Category: Campus life

Student candidates vying for a position on the Dane County Board of Supervisors went head-to-head on transportation, safety and environmental issues in a debate Wednesday.

Madison is tightening its grip on the beer tap and getting stingier with the key to the liquor cabinet.

The city, which has long struggled with how control alcohol-related crime while encouraging a vital Downtown nightlife, is at a defining moment.

With nearly half the seats on its powerful Alcohol License Review Committee coming vacant — three of the more liberal voting members are leaving — Mayor Dave Cieslewicz now has a chance to reshape the committee.

A UW-Madison undergraduate became the 16th UW-Madison student Monday to win a prestigious Truman Scholarship.

Representatives from the State and Langdon Street neighborhood formally presented a plan to separate from a downtown neighborhood association at an executive body meeting Tuesday.

A Madison student neighborhood announced its gradual transition into an independent association to Capitol Neighborhoods, Inc. Tuesday.

Attention all students interested in attending or auditioning for the 2008 Jeopardy! College Championship. A limited number of free UW-Madison student, faculty and staff tickets will be distributed Tuesday for the College Championship taping at the Kohl Center in April.

An electric snowmobile designed by a team from UW-Madison may be used to help further climate change research in Greenland.

The snowmobile, Bucky EV, won the zero-emissions competition at the Society of Automotive Engineers Clean Snowmobile Challenge earlier this month in Houghton, Mich.

University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student Margertha Consona McLean, 23, of Madison, was chosen as Miss South Shore 2008 last weekend at the Marian Center for Non-Profits in Milwaukee. McLean becomes the first black woman to win the crown.

In the talent portion of the event, McLean sang “God Bless The Child.” She is a 2006 molecular biology graduate of Tennessee State University in Nashville and is a Ph.D. physiology graduate student and research assistant at UW-Madison.

She now advances to the 2008 Miss Wisconsin pageant, June 21 in Oshkosh.

Outgoing Supervisor Ashok Kumar, who is stepping down after two years as a rabble-rousing representative of this campus area district, leaves with a great message: “Student issues aren’t exclusively campus issues — they are inevitably intertwined with broader systemic concerns that affect the community we all share. Students are undoubtedly affected by county environmental, housing and criminal justice policy. We have a half a million residents in Dane County, and ‘campus safety’ translates to livable jobs, affordable housing and basic civil rights for residents on the other side of the tracks, maybe slightly beyond the campus comfort zone. Contrary to privileged opinion, the world does not end at Emerald Street.”

The UW-Madison area will be represented by a new Dane County Board supervisor this April, as two students vie to replace the first-term supervisor Ashok Kumar in District 5.

Conor O’Hagan and Wyndham Manning will face off April 1, with the winner being next in a line of UW students on the board.

….O’Hagan, 19, is originally from Appleton and is a freshman. He’s one of the freshman representatives on the ASM Student Council. Manning, 22, hails from Jacksonville, Fla., and is a senior majoring in communication arts and environmental studies.

Walking across the Kohl Center stage to receive a diploma is a highlight for many UW–Madison graduates. But it isn’t their final interaction with the university–at least if Paula Bonner has anything to say about it.

As president and CEO of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, or WAA, Bonner seeks to forge connections between alumni and the university in ways both large and small.

THE VILLAGES â?? The Wisconsin Singers is more than just singers and dancers. It is like one big family.

â??It sounds corny, but weâ??re all doing what we love to do,â? dance captain Sean Pinnow said. â??We can all come together and bond.â?

â??Theyâ??re going to be there for you whether you want them to or not,â? vocal captain Leah Miller said. â??There is always someone in life you can count on, and thatâ??s what the Singers have done for me.”

Dear Editor: Madison Metro is in trouble and refuses to admit it. A recent article compared ridership levels to the record set in 1982.

These numbers are so disingenuous and unsophisticated, it’s enough to make my head spin.

In 1982, Metro did not have thousands of UW student riders hopping on the bus every day to go every few blocks, as is the case today. Metro didn’t have large employers such as the UW and the city of Madison offering free bus passes to riders. And Metro didn’t have the infamous transfer point system, which forces more to make transfers to get from point A to point B.

A rift over alcohol crackdown proposals may cause some student neighborhoods to break from Capitol Neighborhoods Inc.

Jessica Pavlic, who represents the State and Langdon street neighborhoods on the Capitol Neighborhoods council, said the plan to secede is partly a response to the council ‘s proposal to double the fine for underage drinking and increase the beer tax as a way of controlling alcohol abuse Downtown.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, UW-La Crosse, UW-Oshkosh, UW-Stevens Point and the 13 two-year UW colleges will conduct campuswide climate surveys this spring to find out more about how comfortable their campuses are for students, faculty and staff from different racial, ethnic, gender and other groups.

Call it an electrifying win for UW Madison. Last week at Michigan Tech, team Bucky ran away from the competition in a face off of electric sleds, at the Clean Snowmobile Challenge. “We’d watched for two years while other teams had tried to make electric sleds, and we just concluded that they weren’t doing a very good job,” said faculty advisor Glenn Bower.

Most students in U.S. colleges are just plain stressed out, from everyday worries about grades and relationships to darker thoughts of suicide, according to a poll of undergraduates from coast to coast.

On March 18th at 2:11 a.m. Madison Police were called to the 400 block of West Mifflin Street where two UW-Madison students had just fended off a would be purse thief.

Two purse-wielding UW-Madison students fended off a would-be purse-snatcher early Tuesday morning, with one of the women “blasting” the attacker with repeated blows from her purse weapon.

According to Madison police,the two 21-year-old females were walking in the 400 block of N. Broom St. at 2:10 a.m. when they were approached by a stocky man, either Latino or Asian, wearing a white “hoodie” jacket.

Spring Break is in it’s second big week all along the Gulf Coast and while the beaches are crowded, there’s an alternative Spring Break that is building memories of a different kind in Baldwin County.

While most spring breakers are headed to the beach, a group from the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin are building something more substantial than a sand castle.

Lance Cpl. Scott Kruchten keeps a worn photo in his wallet of what looks like a twisted heap of metal. Except for two wheels hanging cockeyed above the mess of parts, it is a barely recognizable image of its former shape: a humvee.

The 32-year old Madison man has carried the picture with him for more than three years.
It is a reminder of the explosion that killed four other Marines south of Baghdad in November 2004. Kruchten was the only one in the truck who survived, although with lasting injuries.
Kruchten considers himself lucky to be alive, though he still lives with the aftermath of his service in the Iraq War. He shows no outward signs of disability, but tests have shown him to be cognitively disabled in several areas. He is on medication to prevent seizures. He tried to return to a pre-military job at Sauk City Harley-Davidson but found it difficult to face the work that had once been so easy for him.
Instead, he enrolled at UW-Madison where he is majoring in Middle Eastern studies.

Russ McMinn knows – in excruciating scientific detail – what green beer can do to a person’s insides.

Still, knowledge didn’t prevent the 21-year-old microbiology student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from deciding Saturday night to join the 20th Runnin’ Of the Green in lower downtown Denver.

A youthquake of activism is hitting college campuses as students â?? armed with cellphones, lots of contacts and political savvy â?? tackle global warming.

“This is not a protest movement. It’s an engagement movement,” says Eban Goodstein, the economics professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., who founded the non-profit organization, also called Focus the Nation, in 2006 to spearhead climate activism.

Three murders in less than a week have sent three Southern college campuses into grief, and brought renewed attention to campus safety â?? a topic already on the minds of parents and students after recent mass killings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois.

While the latest available figures show college slayings have declined, many students are still on edge.

Since making the Recording Industry Association of America’s list of alleged major offenders of illegal downloads a year ago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison remains vigilant. That’s according to Brian Rust, Communication’s Manager with the UW Division of Information Technology. UW Madison’s standing in the most recent RIAA list has remarkably improved.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, known as WARF, learned this week the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office upheld two of its valuable patents on stem cells. That’s critical for WARF, since it means the foundation can expect to collect huge sums of money on licenses and royalties associated with stem cell lines discovered at the UW.

“This is the center of the universe when it comes to stem cell research. It’s a very exciting area,” said WARF’s managing director Carl Gulbrandsen.

One of the finalists for the position of University of Wisconsin vice provost of diversity and climate has accepted a position at another university, narrowing the field of candidates from three to two.

Student representatives said Tuesday they are currently crafting plans to remove the State and Langdon Street area from a neighborhood association in the wake of a controversial alcohol policy proposal.

A UW-Madison junior was charged with disorderly conduct Monday, and ordered both to stay away from Bascom Hall and to have no contact with a UW-Madison assistant dean after allegedly threatening him in the building last month.

A University of Wisconsin student was ordered to stay away from Bascom Hall Monday at an initial court appearance stemming from a February confrontation with a UW assistant dean.

A University of Wisconsin student who allegedly threatened an assistant dean in Bascom Hall has been charged with disorderly conduct and ordered stay away from Bascom unless he has a class there or has written permission to be there.

Alan B. Dubrow, 20, was arrested at Bascom Hall after he allegedly threatened to beat Assistant Dean Ervin Cox and made threatening gestures toward another member of the staff of the Dean of Students Office. Dubrow’s actions took place on Feb. 21, a week after the tragic shootings on the Northern Illinois campus.

RAPIDLY, THE financial distinction between a public higher education and a private college or university is disappearing. At a time when education may be most important – the golden ticket to tomorrow’s high-tech economy – costs are rising faster than families can absorb.

Several factors come into play.

One, clearly, is the unwillingness of legislators to maintain levels of public funding. At one time, for example, the University of Wisconsin system received about three-fourths of its funding through state sources. Today, it’s about half – and falling.

(MADISON) Next month, University of Wisconsin-Madison students can show if theyâ??d help put up money for bringing Iraqi students to campus. Backers of the idea say a slight increase in tuition could bring anywhere from two to five scholars from that country to finish their degrees here.

The Iraqi Student Project is a nationwide effort with more than two dozen colleges and universities trying to sponsor up to 40 qualified students in the first year of the program. The projectâ??s goals include waiving tuition for selected students, so the next step would be finding money to support

After fewer arrests, attendees and the physical space of Halloween on State Street with its â??Freakfestâ? adaptation, the City of Madison can now boast another reduction related to the eventâ??its cost.

The number of student detoxification visits spiked this year, causing some university officials to wonder whether severe winter weather led to stir-crazy students, or if it is yet another sign of risky drinking behavior on campus.

It will be several weeks before coroner’s officials in Arkansas can make an official determination of what caused the death of a Madison marathoner who collapsed eight days ago as he crossed the finish line of a 26.2-mile race.

Adam Nickel, 27, had no medical problems that would have caused concern about him running marathons, his family said after his death on March 2 in Little Rock, Ark. It was his sixth marathon.

Nickel’s mother, Cynthia Nickel of Kaukauna, said the day after Nickel’s death that an emergency room physician told her Nickel may have died from a potassium buildup, which can cause abnormal heart rhythms. But Pulaski County, Ark., Coroner Mark Malcolm said today that results of Nickel’s autopsy last week were inconclusive and he hoped that toxicology tests would shed light on the cause of Nickel’s death. The tests should take about four weeks to complete, he said.