2,700 students. The thought of that number supporting a cause would make any campus activist drool with envy. But that?s the number of students the Badger Herald is reporting have joined a facebook group in protest of a proposed apartment complex on Mifflin St.
A Republican-supported bill to crack down on voter fraud by requiring photo identification to vote is drawing ire from Democrats and other organizations who claim the bill would do more harm than good.
A proposal for a four-story building aimed at young professionals and families for Mifflin Street has created a growing student outcry asking a city commission to keep the tradition of student housing at Mifflin alive.
Jon Leuer, a senior forward for the University of Wisconsin men?s basketball team, has been selected as one of 10 men?s basketball finalists for the Lowe?s Senior CLASS Award. The award is given to the student-athlete who best excels both on and off the court and is measured in four areas of excellence – community, classroom, character and competition.
It?s not hard to look at goaltender Alex Rigsby and think of her celebrated predecessor with the University of Wisconsin women?s hockey program. Like Jessie Vetter, Rigsby is a state product who came to UW with a resume of gender-bending achievement. Like Vetter, Rigsby has been asked to play a prominent role for the Badgers as a freshman.
Early last month I sat in on a discussion UW-Madison School of Pharmacy Dean Jeanette Roberts was having with about 35 high school students who are considering becoming pharmacists. She told the students what it?s like being a pharmacist and what it takes to become one — the classes they?ll need to take, the grades they will need to achieve — and then she answered their individual questions, the first being, of course, how much do pharmacists make?
What was interesting is that Roberts and the students were miles apart from each other. She was in a small sound and video studio operated by Access Wisconsin on International Lane near the Dane County Regional Airport and the kids were comfortably seated in their school libraries. Some were at desks in Mellen, some in Green Bay and Arcadia. Several were in the Adams Friendship High School library, a couple were listening and talking from Grantsburg High.
College mental health workers report greater concern about disruptive students since the mass shooting in Tucson, resulting in more calls from faculty, requests for special training and reassessments of campus procedures. Faculty members are seeking advice on dealing with disruptive outbursts and intimidating behavior, says Brian Van Brunt, president of the American College Counseling Association.
UW-Madison?s student health services this week debuted a drop-in counseling service called “Let?s Talk.” With no appointments needed or paperwork involved, the program allows students to chat informally with staff from University Health Services at drop-in centers around campus.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor David Canon, who studies election law, said the proposal would be the most restrictive in the country.
College freshmen?s emotional health hit an all-time low this academic year, reflecting the stress of wanting to succeed and the cost of acquiring a quality education during a struggling economy, a report from UCLA?s Higher Education Research Institute says.
Ambitious and harried, pro-environment and pro-gay rights, waylaid by a bad economy: That?s the typical college freshman this year, according to an annual national survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The emotional health of college freshmen ? who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school ? has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.
?Yeah, yeah, yeah,? he would hear, one navy blue suit nodding to another. They would listen to what Colin Goddard had to say, shake his hand, then open the door for the next Washington lobbyist or constituent.
….But as Goddard was giving his earnest, wonky spiel about banning the kind of magazines that Jared Loughner allegedly used to spray gunfire in Tucson or requiring background checks on people who buy weapons at gun shows, those listening didn?t know there were three bullets painfully worming their way through his body.
(This column first appeared in the Washington Post.)
University Health Services has launched a drop-in counseling program in an effort to remove barriers for UW-Madison students who need help, but may not be inclined to seek traditional counseling services.
Dr. William Clancy, who developed ACL and PCL reconstruction techniques now used worldwide, is returning to the UW-Madison community to treat student athletes and serve as the new chair of the sports medicine division at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
After officials from both the University of Wisconsin and the Beijing Sport University hailed the Chinese Champions Program a success, the decision to extend the program for an additional three years will coincide with the release of a film documenting the athletes? experiences.
Only weeks after Time Magazine named the University of Wisconsin the nation?s ?most buzzed about university,? another publication has ranked UW as the fourth most influential college on Twitter, closely following Stanford, Syracuse and Harvard.
Wisconsin?s fourth- and eighth-grade students as a whole scored above average on a national science assessment in 2009, but results released Tuesday raise concerns about the state?s African-American student achievement and about scientific literacy in general.
The documentary ?Ride the Divide? chronicles the mountain bike riders who attempted the ?Tour Divide,? a 2,711-mile bike race that follows the Continental Divide through the Rocky Mountains. The film screens for one night only on Friday, Jan. 28, at 7:30 p.m., at the Barrymore Theatre, 2090 Atwood Ave and the event will raise money for the University of Wisconsin cycling club.
Hongtao Zhou requires temperatures below freezing through at least the end of this month. An MFA candidate at UW-Madison, he is accustomed to profound chill. He studied furniture design and wood science in Harbin, the northeast Chinese megalopolis renowned for its spectacular ice festival and brutal winters, with January high and low temperatures averaging nine degrees and -12°.
More veterans are enrolling at the University of Wisconsin-Stout than at any other UW System School.
Only weeks after Time Magazine named the University of Wisconsin the nation?s ?most buzzed about university,? another publication has ranked UW as the fourth most influential college on Twitter, closely following Stanford, Syracuse and Harvard.
Catching up on a couple higher education-related items …
** President Barack Obama named UW-Madison professor Douglass Henderson one of 15 recipients of the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. The award earned by Henderson, an engineering physics professor, is the highest federal honor for mentoring in the country.
** Rosa Clemente, a hip-hop activist and the 2008 Green Party vice-presidential candidate, is speaking on the UW-Madison campus Thursday night.
** Washington State University has lured a professor from UW-Madison out west to take an endowed chair in small grains economics funded by the Washington Grain Commission, according to Washington Ag Today.
Of course, a bill to require photo ID at the polls isn?t aimed at disenfranchising demographically Republican voters like me. It?s aimed at voters like 22-year-old Andrew Flowers, a UW-Madison senior from Denver, Colo.Flowers has voted in two elections while living in Madison. To register, he needed nothing more than a piece of mail to verify his address, he said. But under the bill, Flowers would almost certainly need a Wisconsin photo ID, something that itself would require his certified birth certificate and Social Security card and a trip to the DMV. Would Flowers be likely to go through all that just to vote? “If I had to go wait in the DMV line, no,” he said.
CHINESE CHAMPIONS: A 30-minute program, “Beijing Badgers,” will feature a group of Olympic-caliber Chinese students, athletes and coaches who lived and studied at UW-Madison this fall. It will air on the Big Ten Network at noon Tuesday.
While the lasting positive effects of having a true mentor are hard to quantify, President Barack Obama?s decision to award a University of Wisconsin professor for his mentoring efforts provides recognition for years of a job done well.
A team of UW-Madison researchers landed a grant worth nearly $4.7 million to teach students in rural parts of Wisconsin how renewable biofuels such as wood or switchgrass can be used to produce energy and thereby reduce the country?s dependence on fossil fuels and imported oil.
“Merging science education with the realm of energy is very important for our students and for our future,” says UW-Madison biochemistry professor Rick Amasino, one of the principal investigators who helped secure the funding along with UW-Madison?s Hedi Baxter Lauffer, the director of the Wisconsin Fast Plants Program, and John Greenler, the education outreach program director with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
Ironically, just two days after this grant was announced, Gov. Scott Walker’s administration killed plans to spend $100 million on a boiler that would burn plant-based fuels at UW-Madison’s Charter Street power plant.
The two most common remarks made by those seeking help at UW-Madison?s Writing Center are “I?m a bad writer” and “I hate to write.””
And sometimes they say both,” says Melissa Tedrowe, the center?s associate director. When it comes to developing strategies to make students better writers, Tedrowe notes there?s “a lot of passing the buck.”
The support network is growing for the University of Wisconsin-Madison grad student recovering from a brutal New Years? Day attack.
Classes were back in session at UW System campuses this week, and so were efforts to get students to be smarter about alcohol. ?I see many students who really do stupid things when they?re drinking,? said Madison alcohol counselor Janet DuBerry. ?We?ve seen a tremendous number of kids end up in detox, just because they drink too much, too fast,? DuBerry said, adding that ?alcohol in Wisconsin is a date rape drug.?
Noted: “Our country is rising,” said Jasmine Feng, 25, a doctoral student in business and management at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who is originally from Xian, China. “The relationship between China and the U.S. is very important for Chinese students,” she said, holding a Chinese flag. “It will influence our decision of whether to stay here or go back to China, so it?s in our interest to have harmony between the two countries.”
The Big Ten schools enjoy friendly rivalries and competing on the playing field, but they shared a common cause on Thursday. Students and faculty showed they bleed cardinal and white by stepping up to donate blood during the second annual American Red Cross Big Ten Challenge.
Would you jump off a bridge because everyone else did? What about walk in the street? It turns out doing both could be dangerous.UW-Madison officials have launched a campaign asking pedestrians not to walk in the street when avoiding construction of the new School of Human Ecology building on Linden Drive.
Edgewood College plans to build a three-story Visual and Theatre Arts Center, finally providing a proper home for the arts on a campus where a hallway serves as the art gallery and the theater is hidden in a dorm basement.
It?s hard to imagine a better representative of the collegiate student-athlete than Alyssa Karel. The senior guard from Cretin-Derham Hall in St. Paul, Minn., has made her mark at the University of Wisconsin – both as a basketball player and as an honor student in the School of Nursing.
A fund has been established for a UW-Madison graduate student who continues to recover from burns suffered in a New Year?s Day attack in Puerto Rico. Five family members were killed and three others, including Patricia Sanchez Vazquez, were seriously burned after her uncle allegedly set fire to the room with a blowtorch where they had gathered for a family meal in Florida, Puerto Rico.
I walked into a conversation this afternoon about the latest LGBT bullying related suicide. I quickly found out that it was a Minnesota teen who died on Saturday morning. With these basic facts, my mind immediately went on high alert. I grew up in Minnesota — I know plenty of young people who live there. (Kasandra Brown is a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a student employee at the LGBT Campus Center)
Many colleges and universities have created a Twitter feed to share campus news with students, parents, alums, faculty, sports fans, journalists and everyone else.
This week Klout ranked scores for the most influential universities on Twitter — Stanford University led the list with a score of 70, followed by Syracuse University, Harvard University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, all of which had a score of 64.
Hey you kids, get out of the street! That old warning from adults to children is being used by UW-Madison officials who are worried about students walking on Linden Drive in a stretch where the sidewalk is closed by construction.
Balance. This is the key to Colin Tucker?s pursuit of a pro snowboarding career while working toward an undergraduate degree in legal studies from UW-Madison. Balance is essential to his competition results but also to chasing twin ambitions ? one academic, the other sporting ? at the same time.
A major construction project on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is causing a major headache for transportation officials.
A 20-year-old economics major at the University of Colorado in Boulder came up with a unique stunt to illustrate just how much it costs to attend college these days. He paid his $14,310 tuition using $1 bills.
Nic Ramos jammed the 33 pounds of cash into a duffel bag and handed it over to the CU business office last Friday, according to a report by the ABC affiliate in Denver.
Health officials say a 24-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison student died of bacterial meningitis. The university and the Dane County Coronor?s office believe he had a form of meningitis known as meningococcal disease, a rare and serious bacterial infection that can quickly cause grave illness or death.
UW-Madison likes to trumpet the fact it?s one of the top research institutions on the planet — and has been for the past two decades. This past fall, the university announced its annual research expenditures topped $1 billion for the first time.For a range of reasons, this is good news for the university, the city and state.
But is it possible places like UW-Madison are focusing too much attention on research — and not enough on educating students?
In the heart of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, a new bus line stop is unloading some mixed reaction. Greyhound Express will be making stops on Langdon Street, in front of the Memorial Union on campus, starting Monday. At least four other bus lines currently use the street to pick up and drop off passengers, many of whom are students.
“Bike Baiting,” a new and affordable initiative at Winthrop University, is staving off campus bike thefts and leading to arrests. Winthrop looked to the University of Wisconsin-Madison when creating its program.The UW-Madison Police Department began its program in May 2008. More than 100 bicycle thefts were reported on campus from January 2007 to May 2008, and only one arrest was made during that time, according to information on its website.
Being almost maniacal fans of ?80s films, The A.V. Club has often thought how cool it must have been to be a student at UW-Madison in 1986 while the wonderful cult comedy Back To School was being filmed. Just imagine being at a house party when Rodney Dangerfield and Sam Kinison walked in, or hanging out by a hotel pool with Robert Downey Jr. and ultimate ?80s villain, William Zabka. Madison alum and filmmaker Alex Melli was there, and he was kind enough to e-mail us some cool stories about the month when Back To School took over UW 25 years ago, about which he wrote, ?Overall, I think it did plant/nurture the filmmaking seed in myself.?
Nearly half of the nations undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges dont make academics a priority, a new report shows. Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives.
Tommy Kuehn seemed to shine in everything he did. Golf. Norwegian dance. School. Cheerleading for the Badgers at UW-Madison, where he was a student. Kuehn, 24, died of suspected bacterial meningitis at St. Mary?s Hospital on Thursday night. But those who knew him say he?s affected more people in his short life than many decades older. “That young man touched more lives than anyone could if they lived to a ripe old age,” said Theresa Johnson, who worked with Kuehn at the Coachman?s Golf Resort pro shop in Edgerton for 9 years.
Steffi Greiner and Petra Amann know nothing about Monday?s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration ? they arrived last week as Austrian exchange students at UW-Madison and watched from a third-floor balcony. “We know about his famous speech,” Greiner said of King, “and we want to learn more.”
It?s only 15 minutes into the session, but already every counseling table is full, and more people are waiting. There?s a constant murmur of conversation coming from the three tables, quiet but intense, and punctuated now and then by a louder question, a long sigh or a rueful laugh. Supervising attorney Sarah Orr is explaining options to the middle-aged couple at her table, with a UW-Madison second-year law student by her side. Held Jan. 6, this session of the Foreclosure Answer Clinic was the first offered in the new year, and the 13th since the free program started in July. It was created by the Dane County Foreclosure Prevention Taskforce and its legal partners in response to a rising number of homeowners facing foreclosure suits without lawyers ? about 85 percent are unrepresented in court, program sponsors said.
A 24-year-old UW-Madison student died of suspected bacterial meningitis at St. Mary?s Hospital on Thursday night, according to the university and the Dane County Coroner?s Office. Officials did not release the student?s name, but friends identified him as Thomas Kuehn, a sociable student who was on the spirit squad and wanted to go to medical school.
UW-Madison students can begin registering online Tuesday to take part in the Badger Volunteers program, which sends students to help out at schools, community centers, food banks and more. The program involves more than 400 students.
The funeral for Anna Rose Shoemaker, 20, of Hudson will be held at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 18, at Faith Community Church, 777 Carmichael Road.
The portraits of Anna Shoemaker and her good friend Elizabeth Burns that emerge from the 2008 Hudson High School yearbook are of two smart, talented, well-liked girls ? full of life and with bright futures.
Friends and family are holding a memorial today, for the UW-student who died Thursday.
A man who died from meningitis at a Madison hospital on Thursday was identified as 24-year-old Stoughton native Tommy Kuehn, a University of Wisconsin graduate, according to Madison and Dane County public health officials.
As diversity programs at University of Wisconsin campuses continue to strengthen, school officials are looking ahead to the new semester.
UW-Madison students and other Downtown dwellers will be able to catch the Greyhound bus from campus, starting Monday. The Greyhound Express stop is moving from Kelley?s Market at 636 W. Washingto
Anna Shoemaker, 20, of Hudson died Thursday at about 1 p.m. at a Duluth hospital as a result of injuries suffered in an accident near Ashland early Wednesday morning.
