Category: Campus life

Aside from shows on community-sponsored WORT- FM (89.9) and UW-Madison’s WSUM-FM (91.7), hip-hop now will be aired only on occasion by pop station Z104.

What were two concrete slabs Monday are now on their way to being single-family homes.Twenty University of Wisconsin-Madison students and local volunteers spent the week in what they call a blitz, constructing two Habitat for Humanity homes in Palatka.

In Madison, hip-hop has had a hard time gaining prominence. In the 1980s, groups such as the GeneRations and Home Boys Only brought the first wave of break dance to town. Since then, the popularity of break dance and hip-hop has moved in waves as skilled artists have entered and exited the scene. Still, there has never been the kind of support for break dance here as there has been elsewhere.

“Madison’s hip-hop/break-dance scene is small compared to other hip-hop scenes in the Midwest,” said Jonathan Truong, president of the University of Wisconsinââ?¬â??Madison Break Dance Club (UWMBC).

A UW student and his brother are being credited with saving a woman who had been missing for weeks.

Peter Kottke, a UW-Madison junior was backpacking with his brother in New Mexico., when they heard a faint sound that turned out to be 52-year-old Carolyn Dorn.

No applicant to UW-Madison has ever lost a slot to another because of race, Chancellor John Wiley says.
If two equally qualified candidates apply, both get in, Wiley told the Legislative Council’s Special Committee on Affirmative Action at a hearing Thursday.

The late television news anchor Mike McKinney, retired jewelers and philanthropists Irwin and Robert Goodman and retired East High School principal Milt McPike lead the list of recipients of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. awards from Madison and Dane County.

Eight recipients will be honored Monday in ceremonies at the 22nd annual city-county observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the Overture Center’s Capitol Theater, beginning at 6 p.m.

(Also among the recipients is UW-Madison student Jason Gonzales.)

Textbooks are becoming a hot commodity on the UW- Madison campus.
Madison City Council President Austin King, 8th District, says the theft of textbooks reached a new high last semester, with the increasingly expensive volumes resold to local bookstores for cash.

Compared with last year’s rankings, some institutions leapfrogged into the top 20 and others dropped to lower positions.

For instance, Georgia Institute of Technology moved up 17 places, to number 13, by improving retention and graduation rates and beefing up financial aid. The University of Illinois fell 22 places by raising tuition and cutting need-based aid in half. The University of Wisconsin-Madison also slashed need-based aid and dropped from number 15 to number 25.

Professional violinist Aasheeta Parikh-Dimick remembers when she wasn’t so enthralled with her music.
“My mom has a story about my bad practice habits when I was young,” she recalled. “Apparently she caught me with a book I had placed on the music stand – I was reading while playing, figuring that if Mom heard the violin, she would think I was practicing. My music stand was moved to the kitchen after that!”

MADISON, Wis. � This college town received what it wanted when, during the 1980s and 90s, it sought to reverse the decline of its downtown and to create a more vibrant civic center that would draw people at night and on weekends.

Since then, thousands of young professionals, retirees and former suburbanites have moved to glistening condominium buildings in the shadow of the state Capitol�s dome and only a few blocks from the University of Wisconsin�s main campus. And there is hardly a bad night for business near State Street, where university students and tourists pack restaurants and bars to capacity even on freezing weeknights.

But as downtown�s population and revelry have grown, so have overcrowding on the streets, vandalism and, most significantly, the police say, alcohol-related crime.

Kent Sklarow and his roommate had pulled it off many times before.
But one night three years ago, luck ran out for the UW- Madison students, who were both freshmen.

They were caught drinking alcohol with 14 other students in their residence hall room on the university’s only substance- free floor, and the transgression didn’t come without consequences.

Dear Editor: When it comes to cracking down, spraying down or beating down some defenseless 19-year-old at Freakfest in order to protect the plate-glass windows on State Street, Madison’s “thin blue line” proves fit and robust.

….On campus, the dean of students remains obsessed with removing the UW from Playboy’s list of party schools or tracking down freshmen pranksters, while virtually ignoring serious attacks. A young student is kidnapped and raped within shouting distance of Bascom Hall, and the University Police announce on their Web site that the “crime of the month” involves a couple of kids stealing some banner.

They say that no increased patrols are necessary and return to sniffing at dorm room doors to nab pot smokers. I’m just waiting for them to blame students for stumbling out of the library in a stupor from studying so late at night.

City Council President Austin King is highlighting a serious issue with regard to the spring elections in Madison.

Spring break for students on the University of Wisconsin campus runs March 31 to April 8. If the past is prologue, the vast majority of students will head out of town. The spring election falls on April 3.

….The UW should work with the city to implement a major absentee voting program, which will ensure that every student who wants to exercise his or her citizenship rights is able to do so.

It’s dinnertime at the house at 140 W. Gilman St., where people troop into the dining room to serve themselves from giant pots of sticky rice and veggies in some sort of yellow sauce. No one seems quite sure what they are eating, but that does not stop them from filling their plates.

As more people arrive, the conversations and laughter become almost deafening.

….Housing co-ops can be traced back to the 1800s, but many in Madison originated during the 1960s and ’70s, when students and community members sought greater control over their living situations.

When Lauren Woods entered the race for Madison’s City Council on Friday, she changed the complexion of this spring’s contests – literally.

….Woods is the first person to jump into the race to replace Austin King, who has represented the 8th District in downtown Madison since 2003. He announced Friday morning that he would not seek re-election.

By that time, Woods, a University of Wisconsin-Madison senior and former president of the Wisconsin Black Student Union, had filed all the necessary paperwork.

College students, most of the time, get a bad rap… Partying too much, getting in trouble with police – the basic early 20’s irresponsibility. Mitch Weber met some of these students who spend several hours a month making a difference in the community. They spend most of their time volunteering with children. Badger Pals has hundreds of members. Between all the homework, hanging out with friends, and enjoying college life, this group finds time for others.

Even after being confronted by Madison Police Detective Al Rickey with the fact his DNA had been found on two rape victims, Antonio Pope was defiant with investigators.

“You gotta see my face to say I raped somebody,” Pope, 31, a man with a long criminal record, reportedly insisted.

But later, according to a criminal complaint filed against him Tuesday, “he hung his head and cried intermittently,” then acknowledged that he had raped both women after kidnapping them as they were walking in the campus area, one on Nov. 29, the other on Dec. 9.

MADISON, Wis. — Police say a suspected rapist confessed after authorities confronted him with DNA evidence linking him to two abductions and sexual assaults on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

Antonio Pope, 31, of Fitchburg, is accused in two separate knifepoint abductions of the students.

Pope made his initial court appearance Tuesday, and he faces multiple criminal counts in connection with the assaults.

Madison: “Don’t say anything or I’m going to cut your throat.” Those are the words a rape victim heard as she was kidnapped on campus earlier this month.

It took just 6 days for the state crime lab to link DNA evidence from two downtown rapes to Antonio Pope

Confident heââ?¬â?¢s had a good semester and used to showing his marks to his parents, Winona State University freshman Steven Frank said heââ?¬â?¢ll opt for full disclosure when his grades come through. ââ?¬Å?Itââ?¬â?¢s kind of like a business deal,ââ?¬Â he said, since his parents pay his tuition.But under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, neither he nor the Winona, Minn., school are obligated to share those college marks.

It only took a week from the last attack for the State Crime Lab to zero in on Antonio Pope, the man police believe raped and kidnapped two UW students. Police caught Pope using DNA matching technology. He wasn’t even a suspect in the case until his name showed up as a match on the crime lab’s computer.

MADISON, Wis. — Authorities said that until his DNA was given to crime lab scientists, the man suspected of kidnapping and sexually assaulting two women near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in recent weeks wasn’t even on detectives’ radar.

Antonio Pope, 31, of Fitchburg, is accused in two separate knife-point abductions of the students. Pope is expected to face multiple counts when he makes his initial court appearance, which could come on Tuesday, WISC-TV reported.

(SUPERIOR) The first test of a new University of Wisconsin Board of Regents policy is allowing the re-installation of a UW-Superior Christian student group that only allows Christians to lead its organization.

A student government committee unanimously approved re-instating the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship as a student organization. That allows it to get student fees and use university facilities. IVCF has chapters throughout the nation and UW System.

When asked if she were proud, Cathy Mitchell was so overcome with emotion that she was initially struck speechless.

Mitchell’s daughter, Molli, received her master’s degree in social work at Wisconsin’s 153rd commencement exercises on Sunday. Cathy, her husband Jeff and Molli’s sister Carli were on hand to celebrate Molli’s accomplishments.

“She worked hard and she has affected hundreds of people with her dedication to the domestic abuse programs in the area,” Cathy said.

DNA evidence taken from two sexual assault victims in Madison matched a DNA sample in the state’s Crime Lab database, authorities say, enabling officers to arrest Antonio L. Pope last week in connection with the two assaults.

Law enforcement officials, including Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, praised the efforts of the Madison and UW police departments and the State Crime Lab at a news conference today at the Madison lab.

Emmy and Peabody award-winner Ben Karlin told UW-Madison graduates Sunday he has a lot in common with them.
Karlin, 35, announced recently that at the end of the month, he’ll be leaving his position as executive producer of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” and hasn’t given many specifics about what he’ll do next.

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) – Maureen Fitzgerald wanted to find out what she was good at before declaring a major at the University of Dayton. So she took communications, philosophy, history, English, among other courses.

She’s still looking.

MADISON, Wis. — University of Wisconsin-Madison graduated around 1,600 students during winter commencement ceremonies on Sunday. As graduates walked down the aisle, they were also walking into one of the best job markets in more than four years.

WISC-TV spoke with several graduates who all had at least two job offers, some more.

“Management, real estate, risk management, insurance, they’re all majors in demand,” said Career Center director Steve Schroeder.