Category: Campus life

MADISON â?? University of Wisconsin System regents called for action Friday in response to what they called a troubling audit that showed a growing demand for mental health counseling.

The audit found UW students often wait a week or more for counseling now and wait times are likely to increase as demand grows faster than resources. Also, not all UW campuses track troubled students referred to off-campus health care providers to make sure they get treatment, the report by UW System auditors found.

As the students come flooding back into Madison those looking to party are finding a new obstacle.

Meant to curb underage drinking, new scanners at local businesses are getting their first real test.

It’s a Friday night in Madison and the streets are packed, students are back in town and liquor stores are buzzing.

Those looking to celebrate their return with alcohol are getting a surprise.

MADISON, Wis. — Some of the nation’s most educated academic professionals believe the legal drinking age should be lowered from 21 to 18.

The movement, called The Amethyst Initiative, was undertaken by college leaders who believe that lowering the drinking age could cut the abuse of alcohol.

“The important thing from the university perspective is the decision-making,” said UW Associate Dean of Students Kevin Helmkamp. “We want our students to make good decisions.”

MADISON, Wis. — A Dane County judge has set a trial date for a Minnesota man accused of fatally stabbing a Madison man earlier this year.

Jury selection will begin Jan. 12 for Adam Peterson, 20, of North Grant.

The former University of Wisconsin-Madison student has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

It’s almost time to head back to school — and back to the doctor’s office. Doctors recommend adolescents and college freshmen get vaccinated against meningitis. But one family has learned how suddenly this deadly disease can strike.

“He loved to read,” Ruthann Baxter-Cutting says of her son.

22-year-old Erik Baxter was an aspiring writer himself.

Nearly 100 presidents of some of the top universities and colleges are banding together to tackle binge drinking on campuses across the country.

The UW was approached, but declined to take part.

That’s because their top leader, newly appointed Biddy Martin, doesn’t even start until September.

Still, UW Associate Dean Kevin Helmkamp says he is skeptical of the idea.

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Nearly 100 presidents of some of the top universities and colleges are banding together to tackle binge drinking on campuses across the country.

The UW was approached, but declined to take part.

That’s because their top leader, newly appointed Biddy Martin, doesn’t even start until September.

Still, UW Associate Dean Kevin Helmkamp says he is skeptical of the idea.

Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk announced Wednesday that her 2009 budget proposal calls for the county’s 911 Center to receive $578,000 in significant improvements.

….Both Falk and the 911 Center have been heavily criticized for the mishandling of an emergency call from UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmerman, who was murdered earlier this year.

UW-Madison students hoping to use the podium concrete stage next on the Library Mall for speeches, rallies and music are being displaced by underground utility construction.

But never fear, demonstrators, the city parks department will let you speak (or sing, or act) your piece on either side of the public platform.

The podium is expected to be out of service from now to November.

In response to the city of Madison’s latest budget crunch, library officials recently floated a plan to close the Monroe Street branch library or, at the least, cut back hours and services. But maybe there’s a “green” way to save some dollars there instead.

A study by students in Mike Oliva’s sustainable design engineering class at University of Wisconsin-Madison last year found that the 47-year-old library could shave energy costs by using high-performance fluorescent light bulbs, natural lighting, double-pane windows, occupancy sensors for bathroom lights and fans and additional insulation. The students found, incredibly enough, that there was no insulation in the walls.

On a sultry summer day, Sheridan Glen has the interior of his BMW cool as his pulls out of the parking lot of his home in the 4th Ward Lofts. A Madison resident for eight years, Glen has immersed himself in the historical fabric of one of Madison’s oldest neighborhoods on the isthmus.

….As the (Brittany) Zimmerman homicide illustrates, the neighborhood, despite its recent developments and new residents, is not immune from violence and criminal activities. Roughly 500 major crimes, including rape, murder, burglary, theft and aggravated assault, have been committed in the neighborhood over the past five years, according to Madison Police Department records. The numbers, though, have declined slightly each of the past five years.

Capt. Mary Schauf of the Madison Police Department’s Central District says major crimes have stabilized as the result of acute attention paid to the area in recent years.

Students entering college this fall have lived their whole lives in a digital world â?? where GPS has always been available, phones have always had caller ID and tax returns could always be filed online. The incoming freshmen, born mostly in 1990, also grew up knowing only Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. Those are some of the 60 cultural landmarks on the Beloit College Mindset List.

It took only 2 1/2 hours for chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley to defeat 14 players in a simultaneous tournament Friday afternoon at Memorial Union.
Spending only a moment or two on each move, Ashley stepped from one game board to the next until those 14 players bowed his or her king to Ashley’s mastery.

UW-Madison’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies summer workshop is a four-day event covering meteorology, astronomy and geology. It’s open to high school students who stay on campus in a dormitory. They participate in hands-on activities working directly with scientists, graduate students and professors.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) University of Wisconsin System students seeking mental health counseling are routinely forced to wait a week or longer to get appointments and that delay is likely to increase, a report warned Friday.

The UW System report also said counselors should do more to monitor troubled students who are referred to off-campus mental health providers for advanced treatment. Those students do not always end up getting help, and some campuses do little to follow up, the report said.

The report comes in the wake of last year’s massacre at Virginia Tech, where a troubled student killed 32 others before committing suicide. That tragedy served as a wake-up call for colleges to do more to help students showing signs of potentially dangerous behavior; one focus has been to refer more students to counseling early.

MADISON, Wis. — A new safety campaign launched by the University of Wisconsin Dean of Students is the first one in years to target students one on one on off-campus move in day.

It’s all part of various measures being taken now to keep UW students safer.

After the Brittany Zimmermann homicide last April, property managers were flooded with calls for maintenance service.

Nearly six months later, some property managers said they’ve been working hard to stay on top of building security as the fall migration transforms downtown.

On a day filled with excitement over a fresh start, many students are being met with a sad reminder that tragedy can happen anywhere.

Just four months after the murder of UW student Brittany Zimmermann in her own apartment, those moving into the neighborhood are getting a welcome message from police.

It’s move in day near the UW Campus and amidst the big boxes and hefty loads are police, with a heavy message.

On couches and lawn chairs, UW students wait, wait and wait some more.

“Between 12pm and 12pm, we have no place to stay so for 24 hours we’re homeless,” says UW student Dana Hanson.

But as some pass the time outside- inside property owners like John and Carrie Bartels are working quickly.

MADISON (WKOW) — University and city officials used “Move In Day” to promote a new safety campaign called “Safety 24/7”.

They handed out bottled water and magnets with basic safety advice like walking with friends and locking doors.

In the midst of mattresses and boxes, volunteers with the university and city spoke to students and parents about campus safety.

It’s a topic university officials say becomes even more important following the murder of UW student Brittany Zimmermann last spring.

If approached by a police officer while moving into your new apartment, don’t be alarmed. The officer just wants to say “hi” and give some pointers about staying safe in the campus/downtown area.

The initiative is known as Safety 24/7, the first time UW-Madison has conducted an organized welcome for students moving into their new digs on moving day, the first day most leases commence for hundreds of apartments both downtown and on campus.

The effort is to educate students how to keep themselves safe while living and studying in Madison.

Madison’s move-out day is just another day of car hijacking, violence and general thievery for UW-Madison senior Jeff Sellman.

Of course, that was only in the virtual reality of his Xbox 360 video game Grand Theft Auto 4.

TOWN OF MENASHA â?? Lesley Lathrop has no plans to return to Japan because she won’t go where she’s not wanted.

However, part of her heart is still there.

Three years ago today Lathrop’s 20-year-old son, Andy, who took a year off college to teach English in Japan, went missing just a few days before he was scheduled to return home.

MADISON â?? If younger voters help Barack Obama win this state in November, the presidential candidate will be sure to thank a 20-year-old college student.

University of Wisconsin-Madison junior Bryon Eagon is taking off the fall semester to organize college campuses statewide to get Obama elected.

As state coordinator for Students for Barack Obama, he is the point man for an effort that Democratic pollster Paul Maslin said could take the youth vote to its “absolute peak” in Wisconsin.

Construction work will be halted along the 500 and 600 blocks of State Street for the next three days.

Vehicles will be allowed on State Street but only while actively loading and unloading.

While moving furniture all day is backbreaking enough, finding a place to store and transport goods looks to be a problem for some students.

It is a chaotic 24 hour period that every year floods the streets around campus with garbage, moving trucks and cleaners.

Students move from one home to another in the same day, if they’re lucky, because the trash isn’t the only thing spending the night on the curb.

People take over the streets. Landlords make final checks and sidewalks are lined with garbage. Students are all packed up, many with nowhere to go.

MADISON (WKOW) — Students and other downtown Madison residents are hoping it will be dry Thursday and Friday morning, sow that many are homeless for the next 24 hours.

It is, afterall, ‘move out day,’ when many apartment leases expire. New ones won’t begin until tomorrow.

Many of the streets for blocks in any direction from the largely student neighborhoods have been turned upside down over the past few days as their apartment leases end August 14.

In the city’s biggest yearly migration of people, thousands of UW-Madison students will be moving in and out of their campus-area apartments starting today and likely through the weekend.

And if getting all their clothes, books and ratty, old, second-hand couches from one place to another wasn’t work enough, major construction on two blocks of State Street is sure to make the task even more challenging.

State Street residents moving in or out of apartments this week will be able to use the whole length of the six-block-long street to get their moving vehicles close to their quarters.

The lower half of State Street (the 500 and 600 blocks) has been a construction zone all summer, but construction will be halted at the end of the day Wednesday and won’t resume until Monday, allowing vehicles to be able to use those two blocks for the massive move, as most leases end Thursday (Aug. 14) and renters start moving in Friday.

Only residents with State Street addresses will be allowed access to the street for their moving vehicles, said Madison Police Department spokesman Joel DeSpain.

Was it the stained, aging carpet in the hallways, the sweltering heat and lack of air conditioning or the fight for sinks in the shared bathrooms each morning that kept reminding you, â??thereâ??s no place like homeâ?¦.â??â??

These days, students also have come to dread the stress of moving every year in a relentless search for housing that accommodates their needs.

A major new apartment project on the UW-Madison campus reflects the changing expectations students and their parents have for living arrangements that can enhance academic life and provide a transition into the professional world. As UW-Madison attracts a growing share of world-class intellectual talent, the bar is being raised on the amenities and housing options these savvy students are seeking.

A former Madison man in the middle of a marijuana sales network that moved at least one ton of pot between 2000 and July 2003 pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to conspiring to distribute a controlled substance with a second man who’s suspected of involvement in an unsolved murder.

Brian Hutchinson, now of Fontana, Wis., was a UW-Madison student in August 2000 when he moved into a house on Wingra Avenue shared with the second man, Reed Rogala, who was already heavily involved in marijuana trafficking, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Graber.

Bicyclists traveling from the West Side to the UW-Madison campus now have an easier and brighter passage.

The new Campus Drive Pedestrian and Bicycle Path, which runs along Campus Drive from University Bay Drive to a network of sidewalks on Linden Drive, officially opened Friday.

Dane County’s emergency dispatch center has kept incomplete and disorganized records of police complaints about its shortcomings, limiting its ability to prevent potentially life-and-death mistakes such as those that happened at the 911 center the day Brittany Zimmermann was killed.

Attention, bike thieves.
In a new program on the UW-Madison campus, university police are planting Global Positioning System satellite units on bikes to catch thieves in action.

This summer, police have arrested 16 people through the program.

Nick Gabel enjoyed UW-Madison’s Fun with Forensic Science camp so much it made him think about a career in the field.

“I think this camp has inspired me” to become a crime scene investigator, said Gabel, who will be a seventh-grader in New Glarus.

MADISON â?? The entrepreneurial spirit is rising at UW-Madison and other campuses, and not just among faculty and staff who want to start new companies.

Students are also chomping at the bit to create their own firms, officials say, which is one of the reasons why the University Research Park is opening 10 incubator suites in a former manufacturing site on East Washington Ave. in the capital city.

UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley is predicting an â??explosionâ? of student-run companies. He says there has been a â??sea changeâ? over the past decade in attitudes of students, many of whom now want to run their own companies rather than work for someone else.

MADISON, Wis. — A University of Wisconsin-Madison student from China is wishing she was home to enjoy the Olympic festivities.

Yuli Na said her family and friends are thrilled with the games and although the world may be scrutinizing China right now, she thinks having so many people looking at China could open communication and promote understanding, WISC-TV reported.