Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.
The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.
The next time the University of Wisconsin System hires a top administrator with a fat salary, maybe the job title should be something like this: vice chancellor of gaffe and blunder prevention and contrition.
Lawmakers say they will ask the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents today to fire a top UW-Madison administrator who collected his $191,000 salary during seven months of paid leave.
But Paul Barrows’ lawyer, Lester Pines, said his client has done nothing wrong.
“A lot of legislators, their only reaction to any problem is one of two things: cut taxes or fire the person,” Pines said. “That’s the extent of the intellect of some legislators.”
A new arrangement linking Milwaukee Area Technical College, Waukesha County Technical College and Gateway Technical College could help state employers.
In the first such alliance in Wisconsin, the three neighboring colleges are teaming up to serve manufacturing companies with a Web site, easier access to courses and, if necessary, customized worker training. Known as an advanced manufacturing network, the arrangement is being duplicated elsewhere in the state to serve manufacturers and train workers for an expected resurgence in Wisconsin factory jobs.
Gov. Jim Doyle proposed a biennial budget that any responsible conservative could support. He held the line on taxes, made painful cuts in state programs, and found the resources to maintain the state’s long-standing commitments to support public education and programs that aid the neediest Wisconsinites.
There was nothing radical about Doyle’s budget. Yet Republicans on the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee have scrapped the Doyle budget and replaced it with a proposal that is indeed radical.
Dear Editor: As alarmed as I was to hear of the seven months of paid leave taken by UW official Paul Barrows, I was equally alarmed when I read of Rep. Rob Kreibich’s knee-jerk reaction to “sever all ties with him” without first finding out all the facts behind the case.
There were a couple of examples again this week that explain why defenders of the University of Wisconsin sometimes throw up their hands in utter frustration.
….Some day, the UW has to learn to be more above board and open to the public it serves. When it doesn’t, it just provides more grist for the mills of those with an anti-UW agenda. And, believe me, there are plenty of them around these days.
For most high school seniors, going to a college that bans alcohol and premarital sex, and requires chapel once a week, seems like a raw deal. But the skills students absorb at religious colleges might be giving them an edge in the job market.
On the 14th floor of Moos Tower, the laboratory appears ordinary. Researchers wear jeans, put plates under microscopes and record their observations. Also under their eyes is a controversy ââ?¬â? cells that offer extreme hope to some and cause extreme apprehension to others.
The University�s Stem Cell Institute is at an important juncture in its brief existence, especially in the politically and morally contentious realm of embryonic stem cell research.
Algebra and geometry used to be a problem for 17-year-old Jillianlily Weiss.
Now the Freedom High School senior�s math grades and self-confidence are improving, thanks in part to the tutoring she receives from Upward Bound pre-college program.
Weiss wants to see other students benefit from the program and is concerned that potential budget cuts would eliminate programs for low-income students to attend college. She was one of several students in the program who voiced their concerns earlier this year by writing letters to state lawmakers.
Despite Democratic efforts to water down the most controversial aspects, the Republican-controlled Assembly was poised today to pass a new two-year state budget.
Democrats were preparing to introduce a spate of amendments to the Republican plan, which would cut Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s proposed spending on local schools in half and trim an additional $25 million from the University of Wisconsin System’s budget.
“We want to show the dramatic differences between what’s reasonable and what their cut-throat politics are all about,” said Assembly Minority Leader Jim Kreuser, D-Kenosha.
A top administrator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison returned to work on Monday after collecting his $191,000 salary during seven months of paid leave.
Paul Barrows, who was vice chancellor for student affairs, also received a new title and a $41,000 pay cut on Monday. He will be a special assistant to the chancellor and earn $150,000 per year, said university spokeswoman Amy Toburen.
Ten years after graduating from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree in business, Mark Fain’s dream of earning enough money to allow his wife to stay home with their two children had been replaced with the reality of a $30,000-a-year job as a customer sales representative at Ford Motor Credit Co.
Now Fain is back in school, working on a pharmacy degree that will likely allow him to triple his salary and have his pick of employers.
The bad – UW, W-2:
Republicans cut $90 million from the University of Wisconsin System’s base budget, reduced the number of faculty and forced layoffs of other staff at our 26 academic institutions. Even worse, over $13 million was slashed from student financial aid, jeopardizing access to UW schools for thousands of middle-class families….
Despite an expansion of federal efforts to promote learning Arabic and other languages of the Islamic world, there has been no dramatic increase in Americans studying in countries where such languages are spoken, according to the latest statistics on overseas study. That’s the case even though the number of Americans studying abroad has more than doubled since the mid-1990s.
Gov. Jim Doyle called on University of Wisconsin-Madison officials on Friday to explain why a top administrator was allowed to collect his salary while on paid personal leave for seven months.
Paul Barrows, vice chancellor of student affairs, has been on leave since early November while continuing to earn his full annual salary of $191,749, covering his time away with accrued sick time and vacation days.
Four months into the leave, he applied for a job at the University of Texas at Austin. Just this week, he withdrew his name for a list of finalists for an administrative job there.
Alcohol arrests at the nation’s colleges increased for the 12th consecutive year in 2003, rising slightly by 1.1 percent. The number of drug arrests increased by 2.6 percent.
Some college police officials say more-aggressive enforcement and better off-campus policing explain why alcohol and drug arrests have risen steadily in recent years.
Dear Editor: After witnessing Rep. John Gard’s fight against unmarried partner benefits for state employees and the depredations he seems bent on perpetrating on the University of Wisconsin System, I want to let him know that I’m taking my UW Ph.D. to New Mexico, where my new state job includes health care coverage for my unmarried partner.
Thanks for the great education.
Alan Puckett, Madison
How can the Republican members of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee sleep at night – these users, manipulators, and traitors who are destroying our once proud University of Wisconsin System? How is it that they have lost their moral compass and feel compelled to dismantle one of this state’s greatest assets?
And what about our political and business leaders who have been trumpeting a vision that Wisconsin manufacturing jobs lost to China will be replaced by better high-tech and service industry opportunities. Do they think this can be accomplished without providing a world-class educational experience for our Wisconsin young people?
(Charles W. Nason lives in Stevens Point. He is president of the Worzalla Publishing Co. and a graduate of UW-Madison.)
UW-Madison Dean of Students Luoluo Hong wasn’t a voice in the wilderness this week when she announced she’s leaving the university because of Wisconsin’s “lack of commitment” to higher education.
Her frustration over the Legislature’s habit the past several years of balancing the state budget by trimming UW funding is shared by hundreds, if not thousands, of her colleagues here in Madison and around the rest of the UW System.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Dean of Students Luoluo Hong is leaving for Arizona State University, the UW announced today. In leaving, Hong bashed the state for its budget cuts to higher education.
In a growing debate about higher education reform in Wisconsin, technical colleges are taking their turn to stake out new territory, with a bid to expand their offerings for liberal arts students. A proposal involving colleges based in Kenosha, La Crosse and Eau Claire would change a state law that restricts such schools to vocational education so they do not compete with the University of Wisconsin System.
Did lackluster lobbying cost the University of Wisconsin System millions of dollars during this year’s budget deliberations? Three veteran Democratic lawmakers believe it did.
The three – Reps. Mark Pocan of Madison and Marlin Schneider of Wisconsin Rapids and Sen. Russ Decker of Schofield – say the UW didn’t do enough to head off potential cuts sought by Republicans.
….”For a lot of very smart people, they do a lot of things that aren’t very bright,” said Pocan, a finance committee member whose district includes the UW-Madison.
Quoted: Tom Reason, associate director of admissions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Our challenges in a knowledge-based economy are coming from all over the world. So, many of our most important leaders are pushing for a more vigorous national approach to education, especially in the technology arena. Many of those important voices are in Wisconsin, and they are not being taken seriously enough. John Wiley, a physicist and chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “We are witnessing a systematic dismantling of public higher education in Wisconsin.”
Leaders of both parties blame the other for the UW budget cuts and profess to understand the vital linkage between the university and our economic prosperity. The truth remains that support has dropped sharply over the last two state budgets.
Shouldn’t Wiley’s views be given at least equal weight to those of the politicos?
The maximum Pell Grant would increase by $50 and the budget for the National Institutes of Health would rise slightly under a spending bill for the 2006 fiscal year that was approved on Thursday by a House appropriations panel.
The bill would spare several higher-education programs that President Bush has proposed eliminating, including three popular college-preparation programs for students from low-income families and a program of vocational and technical education that provides $400-million annually to community colleges. The bill would also wipe out a $4.3-billion shortfall that has plagued the Pell Grant program.
Thirty-six University of Wisconsin-Madison students stepped off a bus in front of the Dr. Hector P. Garcia Post Office on Tuesday, ready for a history lesson, South Texas-style.
As participants in a kind of traveling classroom, the students were in Corpus Christi to learn about Dr. Hector P. Garcia, civil rights leader and founder of the American GI Forum, for a college course called “The Santa Fe Trail: In Search of the Multiracial West.”
Gov. Jim Doyle appointed a University of Wisconsin-Parkside English major as the newest student representative on the UW System Board of Regents Wednesday.
Christopher Semenas will replace Beth Richlen, a UW-Madison law student, according to Doyle’s office. Her term expired in May.
Semenas, of Rosendale, is the first student regent appointed from UW-Parkside, Doyle said. He’s a fourth-year student, majoring in English and history.
A survey of more than 3,000 scientists has revealed that a large fraction are acting in ways that could compromise the integrity of research, according to an article published today in Nature.
A third of participants in the survey acknowledged that they had engaged in actions such as overlooking others’ use of flawed data, failing to present data contradicting one’s own work, and circumventing minor requirements of human-subject research. While those actions do not rise to the level of fraud, fabrication, and plagiarism — the three cardinal sins of research — they nonetheless signal problems in the world of science, said Brian C. Martinson, a research investigator at the HealthPartners Research Foundation, a nonprofit center in Minneapolis.
College kids may often be strapped for cash, but not all 18- to 25-year-olds are struggling to make ends meet. About 17 million ââ?¬â? or 53% ââ?¬â? are working-class, with regular paychecks giving them a powerful economic punch.
As state legislators move to hold the line on new spending for the University of Wisconsin System, a new study suggests the state’s economy is suffering from a lack of knowledge workers armed with college degrees.
In 2004 Wisconsin trailed the U.S. average in the percentage of college graduates, with 25.6 percent of state adults, or about 906,000 people, holding a university degree, compared to 27.7 percent of the country as a whole, according a report released Wednesday by NorthStar Economics and the Wisconsin Technology Council.
The University of Wisconsin’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences is in the process of choosing a new dean. Its outcome will signal much about the university’s intentions for rural Wisconsin.
….The university recognizes that agriculture is more than a $51 billion industry in the state. It affects cultural, recreational, community and consumer values statewide. The next dean must commit to engage that complexity, not instead of biotechnology, but along with it. He or she must lead in listening to farmers, landowners, consumers and others and bring together teams across academic disciplines to address these diverse needs. That is the course of continued relevance for the UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.
African-American enrollment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign appears to be bouncing back after a sharp decline last fall, according to preliminary admissions figures
Semester at Sea may no longer have a campus port.
Friends are in a daze. No one can believe the great University of Wisconsin, our finest institution and the glue holding this state together, is in real danger of becoming a second-tier university. They know the reality – as goes the university, so goes Wisconsin.
The University of Wisconsin, known throughout the world for research, innovation, academic freedom and a world view of education, was described in the 1919 autobiography of Bob La Follette, former governor and U.S. senator. He wrote: “It is difficult, indeed, to overestimate the part which the university has played in the Wisconsin revolution – a sense that somehow the state and the university were intimately related, and that they should be of mutual service.”
…without a champion fighting for the university in the governor’s office, all is in danger of being lost. The governor and the lobbyists’ Legislature are now playing chicken with our children’s futures. “I can cut more than you can” is the game. And, of course, the mantra of “I will not raise taxes” rises above the din of fundraising.
The last year has seen a backlash against advancing gay rights with numerous states considering or adopting laws or constitutional amendments to restrict marriage and other benefits to male-female couples.
What if the Supreme Court had banned affirmative action? What if colleges moved away from the use of affirmative action on their own?
Upturn for Minority Students at Michigan
A year ago, minority enrollments fell sharply at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor after it instituted new procedures designed to conform to U.S. Supreme Court�s guidance on the consideration of race in admissions. Monday, the university released statistics suggesting that the numbers are climbing back up, due largely to more aggressive recruiting efforts.
As Harvard prepares to confer degrees on yet another batch of graduates Thursday, academic experts scratch their heads at how this institution maintains its reputational dominance in an era of academic parity. But a marketer would understand the Harvard aura in a nanosecond: It’s the ultimate brand, at least in the academic world.
In his commentary, ââ?¬Å?Lamenting ghost grads,ââ?¬Â Robert Lipsyte shoves out the tired idea that absent from this spring’s college commencement exercises will be football and basketball student-athletes.
Commentary by Wally Renfro, senior adviser to NCAA president Myles Brand.
Like many baby boomers, Sally and Peter Lautmann held their breath and hoped for the best when their daughter, Jessie, started high school four years ago.
Gov. Jim Doyle has not exactly been generous with the University of Wisconsin System. His first budget cut$250 million from the UW System’s allowance in just two years, Now, with his current budget, Doyle has sought an additional $65 million in cuts over the next two years.
The cuts hurt: Students have already been forced to pay out $100 million in tuition increases, and they face the prospect of being tapped again.
But, with his current budget, Doyle sought to limit the harm.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a more proactive stance to prevent the spread of meningococcal meningitis by issuing a recommendation in May that all children over the age of 11 be immunized against the potentially fatal disease with a newly licensed vaccine.
The same high-school students who think nothing of going to J. Crew’s Web site to order the right pair of jeans — sifting through the plethora of styles that seem to change by the week — are turning out to be equally sophisticated online consumers of college information.
ST. PAUL – Saying they must do more to attract and keep their best and brightest, University of Minnesota officials are planning to boost the number of elite Regents Professors on campus and double their financial awards.
Tens of thousands of low-income students will not be eligible for grants, and middle-class families will dig deeper into savings.
With the summer camp season fast approaching, kids across the country will be stocking up on hiking shoes, bug spray and other necessities for adventures in the great outdoors. Thousands of others, however, will be enjoying adventures of the indoor variety: creating video games, building robots and designing Web pages.
Computer camp, as it was known to an earlier generation, just isn’t what it used to be. With the booming growth of video games, the Internet and digital media, technology-minded kids have an enormous variety of things to learn at technology camps, which are often taught on the campuses of major universities.
The competition among colleges for students is growing just as quickly as the number of high-school graduates and adults returning to school, and institutions need to be more nimble and to better promote themselves if they expect to snag those new recruits, higher-education leaders were warned on Thursday at the start of a two-day conference on the postsecondary marketplace.
(AP) — For newly minted business school graduates, this was the most successful job-hunting year since 2001, a new survey says.
Half of students finishing master’s of business administration degrees this year had job offers by mid-March, according to the survey of 5,829 students at 129 business schools conducted by the Graduate Management Admission Council, an organization of business schools.
For the past 15 years, Intel executive Craig Barrett has played the national education scold, warning anyone willing to listen that the United States would pay a price for poorly educating its students in math and science. It’s too bad so few listened.
UW-Madison graduating senior Joe Maldonado is passing up the chance to earn a double-major this summer, preferring a long bus ride with 35 other students to the last sociology class he needs. But it’s not just any bus trek. Maldonado’s collegiate coup de grace will be a 3,000 mile trek across the American Southwest, starting today and ending June 16, for 15 days of nearly non-stop history come to life.
The newest Republican cut in the University of Wisconsin budget will cost the Madison campus about $9 million, according to Madison Vice Chancellor for Administration Darrell Bazzell.
“That will be a difficult challenge for us to manage,” Bazzell said in a Capital Times interview.
UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley lamented that the school is a victim of a lack of will by lawmakers and the governor to dig deep to come up with long-term solutions to fund the state’s needs, including higher education.
University of Wisconsin students will most likely have to pick up the tab for an extra $40.3 million in state funding cuts approved Wednesday by Republican lawmakers.
If you want a diverse faculty, you need to pay more attention to search committees, according to speakers at a panel Wednesday at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education.
About 60 faculty members and administrators attended the session, in a Manhattan hotel, which was organized in a circle so audience members could fully participate. They traded stories of searches marred by inappropriate questions and faulty assumptions.
Amid the plentiful and highfalutin rhetoric about the educational value of involving undergraduates in research, sound evidence that proves that value is harder to find. But researchers at the University of Michigan have produced a series of quantitative studies suggesting that involving undergraduates in research early in their college careers makes them more likely to stay in college, get their degrees, and go on to graduate school.
Starting around 1995, the percentage of colleges that considered studentsââ?¬â?¢ minority status in admissions decisions fell dramatically ââ?¬â? so dramatically that it appears to have gone beyond those states where court rulings or constitutional amendments barred the use of racial preferences.
The number of college students rose 15 percent in the decade ending in 2003, according to data released on Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The data, which appear in a report titled “School Enrollment — Social and Economic Characteristics of Students: October 2003,” show that the number of graduate and undergraduate students increased over the 10-year period to 16.6 million, from 14.4 million, and that enrollments of minority students grew to make up nearly 30 percent of the total.
So it’s one thing to eat bugs for $50,000 or humble yourself before Donald Trump. But can anyone imagine a reality show with 10 gifted, teenage brainiacs competing head-to-head for a four-year college scholarship? Well, yeah.
As this year’s college seniors pick up their diplomas, many of them may think that their future relationship with their alma mater will be limited to periodic class reunions and solicitations for funds. That may have been true in the past, but no longer. Colleges and universities have come to realize that their relationship with their alumni is a two-way street. If they want support from their graduates, they must give them something back in return.
oving? Job hunting? Getting married? It doesn’t matter how swamped you’ll be in the next few weeks. It doesn’t matter if you’ve gone to medical school or gotten an undergraduate degree or are still a junior in college. If you have student loans, you have one more homework assignment to finish before July 1:
See if you, too, can take advantage of some historically low rates by consolidating those student loans now. Locking in now, experts say, can save borrowers thousands of dollars over the life of a loan.
