The bells at UW tolled for Virginia Tech Friday, as the Madison campus mourned victims hundreds of miles away.
At 11 am, the carillon bells at UW rang 32 times…once for each victim of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech.
And at that moment, some students and staff stopped what they were doing to send their thoughts and prayers to the families and friends of the victims.
Kurt Svoboda knew from day one that science meant sacrifices: pulling long hours, sweating over the data, and starving his personal life for professional success. What the young assistant professor at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge didn’t realize was that time spent on grant proposals, not groundbreaking experiments, would be the big stressor.
Across America, college counseling centers are strained by rising numbers of mentally ill students and surging demand for mental health services â?? a challenging trend as campus officials try to identify potential threats like the unstable Virginia Tech gunman. And even when serious emotional problems are detected, university officials often feel constrained in how they respond due to an array of laws and policies protecting students’ rights and privacy.
Tears were shed as students, parents and teachers mourned Mondayâ??s Virginia Tech shooting at a memorial vigil held Wednesday night in Bascom Hall.
â??Our purpose tonight is to send messages of support and healing to our fellow colleagues and students at Virginia Tech University, and also to recognize how we can contribute to our own healing process,â? said UW-Madison Dean of Students Lori Berquam.
UW System President Kevin Reilly announced Wednesday that in light of the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech, UW-Madison Police Chief Sue Riseling will lead a committee to review security procedures at all UW System campuses, according to the Associated Press.
UW System spokesperson David Giroux told the AP the committee will perform an in-depth analysis and incorporate any lessons learned after the deadly shootings Monday at Virginia Tech.
As the University of Wisconsin System attempts to have its proposal for $775 million in building projects approved by the stateâ??s budget committee, the UW System may face a rare opposition to its requests for new building construction. According to The Badger Herald, Republicans within the Legislature may try to block some of the more controversial building projects on the UW campus, such as the construction of a new Union South. Some of the projects, like Union South, will receive little or no funds from the state and will be funded by raising segregated fees and private donations. Some members of the State Assembly, however, may block some of the building projects so that segregated fees do not rise and make UW even more expensive for the average Wisconsin family, many of whom struggle to pay the $17,280 in total costs to send their son or daughter to UW for a year.
When a tragic incident occurs in this country as horrific and devastating as the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, we are often left with nothing more than questions. For those who have lost a friend, family member or colleague, these questions are usually the type of life-altering, existential ponderings that have neither simple nor speedy answers.
As more and more details have surfaced from Blacksburg, we have seen an increased demand for answers to these questions.
Proposed building projects across the University of Wisconsin System received criticism from the stateâ??s budget committee Wednesday, with some legislators calling for more renovation and less construction.
The projects, including six at UW-Madison, were first approved by the State Building Commission and must be approved by the Joint Finance Committee for inclusion into the stateâ??s operating budget.
University of Wisconsin students and faculty joined with Madison community members Wednesday night at Bascom Hall to share thoughts and shed tears as they remembered the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre.
Dean of Students Lori Berquam stressed campus unity and extended a message of support to â??our friends and colleaguesâ? after the tragedy, offering advice and support personnel to help contribute to the healing process.
Researchers for a non-profit group say fewer colleges appear to require students to study the influential author. Just 15 of 70 institutions studied require English majors to take a course on Shakespeare, says a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumn. Three Big 10 schools â?? Illiniois, Minnesota and Wisconsin â?? require Shakespeare.
Virginia Tech may be hundreds of miles away, but tonight the pain of that campus was felt on UW’s campus.
Students, faculty and staff remembered the 33 victims killed during Monday’s shooting rampage.
The names of those killed in this week’s shootings in Virginia echoed throughout Bascom Hall tonight.
Students and staff listened. Some crying or sitting in silence and all trying to make sense of what happened to their fellow students.
For some, Monday’s killing spree hit even closer to home.
In Madison, the victims of the Virginia Tech Massacre were remembered.
Hundreds attended a campus memorial, some with close ties to Virginia Tech.
A moment of silence was followed by reading the names of each victim of the Virginia Tech Shootings, including Cho Seung-Hui.
MADISON, Wis. — Hundreds of members of the University of Wisconsin-Madison community gathered on Wednesday night for a memorial service for those affected by the Virginia Tech shootings.
The non-denominational program that aims to support mourners at Virginia Tech began at 5:30 p.m. in Bascom Hall on the school’s campus.
As part of the program, a quartet played inspirational music and microphones were near the audience for those who wish to express their feelings, WISC-TV reported.
Federal privacy and antidiscrimination laws restrict how universities can deal with students who have mental health problems.
For the most part, universities cannot tell parents about their childrenâ??s problems without the studentâ??s consent. They cannot release any information in a studentâ??s medical record without consent. And they cannot put students on involuntary medical leave, just because they develop a serious mental illness.
Nor is knowing when to worry about student behavior, and what action to take, always so clear.
In hindsight, the signs seem crystal clear: A loner on depression medication writes violent stories and frightens his peers. In the Virginia Tech shootings, as the machinery of blame turns, people are asking whether this could have been recognized and stopped.
But college counselors say that cases like that of Cho Seung-Hui are difficult to identify, even as counselors have seen more and more troubled students in recent years. And even when signs do point to serious problems, counselors say their hands are often tied.
The assistant police chief at UW Madison says communication is one way to avert campus tragedy. Assistant Chief Dale Burke says that, in the vast majority of cases, people don’t just “snap,” and the shootings at Virginia Tech appear to bear that out. “This young man (Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-hui) had pictures on Facebook, showing him with guns and ammunition,” notes Burke. “That kind of information needs to be brought to the attention of people who can do something about it.”
As graduate student tuition continues to rise at the University of Wisconsin, students and teachers alike discussed their current predicament over an increasingly expensive graduate education Tuesday.
The Virginia Tech student who went on a shooting rampage Monday before killing himself may have had a troubled past, but it’s not yet clear whether he had a criminal one. Even so, the tragedy has prompted some calls for background checks on college applicants. “It’s an idea whose time has come,” says Catherine Bath, executive director of Security On Campus, a national advocacy group based in Pennsylvania that has pushed for federal legislation aimed at keeping students safe.
The two hours it took for Virginia Tech officials to e-mail students a warning about a gunman on campus has raised concern about how schools can get critical news out faster in a crisis.”When you’re in the middle of something, two hours is not very long. But when you’re looking in, it does seem like a long time,” says Mitchell Celaya, the assistant chief of campus police at the University of California, Berkeley.
MADISON – Several students and faculty from the University of Wisconsin in Madison were at Virginia Tech on Monday when 30 people were shot and killed.
The five graduate students and three faculty members experienced first-hand, the horror and all of the emotions of the massacre.
UW Professor Tom Lipo had addressed about 100 people when the group was made aware of an emergency, first described as a possible bomb threat and later as a shooting.
Last Friday at the University of Michigan, there was a small fire in an academic building. The alarms went off and police arrived quickly. They found students in another part of the building. â??So our police officers had to go argue with them and boot them out â?? not a great use of resources,â? said Diane Brown, senior information officer for facilities and operations at Michigan.
Soon after a 911 call tipped off campus police to a shooting at the West Ambler Johnston Hall dorm at about 7:15 a.m. on Monday, administrators at Virginia Tech set in motion a sequence of events in a process that some are now criticizing.
MADISON, Wis. — A group from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Engineering Department was on the Virginia Tech campus during the tragic shootings on Monday, and one professor shared his experience there.
Three UW faculty members — Professor Thomas Lipo, Robert Lorenz and Thomas Jahns — were there with five undergraduate students for an engineering seminar. That building sits adjacent to the one where the second shooting took place, WISC-TV reported.
Lipo had been to Virginia Tech about 20 times in the past 30 years. He said that a day later he is still shaken from what happened.
Professor Tom Lipo arrived at the Dane County Airport Tuesday evening.
From his room at a conference facility on the Virgina Tech campus, UW-Madison Electrical Engineering professor Tom Lipo told 27 News the contingent included three faculty members and nine students. Lipo said at the time of the campus shootings, the students were in a building close to Norris Hall, where the majority of the fatal victims were shot. “He (the gunman) could have wandered in there. But our students are safe.”
Five UW engineering graduate students and three faculty members arrived home safely from Virginia Tech Tuesday after being locked down on the campus during Monday’s shootings. One of the faculty members spoke to news reporters Tuesday.
UW faculty and students have been traveling to Virginia Tech for nine years in a row and working closely together for decades longer. Now the two schools have a special bond they never expected to. The sights and sounds of Monday’s shootings were terrifying, but imagine not being able to see or hear anything when shots you are just hundreds of feet away.
University of Wisconsin police say they are as prepared as they can be for a tragedy like the one that occurred Monday on the Virginia Tech campus, where more than 30 people were killed in a shooting rampage.
And UW-Madison Dean of Students Lori Berquam stressed that officials are responding to concerned students and reaching out to students who come from Virginia to help them deal with the frightening reality.
“The other component is to make sure our crisis plans are intact and up-to-date. They are pretty comprehensive. It indeed could happen here,” Berquam said.
BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — The gunman suspected of carrying out the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead was identified Tuesday as a senior English major from South Korea. But police and university officials offered no clue to his motive.
“He was a loner, and we’re having difficulty finding information about him,” school spokesman Larry Hincker said, a day after the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.
In less than one month, Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle will allow eighth graders across Wisconsin to officially pledge good grades to a program that has not yet been approved by the state Legislature.
Virginia Tech’s president said Tuesday that a student was the gunman in at least the second of the two campus attacks that claimed 33 lives to become the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.
Safety officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will keep a close eye on details that emerge on the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech to determine if the university needs modify any of its own preparedness plans for such an event.
Twice a year university police receive training on how to respond to “active shooter” situations, a process that is constantly being tested and re-evaluated, UW police Sgt. Mike Newton said.
MADISON â?? With 1,450 students and an 84-acre main campus, Appleton’s Lawrence University is a far smaller school than Virginia Tech.
But when there’s an emergency on campus, as there was in Blacksburg, Va., on Monday, quickly communicating important information to students is a big challenge for schools of any size.
At any given time, any student can literally be anywhere, from a job off-campus to alone in a study lounge.
In the wake of Monday’s deadly college shooting in Virginia, what measures can large universities take to ensure student safety?
Entrances are locked at preschool to high school buildings across the country after many incidents of school violence, including the deadly rampage at Colorado’s Columbine High School in 1999. But college classrooms are spread across large campuses, and well-meaning students sometimes open dormitory entrances for strangers.
Students and parents want to know if UW has a plan in place should anything resembling Virginia Tech’s tragic shootings occur. Moments after hearing shots were fired at Virginia Tech Monday, the UW Police Department and UW administrators started hearing their phones.
“We started getting phone calls from the public asking us what our response would be if a similar situation would happen on our campus,” says Sargeant Michael Newton.
MADISON, Wis. — Monday’s fatal shooting at Virginia Tech is resonating on many college campuses across the nation. Among them, the tragedy is provoking questions on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus as some students and officials are now wondering about their own safety
In the search for answers as many seek to comprehend such a scenario, many at UW are asking the question: Could this happen here?
MADISON, Wis. — The Virginia Tech tragedy is resonating across college campuses across the nation.
UW sophomore Sarah Backhaus wondered if the same situation could happen at the UW.
“I always felt kind of safe here,” said Backhaus. “I felt like during the day, at classes, that’s the safest time to be on campus, and then you never know who is just going to walk into classes, I guess.”
A contingent of a dozen UW-Madison engineering faculty and students is safe after visiting the Virginia Tech campus on the same day of what’s being called the worst shooting spree in U.S. history.
From his room at a conference facility on the Virgina Tech campus, UW-Madison Electrical Engineering professor Tom Lipo told 27 News the contingent included three faculty members and nine students. Lipo said at the time of the campus shootings, the students were in a building close to Norris Hall, where the majority of the fatal victims were shot. “He (the gunman) could have wandered in there. But our students are safe.”
Administrators at colleges around the country closely followed news of the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech on Monday, and campus officials responsible for safety, crisis planning, and risk management began weighing the lessons of the tragedy.
Efficient communication is the most important element of an institution’s disaster response, risk experts said, but getting an announcement across a campus is a difficult task. At Virginia Tech, the first shootings happened early enough that staff members who would typically handle such announcements may not have been in their offices yet.
As darkness fell over the Virginia Tech campus here on Monday night, hundreds of students clutched one another in tears at the Holtzman Alumni Center to wait for news about friends they feared had died in one of the deadliest shooting rampages in American history.
Hours earlier a gunman had opened fire in a classroom building, killing 30 people and injuring at least 30 others before turning the gun on himself. Before that, the police say, he killed two people in a dormitory.
The rampage stunned those on this close-knit but sprawling 2,600-acre campus that is nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains.
And even as Virginia Tech reeled from the massacre, many people questioned the university’s response. They wanted to know why it took more than two hours to notify the 26,000-student campus of the first shootings, and why more buildings were not locked down sooner.
What if they created a college rankings system and nobody participated? That question is growing increasingly relevant as a burgeoning number of college presidents say they are fed up with U.S. News & World Report’s popular annual feature. Arguing that the rankings do a disservice to prospective students, a group of ranking critics, including several college presidents, are preparing to send a letter urging college presidents nationwide to not cooperate with U.S. News and other publications that compile such data. Earlier this year, the president of Trinity University in Washington, D.C., writing in a publication for university trustees, urged colleagues to toss their surveys in the trash, as she has done for years.
Parents who send their children to four-year colleges have long been above average when it comes to income. But today’s freshmen are financially better off than ever before, and the gap is widening, a report on 40-year trends in higher education shows.
Freshmen in 2005 reported median family incomes 60% higher than the national average, says the report, released by UCLA’s Cooperative Institutional Research Program. In 1971, incomes were 46% above the national average.
The nation’s largest student loan provider will stop offering perks to college employees as part of a settlement announced Wednesday in a probe of the student loan industry.
Salaries of full-time college faculty rose 3.8% this year, the biggest increase in five years. Academic salaries vary significantly, depending on rank and institution, but the overall increases narrowly beat inflation and were the highest since 2002, according to an annual survey to be released Thursday by the American Association of University Professors. Salaries of full professors rose 4.2%, slightly better than the increases for lower ranks.
The nations largest student loan provider will stop offering perks to college employees as part of a settlement announced Wednesday in a widening investigation of the student loan industry.
On an overcast, chilly day in late March, scraggly rows of experimental crops line the test plots here at Iowa State University’s research farm.
Corn is king in Iowa, both as a food grain and now as a focus of efforts to rev up the biofuel industry. But these plants bear less-familiar names: switch grass, miscanthus, and kenaf.
The brown and black stalks are not much to look at, having weathered Iowa’s winter snows. But Iowa State researchers see these crops as seeds of change in alternative fuels. By summer, the grasses will be lush, tall, and green.
In a place where poverty rules and jobs lack, the College of Menominee Nation has taken root, offering hope and preserving tradition.
A federal test administrator announced last week that Education Testing Service will not be implementing a new version of the Graduate Record Examination this year as previously planned.
After adopting a new, “holistic” approach to reviewing applications, the University of California at Los Angeles has reversed a decline in the share of black students in the freshman class it has admitted for the fall, university officials said on Thursday. The new admissions policy appears to have increased black and Hispanic students’ chances of being accepted, while making it more likely that white and Asian-American applicants would be turned away.
Most of what we know about the habits of “helicopter parents” comes from anecdotes about extreme parenting that have made their way into the popular lexicon. Now, though, what’s believed to be the first scholarly research on parents who hover too closely over offspring of any age finds that helicopter parenting appears to cross racial and ethnic lines, as well as socioeconomic status.
Wisconsin’s economic strength relies heavily on its educational foundation, and we are fortunate to have an extremely strong system of higher education, one that must be preserved and supported.
….Just as in the private sector, we must brand our uniqueness; we must characterize our programs and campuses so our students, parents, stakeholders and employers understand the value added that we provide.
State governments have taken the unusual step of funding biomedical research â?? usually done with federal grants â?? because of federal political decisions to restrict funding for embryonic stem-cell research.
Stem-cell scientists are naturally delighted by the new avenues of support, but there could be complications if scientists in different states want to collaborate.
Whether they deserve it or not, embryonic stem cells have come to represent potential salvation for many people suffering from incurable diseases.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison ranked about the same as last year in several of the U.S. News & World Report graduate school rankings for 2007.
The newly published issue of America’s Best Graduate Schools also includes ratings done in previous years, however, which raised UW’s overall prestige.
The invisibility and underutilization of campus sex offender registries is precisely the point of the new research. Even on campuses with the databases, many sex offenders â?? more than one in three, it turns out â?? have absolutely no idea that their unflattering mug shots are on display somewhere in the dark depths of the public safety departmentâ??s Web site.
As state support lags, tuition rises. Itâ??s a well established phenomenon. But whatâ??s less discussed is the effect that flat state support might be having on the traditional undergraduate tuition model itself. The one-student, one-rate model is somewhat silently slipping away at many public universities nationwide, as institutions increasingly turn toward differential (read: higher) tuition rates for students pursuing specific majors, often those with higher costs of operation.
American proficiency in foreign languages needs improvement and expansion, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Academiesâ?? National Research Council.
Jonathan Foley, head of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, or SAGE, cites the launch of Earth Day in 1970 as the original catalyst. But until recently, he says, “we’ve had an artificial separation” between the study of the natural environment and our human impact on it. Sustainability studies views the two as an inextricably connected whole. It addresses predicaments whose impact can be felt both locally (Greenland’s melting ice field, in one well-known example) and globally (the resulting potential for rising water levels and changing ocean currents).
Last year, just 9 percent of UW-Madison’s bachelor’s degrees in computer science – 8 out of 92 degrees – went to women. That’s down from a peak of 16 percent in 1998.
Two University of Wisconsin juniors were awarded $30,000 scholarships to pursue a graduate education, the university announced Wednesday.
The controversy surrounding Marquette theology professor Daniel Maguire mounted Tuesday over his circulation of pamphlets defending abortion and same-sex marriage.
A national Catholic organization lashed out at Marquette for allowing Maguire to teach, while the professor complained that the university had failed to adequately defend him against attacks by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Most of the people giddily filling out brackets for their NCAA “March Madness” office pool will never have a problem. But for a few unfortunate young people and their families, the Road to the Final Four, the nation’s fourth biggest gambling event, is paved with personal and financial ruin.
Some college students addicted to sports betting or online poker have taken it to extremes. They have committed crimes, including bank robbery and murder, over gambling debts. Others, unable to face the guilt or consequences of betting away tuition, have committed suicide.
Discussed: Meng-Ju “Mark” Wu, a 19-year-old freshman at UW-Madison who, in 2005, hung himself in jail while awaiting his murder trial committed over a $15,000 sports betting debt.
Since Princeton took the lead among Ivy League schools to formally adopt a grade-deflation policy three years ago â?? limiting A’s to an average 35% across departments â?? students say the pressure to score the scarcer A has intensified. Students say they now eye competitive classmates warily and shy away from classes perceived as difficult. “It used to be that you’d let someone copy your notes if they were sick,” says Mickel, 21, of Monroe, La. “Now, if someone misses classes, you’d probably still let them, but you’re also thinking: ‘Gee, you might get the A while I don’t.'”
