The future of the UW’s two-year campuses is up for debate.
The Higher Education committee heard about two rival plans for finding cost savings within the UW System Wednesday.
UW System President Kevin Reilly testified that consolidating some of the administration between the twoââ?¬â??year campuses and the UW Extension Program is the best way to go right now. That plan would save $300,000.
By Charles Hoslet
I was driving along I-94 from Madison to Milwaukee the other day and crashed right through a large brick wall. I noticed that other drivers were also getting through�in both directions.
The brick wall, of course, was just a figment of my imagination, one of those old “truths” we are taught to believe, but just aren’t true any more. The old idea is that Madison and Milwaukee are very different places, have little in common, and frankly don’t much like each other. We pick on each other almost as much as we do those Bears fans to the south.
Contributions to colleges and universities rose $800 million last year, to $24.4 billion, led by Harvard and Stanford with more than $500 million each, the Council for Aid to Education reported yesterday.
State Rep. Robin Krelbich may have found a guinea pig willing to experiment with his idea of merging the state’s two-year colleges with the nearest four-year university campuses.
Retired fisherman Billy Bodiford was diagnosed with prostate cancer in October. The doctor who found the cancer is the only urologist available in Taylor County, Fla. (pop. 19,200) ââ?¬â? and he visits just one day a month. Bodiford experienced what many Americans may soon face: a shortage of physicians that makes it hard to find convenient, quality health care. The shortage will worsen as 79 million baby boomers reach retirement age and demand more medical care unless the nation starts producing more doctors, according to several new studies.
Quoted: Richard Cooper, director of the Health Policy Institute at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
WHITEWATER – Ward Churchill was defiant. He was bold. He was passionate.
And he spent the better part of his 75-minute speech here defending controversial comments he made in a 3-year-old essay that has ignited a national firestorm in the past month.
George Mason University’s application to establish a chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society was rejected in January because of concerns that the Virginia college had stifled freedom of speech last fall when it canceled a campus lecture by the controversial filmmaker Michael Moore, faculty and staff members said on Tuesday.
Ivy League colleges have made few strides in hiring women and members of minority groups, according to a report released this week by a group of Yale University graduate students who are seeking to form a union. Data in the report, compiled from existing statistics at the U.S. Department of Education, show that of 433 new professors hired into tenure-track positions at Ivy League institutions in 2003, only 150 were women, 14 were black, and 8 were Hispanic.
A University of Colorado professor defended his essay comparing victims of the September eleventh World Trade Center attacks to Nazis, during his speech at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Tuesday night.
Ward Churchill, the strident University of Colorado professor, dealt with his own “blowback” in an appearance Tuesday at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
WHITEWATER – Colorado professor Ward Churchill received his longest, warmest applause of the evening toward the end of his talk Tuesday night at UW-Whitewater, when he spent several minutes blaming media mistakes and misinterpretations of his views for the controversy around him.
Closing the achievement gap remains a hot topic in education these days. While statistics suggest that Black and Hispanic students are narrowing the academic-achievement gap that separates them from White and Asian students, the problem persists in schools nationwide.
The University of Wisconsin came in above the national average in the NCAA’s new academic progress rate, although football and men’s track lagged behind.
The new calculation is a measurement of success in the classroom by student-athletes and will be used by the NCAA to levy punishment – in the form of lost scholarships and, in extreme cases, bans on postseason competition – for those programs which lag behind.
Some of the nation’s leading microbiologists criticized the National Institutes of Health on Monday for financing a large expansion of research grants on bioterrorism.
The cost of attending the University of Michigan could go down for about 2,900 in-state undergraduates this fall under a new grant program, to be announced today that will give needy students $500 to $1,500 a year.
During her first week at Furman University last semester, Amber Kirtley enrolled in a cardio-kickboxing class to avoid the dreaded “Freshman 15.” After one intense class, she discovered that yoga was more her speed.
In 2003, Ivy League campuses hired 433 professors into tenure-track jobs. But only 14 were black and 8 were Hispanic, and women received 150 jobs, according to a report.
Not even Meryl Streep could accurately mimic the speech of most born-and-raised Wisconsinites, according to a recent study by a team of linguists from UW-Madison.
Listening to Ward Churchill speak must be a lot like watching a train wreck — horrifying yet riveting.
Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has suffered acrimonious condemnation, and may have jeopardized his job, for suggesting that the underreprentation of women in engineering and some science fields may be due in part to inherent differences in the intellectual abilities of the sexes.
The governors of 13 states say they will require all students to take a college-prep curriculum and sit for new exams that tell whether they are ready for college-level work.
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Chancellor Jack Miller says he gets offended when he hears people say that Ward Churchill should not be allowed to speak on his campus because it would poison the students’ minds.
UW-Madison will be part of The New Yorker magazine’s 2005 College Tour for three days starting March 8, with some events open to the public on and off campus.
One UW Law School student plans to use a prestigious national fellowship to help protect the property rights of Wisconsin’s American Indians, while a graduate will provided legal aid to low-income minority farmers.
The First Amendment in the News.
In 2002, New York University became the first private university to negotiate a labor agreement with a union of teaching assistants. The pact followed years of hostility — and strike threats — but was seen as a potential precedent for other private institutions.
BERKELEY, Calif. – Long-simmering tensions between the City of Berkeley and its famous university erupted Wednesday when the city sued to block campus expansion plans.
Binge drinking on Wisconsin�s college campuses is directly related to the high levels of drinking among the general adult population, says a national study released Tuesday.
In a dspute pitting decency against academic freedom, the state Assembly voted 67-31 Tuesday to condemn the “anti-American hate speech” by Colorado professor Ward Churchill and urged UW-Whitewater to cancel a planned speech there by Churchill next week.
In a few weeks, high school students face the prospect of taking the much-publicized new SAT Reasoning Test, which for the first time will require them to write a timed essay. Yet colleges continue to send confusing signals about whether students applying in the fall to attend college must take the new exam.
Every day in Madison students file into crowded lecture halls and discussion rooms and listen attentively to a speaker while taking copious notes.
This is not an issue to divide liberals and conservatives. This is not an issue of military preparedness, nor is it a referendum on the war in Iraq. It is a question of values – values at the heart of America’s tradition.
Attention Harvard Law students: The U.S. Army wants you. Oh, and your counterparts at Yale, New York University and other leading law schools. Sadly, your professors don’t want you to know that.
How to be great. Whom to let in.
The University of Minnesota finds itself juggling those critical issues again as it readies a plan to put itself among the world’s top three public research universities. (Registration required.)
The American Association for the Advancement of Science wants to know if scientists believe that academe’s growing pursuit of patents, and related practices for commercializing research, “are aiding or hindering the progress of science.”
When Karen A. McDonnell was nine weeks’ pregnant, she heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time on a monitor in her doctor’s office and decided it was finally time to share her good news. So the assistant professor of public health at George Washington University called her mother, her sister, and her best friend. Then, before she told her department chairman, or her other friends and relatives, she walked a block from her office to put her expected newborn –Ã? who did not even have a name yet –Ã? on the waiting list at George Washington’s child-care center.
Improving Virginia’s public colleges, and how they serve the state, has become one of Mark Warner’s top priorities as governor, even as he embarks on his last year in this one-term state.
As the first in his family with a college degree, Mr. Warner says he has seen firsthand the power of higher education to transform a life and wants to improve access to that opportunity across Virginia.
When she was 15 and made a pass at a girl, Michelle Marzullo had her head smashed against a bathroom wall by her best friend. At 17, Marzullo said, she got kicked out of the house and ricocheted from place to place, staying with friends while she finished high school.
A Wisconsin lawmaker has let loose his own salvo in the growing national controversy over allegedly “anti-American” remarks made by Colorado professor Ward Churchill.
When Irene Hofstein decided to spend her twilight years here beside the campus of Lasell College, she expected to be a student again, auditing courses and learning at the feet of professional educators. Over time, however, professors and students have increasingly been learning from her ââ?¬â? and from thousands of other retirees who have settled near college campuses in the past 15 years.
Janesville — William Mentele, 21, a nursing student at UW-Rock County, said it’s getting harder for him to afford college.
It’s no mystery what sent a record flood of students to SAT test-prep courses this year: anxiety over the new, written portion of the college entrance exam.
In his State of the State talk, Gov. Jim Doyle remarked that Wisconsin students have the highest score on the ACT. At a recent meeting, state School Superintendent Libby Burmaster said Wisconsin students always rank near the top on national tests. Here (right) is some data that suggests this is not likely to continue, nor is always true even now.
The Ward Churchill controversy began with outrage over his description of September 11 victims as “little Eichmanns,” but as the scrutiny of the professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder has continued in recent days, new questions have been raised about how he earned tenure and about his claims of American Indian heritage.
The average wait for security clearances for foreign scholars studying sensitive topics has fallen from 67 days to 15 days over the past year, according to a report scheduled to be released today by the Government Accountability Office.
WASHINGTON – If you’re a college student looking for tuition help, beware the fine print. Despite proposed increases to the Pell Grant program, President Bush’s budget plan might still leave students to foot large tuition bills because of additional cuts to campus-based financial aid and the rising cost of education.
“His budget proposal will end up with a reduction in financial aid in general,” said Steve Van Ess, director of student financial services at UW-Madison.
Wisconsin will benefit from a federal decision to streamline visa procedures that had discouraged foreign students and scientists from coming to, or remaining at, American universities.
After the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s chancellor decided to allow a controversial professor to speak on campus, Nass set out to block the speech.
….Nass, whose acquaintance with the Constitution is not what it ought to be, may not find a lot of takers from his crusade against the Constitution in Wisconsin. But he’s found a forum in New York City.
Increased competition among universities and trends toward privatization are threatening the public mission of state universities and colleges, according to a report scheduled for release today.
Overpraised ’80s kids, stunned by criticism in college and at work, are ill-equipped to cope. Andrea Sobel shudders at those oh-so-positive messages aimed at boosting kids’ self-esteem. She has heard her fill of ââ?¬Å?good jobââ?¬Â or ââ?¬Å?great pictureââ?¬Â or any of the highly exaggerated claims that parenting experts and educators spouted as the way to bring up well-adjusted children.
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — A growing number of public universities are requiring that students have health insurance before they step into the classroom, a move aimed at saving the uninsured from huge bills and college hospitals from getting stuck with the cost
States have long worried about how far to go in attracting jobs, with the debate focused mainly on tax incentives and other corporate giveaways. Now, as states gamble billions on controversial stem cell research to attract coveted biotech jobs, they’re confronting an issue rare in job development: moral values.
PARIS Just as Sputnik spurred a surge in Russian language training a half-century ago, Sept. 11 has made Arabic the language of choice for a new generation of ambitious diplomats and academics across the world.
What looked like a good-news report on minorities in higher education was released Monday: The number of African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American and Native American students enrolled in college doubled during the past decade.
In a highly unusual move, the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and Stanford University have written an essay critical of remarks last month by Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers that biological differences may help explain why fewer women than men succeed at the top ranks of science and engineering.
ONE would have thought, given the decades of ardent debate over affirmative action in higher education, that the main axes of the dispute had been established.
…while I probably disagree with Ward Churchill more than most of his right-wing critics, I recognize him as a challenging public intellectual who has prodded and provoked my thinking in ways that I have to respect.
So, as a Wisconsinite, I was pleased when the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Chancellor Jack Miller became the first campus administrator in the country to resist the right-wing crusaders who have been campaigning to deny Churchill a right to speak at institutions of higher learning.
The good news remains good, and the bad news has gotten better when it comes to high school graduation in Wisconsin. A new report concludes that the black graduation rate in Wisconsin has risen from 40% in 1997 to 50% in 2002. For whites, it rose from 85% to 91%, while the rate for Hispanics was steady at 58%.
TOLEDO, Ohio — A growing number of public universities are requiring that students have health insurance before they stop into the classroom, a move aimed at saving the uninsured from huge bills and college hospitals from getting stuck with the cost.
Most public universities still leave the decision up to students, who can buy into a school’s student health care plan or obtain their own insurance. (2/14/05 Capital Times print edition)
WASHINGTON – There are funny stories, like the one about the state attorney who bought an MBA for his cat, and then there are the horror stories like tales of New York City cab drivers who moonlight as dentists.
These days you can be anything you want by simply clicking on a mouse and buying a degree from a “diploma mill.” Institutions sell phony diplomas, usually by mail, and recently they have been popping up all over the country.
