The UW is working to improve diversity on campus starting with its faculty and staff.
Adin Palau is UW Madison’s recruitment manager. He filled a new position created six months ago to help recruit a more diverse workforce on campus.
Working while in school no longer means serving food at the Union.
A new UW program helps students pay for school and improve their resumes.
It’s called “RISE” – the Recruitment Initiative for Student Employees.
Locking a bike is routine for UW graduate Carrie Lorig, but one night this summer, it still wasn’t good enough. “I was just really devastated because that’s how I get around town, and I really love my bike,” said Lorig. She said she locked her U-lock to itself because the bike rack at the downtown grocery store she visited was full.
“A lot of my friends, there was a lot of bike stealings after that,” said Lorig.
There are other students with similar stories of victimization and frustration.
MADISON, Wis. — University of Wisconsin-Madison police are taking extra steps to keep bikes safe from thieves.
A special GPS device has helped police catch at least 18 thieves since May, according to UW police.
The police leave what they call bait bikes around camp
Every year hundreds of bicycles are stolen on campus. Very few of these bikes are ever recovered and even fewer arrests are made. But a new program created by the UW Police has changed all that.
“It was actually stolen out of my basement in my apartment,” said Shawn Vesely. “I was pretty upset. I was wondering where my bike went. Who came into my house and took it.”
Stories like this are all too common as bicycles are one of the most stolen items on the UW Campus. But, University Police may have found a way to make sure your ride home doesn’t ride away.
How Lucky can you get?
Lucky, a four-ton marble elephant carved in India was put on its pedestal Wednesday in the lobby of the Lucky Apartments at 777 University Ave., part of the $190 million University Square redevelopment project on the UW-Madison campus.
The marble elephant is the mascot for the 359-unit apartment building and is a symbol of good luck in parts of Asia, with good fortune expected to follow those who rub its trunk.
High schools and colleges are steering students away from cars to save money on gas, save the environment and promote physical fitness.
This fall, Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., is offering freshmen free mountain bikes, helmets and locks in exchange for a promise not to bring a car to campus. The $300-per-student cost is funded by private donations.
MADISON, Wis. — A 21-year-old bicyclist was injured on Wednesday morning when she fell off her bike and slid underneath a truck’s rear tires on West Washington Avenue, according to Madison police.
The woman was riding her bike at about 9 a.m. when, witnesses said, a truck began to make a right turn onto Henry Street from Washington Avenue. The cyclist was riding close by and apparently hit her brakes to prevent hitting the truck and she flew over the top of the bike’s handlebars, hit the ground and slid beneath the truck. (Victim is UW student.)
Extending for almost a month, Wisconsin Welcome goes above and beyond making new students feel, well, welcome to campus. By offering a slew of activities, some campuswide and others residence-hall focused, there are plenty of chances to wade into the waters of college-level socialization.
The largest fraternity on the University of Wisconsin campus expects to have a new home by 2010 after a late-night blaze destroyed their residence and caused more than $1 million in damage last May.
The University of Wisconsinâ??s new emergency text messaging service is approaching 10,000 subscribers, marking a number university officials hope to increase by thousands this school year.
The University of Wisconsinâ??s flagship campus will be welcoming a new chancellor this fall.
Cornell University Provost Biddy Martin begins later this summer, filling the spot left vacant by outgoing chancellor John Wiley.
Madisonâ??s homicide count for 2008 increased to five this summer, after a man allegedly stabbed his girlfriend at their home a few miles south of the University of Wisconsin campus.
An arrest warrant was issued Tuesday for a man thought to be living in Massachusetts who is charged with raping a drunk young woman after she left the Kollege Klub in March of 2007.
Anderson R. Dasilva, who turns 29 Saturday, is charged with second-degree sexual assault for the incident, which occurred after the woman and several of her friends had been out drinking the night of March 9 and into the early hours of March 10. After bar time, the woman said she became separated from her friends and could not find them when she left the bar.
April Nett is a college student turned part-time detective.
Her investigative, take-matters-into-your-own-hands attitude is a recent transformation sparked by what hundreds of college students and city residents experience every year in Madison. Her bike was stolen from outside her University Avenue apartment, and she felt if she didn’t do something, nobody else would.
After watching the apartment building’s surveillance tape of two guys breaking her bike lock, then walking off with her bike, she attempted to file a report with the Madison Police Department. Without knowing the serial number for her bike, however, she knew there wasn’t much hope.
The Posse Foundation is an innovative scheme brought to fruition almost 20 years ago by Deborah Bial, an education specialist who was troubled by the high failure rate of promising minority students recruited by top-tier universities.
One such student explained to her that he would have stayed in school if he’d had his posse with him — using the popular urban expression for his network of neighborhood buddies. That’s when Bial hit on the idea of recruiting a cross-section of kids from urban public high schools, bonding them into cohesive groups of 10 or 12, and sending them off, en masse, to some of the nation’s best universities.
this year’s crop of Posse Chicago’s 72 scholarship winners will be heading to Carleton College in Minnesota, DePauw University in Indiana, Oberlin College in Ohio and Pomona College in California, as well as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
For her senior project in biological systems engineering before graduating from UW-Madison in May, Danielle McIntosh designed and built a bike rack to transport hula hoops. This Hoopla rack won her $5,700 at the College of Engineering’s Innovation Days.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Real Estate Foundation on Monday released a list of eight proposed locations for the schoolâ??s new dorm in Milwaukeeâ??s east side and Riverwest neighborhoods, with sites as far west as the Holton Terrace apartments and as far east as the old Prospect Mall.
Ten days before the big day, Madison recycling coordinator George Dreckmann is asking for help from the legions of students who will be moving.
“We really need everyone’s help so we can get things cleaned up and keep the downtown looking good,” Dreckmann said. “We will be handling approximately 800 tons of trash during the move out, so we need everyone’s cooperation to make things work smoothly.”
Student’s leases tend to expire on Aug. 14, and that is the big day for students moving out of one apartment and into another.
As one would expect of a recycling coordinator, Dreckmann is urging students to reuse items or share them with others.
After years of skyrocketing arrest numbers and city and community frustration, the Mifflin Street Block Party is taking the first steps toward an overhaul.
According to Joel Plant, aide to Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, Madison officials have been meeting with the owners of the Majestic after they raised the possibility of the local music venue sponsoring the event.
Although planning is still in preliminary stages, the event would become a live music event, with two stages alternating music throughout the day and culminating with a nationally recognized headliner.
The Mifflin Street Block Party in Madison may have a sponsor next year.
The owners of the Majestic Theatre want to change the partyâ??s focus from alcohol to music.
They are talking with leader of UW-Madisonâ??s student government. The student leaders plan to survey their classmates soon about their thoughts on a more organized party.
MADISON, Wis. — The federal government is cutting off college aid for some of the nation’s worst sex offenders.
A little-noticed provision of a broader higher education bill makes such offenders ineligible for Pell Grants, the nation’s premier financial aid program for low-income students, starting July 1, 2009.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The top suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks was obsessed with a sorority that sat less than 100 yards away from a New Jersey mailbox where the toxin-laced letters were sent, authorities said Monday. Multiple U.S. officials told The Associated Press that former Army scientist Bruce Ivins was long obsessed with the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma, going back as far as his own college days at the University of Cincinnati.
MADISON (WKOW) — Classes at UW-Madison don’t start for 33 days, but already the rumor mill is spinning about a building that will house hundreds of students for the fall 2008 semester.
Ten stories tall and more than a million square feet, Lucky Apartments will house more than 800 people when the site opens in August.
Or, as many UW students, have heard, “if” it opens in August.
When UW-Madison MBA students return for fall classes in late August, theyâ??ll find new digs in the form of the $40.5 million east wing of Grainger Hall.
The 131,416-square-foot, four-story addition features enhanced space for Wisconsin Enterprise MBA programs, the Evening MBA and Executive MBA, all of which serve working professionals.
The new tower also features common areas for visiting recruiters, alumni and students –including the multi-purpose Plenary Room on the first floor — as well as the Capital Café and 29 modern classroom and meeting/breakout rooms.
All around the city, or at least as far as the station’s signal can reach, WSUM/FM 91.7 host Paul Alan Baker knows a lot of radio dials flee from his program at 1 p.m. on Thursdays.
The student-run station has its rock and its hip-hop, some heavy metal and some jazz. But once a week the station has poetry and spoken word in all its forms, some as contemporary as hip-hop music, some so avant-garde it seems to be nonsense.
“I’m this big break in the day when I can just hear people turning their radios off,” joked Baker. “People just have the music on all day as background and then all of a sudden this weird, experimental poetry comes on and they think, ‘What the hell?’ ”
Baker is the host of “Wordsalad,” an hour that features authors reading from their own works.
Downstairs, Garbage is pouring misery out from the jukebox. Upstairs, David Hart is battling his faulty memory and the audible sound of Shirley Manson’s voice to get his poem out.
His eyes are squeezed shut, he’s trying to remember the next line. He pauses.
“Take your time, Dave!” encourages a woman from the back of the room.
He begins again, “The putrid corpse of hip-hop lies in state in a Brooklyn nightclub, flanked by bouquets of dubs, 20-inch rims and covered in shrubs of Sean John.” With that, he’s off into the lyrical web of a story about his evolution from hip-hop artist to spoken word poet. The audience makes their appreciation known.
Lauren Bern of Madison traveled with her family to Postville, Iowa, over the July 26-27 weekend to protest a mid-May immigration raid there on a kosher slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant.
The raid is widely considered to be the largest and most punitive in United States history.
For their all their political differences, Vicki Pietrus and Allison Nelson have a lot in common. Both are smart, engaged University of Wisconsin-Madison seniors from suburban Chicago. Pietrus is majoring in political science and English, Nelson in political science and film production.
But while Nelson, a Republican, is trying to get her Students for John McCain effort off the ground, Pietrus, a volunteer for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, is trained and field-tested.
More than 100 residents from Milwaukeeâ??s Riverwest and east side neighborhoods packed a community meeting Tuesday night to discuss providing more input on a proposed dormitory that would house 500 to 700 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee students.
The parents of a slain University of Wisconsin-Madison student have dropped their lawsuit against Dane County and a former sheriff’s dispatcher.
An attorney for Kevin and Jean Zimmermann has filed a stipulation in federal court in Madison saying there’s an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit.
An emergency text messaging system on the UW-Madison campus is nearing 10,000 subscribers, after being launched less than three months ago.
The service, WiscAlerts-Text, was started so students, staff and campus-based affiliates such as UW Hospital and Clinics can get alerts on their cell phones in case of a campus emergency.
“We are glad to see strong participation and expect to add even more users as we market the service aggressively throughout the fall semester,” said UW Police Lt. Michael Newton.
A number of Wisconsin universities and colleges are prominently featured in the 2009 version of Princeton Review’s “Best Colleges” guidebook.
“The Best 368 Colleges,” which goes on sale Tuesday, used 120,000 student surveys to rank the country’s colleges in 62 categories.
Although there’s been considerable griping about rising tuition the last few years, UW-Madison students evidently still think they are getting pretty good bang for their buck. The university received a top 10 ranking in the category of “Best Value Public Colleges.”
UW-Madison did not crack the top 20 party schools list, but did score particularly well in categories involving alcohol, ranking sixth overall in the “Lots of Beer” category and ninth for having “Lots of Liquor.”
The parents of slain UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann dropped their federal civil rights lawsuit against Dane County and a former 911 dispatcher on Monday, about a month after the county’s attorneys moved to dismiss the case.
UW-Madison may be losing its reputation as a hard-partying school.
For the second-straight year, it didn’t make the list of top party schools in the annual Princeton Review rankings.
More college athletic departments are developing or publicizing online social networking policies for student athletes, experts say.
USA TODAY researched social networking policies for 27 schools in six major conferences, including the University of Iowa, which will implement a new monitoring policy Friday. Last fall, pictures emerged on Facebook of two 19-year old Hawkeye football players holding cash and liquor bottles.
Every year, the Princeton Review releases a list of Top Schools in certain categories.
For UW administrators, unfortunately, the University has topped or been close to the top of “Top Party Schools” for several years. In 2005, it was #1.
Not in 2008.
UW-Madison didn’t even make the Top 20 list.
MADISON, Wis. — University of Wisconsin-Madison police said they arrested two suspects Monday in connection with the robbery of a graduate student on campus more than two years ago.
Authorities said that a 31-year-old graduate student was walking in the 1400 block of Observatory Drive on July 6 when a man wielding a pipe struck him in the head several times, knocking him to the ground. After a short struggle, police said the attacker fled with the victim’s wallet.
MADISON, Wis. — The parents of a University of Wisconsin-Madison student who was killed in her campus-area apartment this spring have dropped their lawsuit against Dane County and a 911 dispatcher regarding the alleged mishandling of a call from the victim’s phone.
Dear Editor:
The seven-week summer conditioning program for football players is cause for reflection, if not concern. Graduation rates and GPAs for athletes are marginal at best, so why can’t there be an academic conditioning program as well?
MADISON (WKOW) — More than two years ago, on Thursday July 6, 2006, UW Police responded to a 911 call from a campus emergency phone regarding an armed robbery.
The victim was a UW graduate student who was walking in the 1400 block of Observatory Drive when police say the male suspect hit him in the head with a pipe several times, knocking him to the ground. We’re told the suspect then took off with the victim’s wallet.
The victim was hospitalized, and his credit card was later used at several locations in Madison and Fitchburg by a female suspect, police say.
After DNA analysis, police arrested 24-year-old Otis Darnel Williams and his girlfriend 21-year-old Amanda Porrazzo. Police say neither has any affiliation with UW.
Just call ’em the Guzzling Gators: The University of Florida is the nation’s No. 1 party school. The school tops the annual list of party campuses compiled by the Princeton Review.
The university has made the list before, but has never been first. It wrested the title away from West Virginia University.
Coming in second was the University of Mississippi, followed by Penn State University, West Virginia and Ohio University-Athens.
(UW-Madison was not listed in the top 20.)
Just blocks from the University of Washington, a line of people shuffle toward a food pantry, awaiting handouts such as milk and bread. For years, the small University District pantry has offered help to the working poor and single parents in this neighborhood of campus rentals. Now rising food prices are bringing another group: Struggling college students.
Milwaukee poet Dasha Kelly stood on the stage of the dimly lighted Miramar Theatre last Wednesday night and addressed a small but supportive audience.
“This is more than just a hobby,” she said. “This feeds your soul.”
Kelly was referring to the art of spoken-word poetry, in which poems are written to be heard by an audience rather than read on a page. Her words resonated with the audience, many of whom had come to perform in Soul Fire, a weekly open mic night that Kelly hosts.
CHICAGO — Junior running back Lance Smith has been suspended from the University of Wisconsin football team, Badgers coach Bret Bielema announced Thursday.
“It has come to my attention that Lance has failed to meet certain requirements relating to the first-offender program he was placed in last fall,” Bielema, who is in Chicago for the Big Ten Conference preseason media event, said in a statement.
Smith was arrested in July 2007 after a dispute with his girlfriend. He pleaded guilty last October to misdemeanor charges of battery and disorderly conduct and was referred to Dane County’s first-offende
The administration of County Executive Kathleen Falk continues to stymie media efforts to learn more about longstanding problems at the countyâ??s 911 Center. And what little information is being released following revelations that UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann called 911 before she was killed is not comforting.
The growing crowd gathers in the sparse room devoid of any decoration save for two plaques on the wall quoting the Koran. Mimicking the neat lines of shoes by the door, nearly 150 Muslims are drawn together for the Jumma, or Friday prayer. As the second of five daily prayers starts, Sarrah AbuLughod, head wrapped in a bright blue scarf to hide her hair, joins in the rising drone of the crowd giving thanks to Allah.
It’s a scene AbuLughod, a recent UW–Madison graduate and former vice president of the Muslim Student Association, has been a part of her entire life and as long as she’s lived in Madison. But the Islamic faith is but one component of Madison’s growing and active Middle Eastern community. Just like the geographical region of the Middle East, the community has distinct parts, coming from both Persian and Arab backgrounds with no one country overly represented in the city.
The scene at Bascom Hill on a recent Tuesday afternoon seems normal at first glance. Young women lounge on the grass about halfway up the hill, catching some rays on a hot summer day. Not far away, two young men toss a baseball back and forth in an unsubtle attempt to catch the ladies’ attention.
Midway through the afternoon, the peaceful setting disappears in an instant with the sound of voices and the thumping of feet on the pavement. You can hear them getting closer and closer until they appear not far from Abraham Lincoln’s statue: four dozen UW football players, working through one of the more grueling days of their seven-week summer strength and conditioning program. A few hours later, after this group has passed, about 60 more Badgers appear for their turn at running Bascom Hill.
The year is 1998. Michael Verveer is a 30-year-old member of Madison’s City Council, serving the heart of the city’s downtown.
He is the articulate public voice for the many students in his district who oppose stricter controls on alcohol. When the police announce in September that they have written their first tickets under a new policy to the hosts of an off-campus party with underage drinkers, Verveer tells The Capital Times that “some of my constituents are now facing several thousands of dollars worth of fines for a crime that I don’t think is that bad and that has been going on at the UW for more than four decades; namely, inviting friends over to celebrate a football game.”
….Fast forward to 2008. Madison’s economic revitalization has continued, and the face of downtown has changed as well, with many young professionals and “empty-nesters” moving in to hundreds of new condominium units.
….Verveer is not the only politician whose thinking on downtown alcohol issues has evolved in the past few years. The makeup of the Alcohol License Review Committee itself is a sign of how Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s views on alcohol enforcement have changed.
A Madison woman has been charged with four counts of misdemeanor theft by fraud after scamming a number of sympathetic citizens out of nearly $3,000.
According to a criminal complaint filed Monday, 35-year-old Crystal Cox, (aka Tonya Dexson, Tonya Deyson, Kathy Dixon, Allisha Dixon) convinced at least four people to lend her money for a variety of reasons but never followed through with her promises to repay the loans.
….Cox said her friend had advised her that “UW students are stupid,” and are an easy mark for a scam.
The College of Engineering and Madison Area Technical College (MATC) will sign an agreement Monday that will guarantee qualified MATC students admission to University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering programs.
Hezzy Smith was willing to move halfway around the world to learn how to speak Bengali.
But when the recent Harvard graduate didn’t get a spot this summer in a program in Dhaka, Bangladesh, he was less enthusiastic about moving halfway across the country to study this South Asian language.
“I’m from New Jersey, went to high school in New York and college in Boston,” said Smith, who needs to learn Bengali before moving to Mymensingh, Bangladesh, where he will begin working with people who have cognitive disabilities in April 2009. “And now I have to go to Madison? I was like, ‘I’ve never been out west.’
“I remember how everyone kept asking me, ‘Why are you going to Madison to learn Bengali?’ ”
College choices can be “vexing” for twins, says professor Nancy Segal, head of the Twin Studies Center at California State University-Fullerton.
The “going wisdom” is to go to different schools, but “society has to stop putting pressure on twins to separate,” Segal says.
On a recent sunny afternoon, concoctions of chocolate chips, butterscotch chips and marshmallows were melting in foil-lined boxes at the top of the steps leading to Chamberlain Hall.
Inside the UW-Madison building, middle-school-aged students were looking out a classroom window through pinhole cameras they built. Roller coasters made of flexible pipe were taped to a wall. These activities were all part of the Wonders of Physics workshop during College for Kids â?? a summer program sponsored by the UW-Madison School of Education.
It was the $40 laptop lock that threw Curt Bauer for a loop. Hidden Costs of College
After years of making deposits into the college fund, consulting budgeting books and scouring the Internet for obscure scholarships, the Waukesha dad finally sent his oldest daughter off to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee last fall.
He was ready for the cost of tuition, room and board. It was the little unexpected expenses like the laptop lock – “all those nickels and dimes,” he said – that added up.
MADISON, Wis. â?? Multiple confessions and a DNA match were enough for a judge to order a college dropout from Minnesota to stand trial today in a murder that left Wisconsin’s capital city on edge for weeks.
Adam Peterson, 20, told his parents during calls from jail and detectives who arrested him that he stabbed Joel Marino in his home in a robbery attempt, according to transcripts and testimony during a preliminary hearing in Dane County Circuit Court.
MADISON, Wis. — Former University of Wisconsin-Madison student Adam Peterson has been bound over for trial in connection with the January stabbing death of Joel Marino.
Twenty-year-old Peterson faces one count of first-degree intentional homicide in the death of Marino.
Peterson is accused of attacking Marino at the victim’s south side home on Jan. 28.
Assistant district attorney Corey Stephan on Friday played tapes of calls Peterson made from jail to his parents in which he confesses to killing Marino in a robbery.
MADISON (WKOW) — A former University of Wisconsin-Madison student has been bound over for trial in connection with a January stabbing death.
Twenty-year-old Adam Peterson faces one count of first-degree intentional homicide in the death of Joel Marino.
Assistant district attorney Corey Stephan on Friday played tapes of calls Peterson made from a Minnesota jail to his parents in which he confesses to killing Marino in a robbery.
Madison police officials told 27 News there are no plans for any detective to travel to Wood County to further check out the presence of a newspaper clipping on UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann’s murder in the home of a suspected kidnapper.
“No one’s going to Wood County, at least at this point,” Madison police spokesperson Joel DeSpain told 27 News.
Transfer agreement to help MATC students to UW College of Engineering
Todd Finkelmeyer â?? 7/17/2008 8:34 pm
Madison Area Technical College is set to provide its students with a road map for earning access into UW-Madison’s highly regarded College of Engineering.
On Monday, MATC and UW-Madison officials plan to sign an engineering transfer agreement which will guarantee qualified MATC students admission to 10 degree programs at the College of Engineering.
