefits to domestic partners of University of Wisconsin employees.
Last Monday, Nov. 3, a UW-Madison student was robbed at gunpoint on the 100 block of Langdon Street. This followed a string of recent robberies on campus.
In response, the Greek community, UW police, the Associated Students of Madison, Ald. Eli Judge, District 8, and Dean of Students Lori Berquam are holding an impromptu campus forum Tuesday night at the Armory and Gymnasium at 6 p.m. Although a portion of the forum will address ongoing investigations, the forumâ??s primary focus is to generate feedback and problem-solving suggestions from the audience.
MADISON, Wis. — A Madison fire station has been renamed to honor Dr. Darren Bean, its former medical director who died in a helicopter crash this spring.
Bean was one of three passengers aboard a Med Flight helicopter that crashed just outside La Crosse on May 10. All three died.
Quoted: “Half the time, patients and physicians disagree on what the problem is, and two-thirds of the time, patients and physicians disagree on what the goals of treatment are,” Dr. Alan T. Luskin, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said in the news release.
Quoted: “School boards around the country are going to be in real trouble over the next year or two,” said Andrew Reschovsky, a University of Wisconsin economist, who added that some states may be forced to seek additional federal funds to help their school districts maintain programs.
Wisconsin residents are waiting longer to see a doctor, and a physician shortage means the situation isn’t likely to improve, according to a report released Monday by a coalition of medical groups.
A group of health care providers is forming a first-of-its-kind coalition that it hopes will lead to sweeping changes in state law to combat problems of excessive drinking.
The group hopes new legislation will fight drunken driving, compel insurers to cover injuries caused by drunken driving, and decrease underage drinking.
UW Health will announce the coalition, named All-Wisconsin Alcohol Risk Education – or AWARE – at a news conference at 2:30 p.m. today at the state Capitol. In addition to presenting their potential legislative agenda and statistics about drinking in Wisconsin, organizers plan to encourage members of health care organizations, law enforcement, school groups and advocacy groups to join their efforts. The Legislature reconvenes in January, and already some lawmakers are planning to introduce bills to tackle the subject.
To be persuasive on college costs, universities must be more open about their budgets, a panel of college leaders said here today at the annual meeting of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.
But budget transparency will be a challenge, they said, as universities have long sought to keep some of their costs away from the prying eyes of lawmakers and competitors in higher education.
The U.S. economic downturn and $3-billion state budget shortfall are affecting the U-Wâ??s plans to attract and keep faculty.
For several years now, the University of Wisconsin has aimed to hire and retain high-caliber professors. Plans have included upping the salary range to better compete with rival universities in the Midwest, including Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. On average, professors in those schools make between $5,000 to $15,000 more a year than those at the UW. (Second item.)
Alice Martha (Kaiser) Thaden passed away on Friday, Oct. 31, 2008, at the age of 85. One of her many jobs was working as a cook for the UW Sorority and Fraternity Houses.
John P. “Pete” Beck, age 66, passed away on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008. Pete worked as an accountant for University Hospital and UW-Madison.
Quoted: “It’s going to be a challenging season for all retailers,” said Jerry O’Brien, director of the Center for Retailing Excellence at UW-Madison. “You can’t read a report that doesn’t say this is going to be a tough season.”
Hooper’s employees also travel across the nation, working on wind-farm projects from New York to New Mexico. And its custom metal fabricators fashioned stainless-steel tubing and wires for the inner structure of a rippled glass waterfall sculpture created in 2006 by UW-Madison art professor Truman Lowe and installed in Indianapolis.
Because Friday’s competition was the first held at the Wisconsin Library Association’s annual conference, only two teams faced off: the Mad City Truckers, a group of UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies graduate students; and the Baraboo Bookers: Four Carts and a Dolly from the Baraboo Public Library.
Because of heavy usage generated by UW-Madison and state government, Metro delivers far more service per capita than any similar system in the nation, a September audit by the state Department of Transportation says.
Quoted: “This is the bluest Wisconsin has been in a long time,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor, referring to the color associated with Democrats on the electoral map.
Democrats are “going to have to do something with that power. They have the voters on their side right now. If they use it wisely, this could be a blue state for a good while into the future.”
At the South Pole, the temperature on a pleasant summer day is 30 below zero.
In that kind of cold, skin cracks and, according to the journals of one old-time explorer, “tears turn to steam.”
So imagine the challenge of staying healthy for the large number of UW-Madison researchers and engineers who make Antarctica their home for the summer.
When Richard Kloepfer returned home this spring after spending the winter in Florida, the retired plumber’s chest started to hurt.
A CT scan revealed late-stage pancreatic cancer, which had spread to his liver. His prognosis is not good, but Kloepfer has enrolled in a chemotherapy study at UW Hospital.
Kira McCoy spent her summer biking Madison. She got a great tan and good exercise, but she was also a key component in a project with UW-Madison and the city to revamp the city’s bike parking facilities and create a healthier urban environment.
With big spending increases difficult, Pocan said Democrats would look at smaller ticket items such as a plan long-sought by UW-Madison and other state universities to give domestic partner benefits to their employees. During the last budget process the Republican lawmakers who then controlled the Assembly blocked the measure.
Being one of the few large universities in the region that doesn’t offer health insurance to employees’ same-sex partners makes it harder to attract some top faculty, University of Wisconsin System spokesman David Giroux said. The $670,000 a year cost of the benefit would be returned because it would help attract or retain researchers who bring in the big federal grants that help drive Madison’s growing knowledge economy, he said.
“We’re going to do what we can to help the UW be competitive in keeping” faculty, Pocan said.
Sometimes, professors are more than just classroom instructors. Sometimes they’re mentors, or cheerleaders. Other times, they’re citizens doing their civic duty.
Which is how it came to be that faculty, administrators and students at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University together marched to the polls on Oct. 20, the first day of early voting in Florida. More than 1,000 strong, they cast their ballots for the next president of the United States.
Student engagement requires a campuswide commitment, but much of the heavy lifting occurs in the classroom. For some faculty, that means rethinking their approaches to teaching.
“You can’t just show up in class with yellowed notes,” says Jeff Abernathy, vice president and dean of the colleges at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill.
Good writing assignments are definitely a good thing. When courses provide extensive, intellectually challenging writing activities, the NSSE report found, students engage in a variety of positive activities. They are more likely to analyze, synthesize and integrate ideas from various sources. They grapple more with course ideas both in and out of the classroom. And they report greater personal, social, practical and academic development.
Keeping transfers engaged can sometimes pose a challenge. They lack the personal contacts on campus that other students have built up. And almost two out of three transfers are older than most of their classmates.
Despite the challenges, many transfers thrive in their new settings. The NSSE identifies schools where transfers are as at least as academically engaged as their native classmates, thanks in large part to their schools helping them make a smooth transition.
Lasha Carey wasn’t especially interested in community service work before she enrolled last year as a freshman at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, N.J. But that’s changed in a big way through the power of peer influence.
Inspired by classmates who gave her a taste of their work in Trenton neighborhoods, Carey now tutors inner-city kids, helps the homeless learn basic job skills and leads fellow students on one-day, urban outreach trips.
Nearly one in five college seniors and 25% of freshmen say they frequently come to class without completing readings or assignments, a national survey shows. And many of those students say they mostly still get A’s.
The survey doesn’t address whether those students are lazy, busy, intimidated, bored or geniuses. But it supports other studies that suggest a gap between what college professors expect from students and what students actually do.
