On a sunny, early summer day, Memorial Union Terrace on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is idyllic. The high, cloudless skies and cool blue water of Lake Mendota serve as a backdrop to coeds drinking beer, sunning themselves and studying for exams. (Subscription required.)
Sweeping changes to the UW System sought by Gov. Scott Walker and his allies are fueled by public misconceptions regarding faculty workload and the overall cost of the UW System.
The timing could not be worse for new state-by-state faculty tenure rates to be released by the National Center for Education Statistics.
“This is what anonymous did to my elbow.” It was 10 p.m. last Friday night in Philadelphia, and I was sitting outside at a restaurant with the sociologist and author Alice Goffman. Goffman, a small woman with a drink and a plate of chicken wings sitting mostly untouched in front of her, swiped back and forth on her phone, showing me photos from last month in which one of her elbows looked normal and the other one, the site of an old injury, appeared red and inflamed. Her elbow got inflamed because she is now a controversial figure.
Quoted: Michael Wagner, a University of Wisconsin professor who specializes in the intersection of politics, religion and the media, tells Whispers it’s “not that surprising” that conservative Republicans would push back against the pope, especially the ones running for president.
Postmenopausal women who are given an activity level goal for the week end up getting more activity when using a Fitbit than a traditional pedometer, according to a new study.
Late last month, a Northwestern University law professor published an article calling into question the veracity of a widely lauded book by Alice Goffman, one of sociology’s brightest young stars. The book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, is an ethnographic study of a black neighborhood in Philadelphia where, according to Goffman’s research, residents live in a mini–police state, constantly in fear of being arrested and sent to jail or prison, often for minor offenses.
The business school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison no longer has a director for a program that admits academically accomplished high school students directly to the highly competitive Bachelor of Business Administration program.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is all over Twitter.
As Republican Gov. Scott Walker prepares to campaign for president as the man who tamed Wisconsin’s unions, he’s taking on a new labor fight: weakening tenure protections for professors at public colleges and universities.
In the fall of 1986, I was one of a group of young upstarts who thought we would take on one of the oldest student newspapers in the country.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison recently announced a $50 million gift from alumni couple Albert and Nancy Nicholas to support scholarships and fellowships at the school. The gift is actually a challenge gift, and will be used to “match, on a one-to-one basis, gifts that support undergraduate and athletic scholarships and graduate fellowships”
On Thursday, Pope Francis issued his newest encyclical, “Laudato Sii” (Praised Be To You), making the case that the environment is a moral issue. Catholics, and all people of good will, are asked to care for creation as God’s gift and to preserve a quality of life for future generations. Francis believes we are in danger of losing sight of the giftedness of creation. He is concerned that while Genesis commands humankind to “till and keep,” it has become clear that we have “tilled too much” and “kept too little.”
Wisconsin ranks last in the nation for startup activity and Milwaukee ranks second-to-last among large metropolitan areas, according a new report from the Kauffman Foundation. Interviewed: Jonathan Eckhardt of UW’s Weinert Center.
The for-profit prison industry sells itself as a cost-effective option for cash-strapped states, but according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin, privatized prisons are keeping inmates locked up longer in order to boost profits.
The battle over Wisconsin’s tenure law will soon be waged in the state Assembly and Senate. Gov. Walker proposed eliminating the law in the budget he handed legislators.
Quoted: “We don’t know in the U.S. whether embryos are going to be treated as property or not, as children or not, or sui generis, as something different,” said Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That keeps alive a debate around their moral status, their legal status, debates that quickly spiral into the black hole that is the abortion debate.”
Anyone concerned about America’s future generations has to be dismayed at the condition of public higher education.
Walking through Chicago’s Green City farmers’ market in the heat of August, it’s hard to overlook the abundance of heirloom tomatoes, in colors ranging from near black to pink or green, filling plastic bins and laid out on tables. Some are small as marbles, others large and lobed, almost like bell peppers. Their skins are often fragile, prone to splitting and poorly suited to lengthy journeys in refrigerated trucks.
Quoted: “We know that living in neighborhoods with more green space has been associated with improved mental health in adults and kids,” said Kristen Malecki, assistant professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It also is associated with many positive health behaviors, such as physical activity.”
Noted: One of the downsides of the mostly awesome phenomenon of human consciousness is the ability to worry about the future. We know the future exists, but we don’t know what’s going to happen in it. “In other animals, unpredictability or uncertainty can lead to heightened vigilance, but I think what’s unique about humans is the ability to reflect on the fact that these future events are unknown or unpredictable,” says Dan Grupe, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. “Uncertainty itself can lead to a lot of distress for humans in particular.”
LYNDA BARRY: RESCUE ME!!! The pioneering female cartoonist Lynda Barry — whose early work included the syndicated alternative strip “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” “One! Hundred! Demons!” and the illustrated novel “The Good Times Are Killing Me,” which became an Off Broadway play — in a phone interview put her relationship with Drawn & Quarterly like this:
Chancellor Rebecca Blank says she’s heard from many graduates of UW-Madison that they want to help the school.
UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank says faculty are unhappy with proposed changes to their job protections, and she is worried she’ll lose top people as a result.
An Outside the Lines investigation Sunday into 10 major football and men’s basketball programs — including Wisconsin’s — detailed incidents of coaches and athletic department officials being intertwined with police investigations involving athletes.
Quoted: “Zhou’s arrest and verdict goes deeper than policy logic. He was part of a security apparatus that had become too powerful,” argues Edward Friedman, China expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Together with Bo, they represented a threat to the center.”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been making national headlines for years taking on public and private sector unions. Now, the possible GOP presidential candidate is going after another group — nearly 5,000 tenured faculty in the 26-campus University of Wisconsin system.
Closed to the public. That’s the sign that state officials apparently want to hang on the selection process for top leaders at the University of Wisconsin System.
Late last month, what began as a book review in an obscure publication blew up into a major controversy that tarnished sociology’s most-buzzed-about young star. At issue: whether the sociologist, Alice Goffman, had participated in a felony while researching her ethnographic study of young black men caught up in the criminal-justice system.
As a University of Florida running back, Chris Rainey was named a suspect in five crimes in Gainesville. He faced charges once.
Last month, the Joint Finance Committee struck tenure for University of Wisconsin faculty from state law.
Giving new meaning to the term “wood chip,” scientists in a woodsy part of the country have come up with a way to make biodegradable computer chips from trees. (Subscription required.)
WASHINGTON — The American Association of University Professors voted Saturday to censure the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and three other institutions, while protesting planned changes — pushed by Republican lawmakers — to tenure and shared governance within the University of Wisconsin System. Members also discussed at their annual meeting here how the association might better respond to administrative moves to close troubled colleges in light of the shocking Sweet Briar College announcement earlier this year. They called that decision the first of many coming threats to similar institutions in financially and politically turbulent times.
Quoted: Leslie Bow, a professor of English and Asian-American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has written about transracialism, said Dolezal didn’t seem to be transracial — a concept she said has been most commonly invoked in terms of adoption, such as when white parents adopt children of color — as some have claimed. (Bow also has argued that transracialism indicates a kind of “social betweenness,” such as Asians being treated as black or white under segregation.)
Noted: This mission creep has been abetted by the fact that the language of I.S.D.S. provisions is often vague. Jason Yackee, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who specializes in international-investment law, told me, “The rights given to investors are so open-ended and ambiguous that they allow for a lot of creative lawyering.”
Noted: That concerns Dr. Frank Greer, a neonatologist and professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “Most of the vitamin C in the world comes from China,” he says. “And they have not always had a good reputation when it comes to quality control.”
The American Association of University Professors voted overwhelmingly at its annual conference here on Saturday to censure the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for withdrawing a tenured-faculty appointment from Steven G. Salaita over his Twitter posts harshly criticizing Israel.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison received its largest student-aimed gift from individual donors in its history this week: a $50million donation from Albert “Ab” and Nancy Nicholas, the school’s foundation announced Friday.
Quoted: “There was a point in time where so many sitcoms were giving us such a false sense of what a family was and ‘The Simpsons’ didn’t do that,” says Jonathan Gray, a media professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of “Watching the Simpsons: Television, Parody and Intertextuality.”
Tight end Owen Daniels drove out of Broncos headquarters last week and pulled over, frozen by the view through his windshield.
Twenty-one scholarly groups led by the American Historical Association wrote on Thursday that they were “gravely concerned” about looming changes in tenure and shared governance in Wisconsin.
Lily Mank never had to stop to smell the roses. She was most likely planting them.“Just look at my name,” said the 2015 University of Wisconsin graduate who specializes in therapeutic garden designs. “It was only natural that I gravitated towards nature.”
Noted: “One of the most fascinating developments in African politics has been the increase in women’s political participation since the mid-1990s,” writes Aili Mari Tripp, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.
Last year, Alice Goffman published On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, an adaptation of her dissertation at Princeton. For six years, while a student at Penn and at Princeton, Goffman immersed herself in a Philadelphia neighborhood that she writes is “a lower-income Black neighborhood not far from [Penn’s] campus.” The book is an ethnography of the lives of the young men (and a few women) she hung out with in the neighborhood. She changed names and calls it “6th Street,” to avoid identifying her subjects.
The mosquito population is expected to boom in the next week or two, according to Susan Paskewitz, professor of entomology at UW-Madison. Recent rain is a factor and mosquito trapping is an indicator.
A team of researchers has turned to the ocean to help unravel the mysteries of cloud formation by peeling back the mysteries of the structures of tiny aerosol particles at the surface of the ocean. The University of Wisconsin-Madison work shows how the particles’ chemical composition influences their abilities to take in moisture from the air, which indicates whether the particle will help to form a cloud, a key to many basic problems in climate prediction.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor has launched the Farmers Market Metric Project to help communities measure the impacts local farmers’ markets have on economic growth and community building.
Four years after taking union rights away from teachers and other public workers in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker now wants to strip job protections for University of Wisconsin professors in a move he likens to the 2011 law that made him a national figure and set up his expected presidential run.
Wisconsin counties have long relied on their University of Wisconsin cooperative extension to answer questions about and to encourage development in agriculture, horticulture, family living, youth and 4-H. However, the recent proposed UW System budget cut could mean Wisconsin counties lose from 65 to 80 of those local UW extension agents. Rural Wisconsin will be hardest hit.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison asked state lawmakers on Tuesday to reconsider proposed changes to job protections for tenured faculty that have come under fire from professors and others who see it as putting academic freedom and their jobs at risk.
Public colleges and universities in several states once again face the prospect of sharp budget cuts this year, and students say they have an important role to play in opposing them.
Republican state senators have voted to confirm the son of Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign chair to the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents.
Pick up any paper or magazine, and you’re likely to see a front-page article on college: It costs too much, spawns too much debt, is or isn’t worth it.
Quoted: Many different factors can cause unusual shapes or inconsistent coloring, according to Amaya Atucha, a fruit crop specialist and assistant professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: genetic mutations, overlapping branches of a fruit tree, nutrient deficiencies or pollination problems. Frost can damage the external tissues and cause scabbing on a fruit’s skin, while light interception can affect coloring.
The University of Wisconsin (UW) system could, within the month, no longer have a nationally recognized tenure system.
Adena Rissman is on the faculty in UW Madison, studying relationships between people and natural resources.
Re “Unions Subdued, Walker Turns to Tenure at Wisconsin Colleges” (front page, June 5):
Like many university leaders, Chancellor Rebecca Blank of the University of Wisconsin at Madison has had her ups and downs with the faculty. She butted heads with some professors in her support for a now-dead plan to make the university system into a more autonomous public authority, for example, but earned faculty praise when she defended professors against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s suggestion that faculty members might be shirking their teaching responsibilities.
Sociologist Alice Goffman’s book “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City,” drew fulsome praise upon its publication in 2014 and gave its youthful author a crossover reputation — a TED talk, a speaking tour, possible TV and movie deals, trade paperback reprint.
The full University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents voted Friday to adopt a tenure policy to replace the one likely to be stricken from state statute, while rejecting one last opportunity to formally oppose planned Legislative changes to faculty terms of employment.
