As we have all experienced over these six months, the COVID-19 crisis has upended normalcy. From remote working to virtual learning, the loss of healthcare to the loss of loved ones, the coronavirus has forced us all to operate under a new, frightening reality. At the same time, it has brought into crisp focus our society’s greatest inequities and our leaders’ misplaced priorities.
Letter to the editor: UW-Madison has restricted student movement and activities for 14 days due to an increase in COVID-19 cases. This increase is to be expected. More students and more testing will do this.
As Black Lives Matter movement gains traction in media, so does complicated history involving Lincoln statue.
Today’s increasingly politicized higher education too often compounds the problem by dishonoring both freedom and standards of truthfulness.
Em. Prof. Donald A. Downs
Column by Sarah Anne Carter, visiting executive director of the Center for Design and Material Culture in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
UW’s response to the ongoing pandemic is insufficient, university must consider revising Smart Restart plan for upcoming semester.
Letter to the editor: There are vast numbers of such cautionary tales across the country. Why not heed these warnings, rather than put the campus and the community at risk of a potentially fatal disease?
UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank, in a blog statement published Wednesday, detailed the steps being taken on campus to allow a “hybrid” reopening — some live classes, some online — and defended the plan as best for students. “Having students on campus and providing in-person instruction, where feasible, provides a better set of educational opportunities for students lacking suitable technology or spaces to effectively study at home,” Blank wrote.
While the nation roils with ongoing protests against police violence and persistent societal racism, many organizations have released statements promising to do better. These promises often include improvements to hiring practices; a priority on retaining and promoting people of color; and pledges to better serve those people as customers and clients.
Column from interim System President Tommy Thompson: If our great state is going to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic poised for growth, we will need to renew the Wisconsin Idea for the 21st century with a real investment in the University of Wisconsin System.
However, African Americans have long known that they have deep roots in all regions of the United States. As the African American Bishop Richard Allen wrote in 1829, affirming that Black people belonged:See the thousands of foreigners emigrating to America every year: and if there be ground sufficient for them to cultivate, and bread for them to eat, why would they wish to send the first tillers of the land away? . . . This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country.
Christy Clark-Pujara is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island. Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: From Slavery to Suffrage in the Wisconsin Territory, 1725 to 1868, examines how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and Black rights shaped White-Black race relations in the Midwest.
It’s been five months since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered college campuses across the country. Like thousands of other college students, I finished the spring semester on Zoom, attending classes and taking exams in my childhood bedroom in Madison.
We recognize the uncertainty about reopening UW-Madison to in-person instruction this fall, as expressed in Timothy Yu’s guest column last Sunday, “UW needs a safe plan for faculty and students.” But we’re taking steps through our Smart Restart plan to minimize the risks.
Granted, the loss of a University of Wisconsin football season is a massive disappointment for players and coaches and everyone involved with the program, and it constitutes a major financial hit to the UW Athletic Department. And there is the impact on bars and hotels and restaurants that do big business on home football weekends. But for the fans, it was always a pipe dream that they could return to Camp Randall this fall in what is often, ahem, a cheek-to-cheek experience because of the cramped seating in the historic old stadium.
We need consistent tactics to battle this virus. We support national standards for face coverings. Our nation needs uniform criteria for stay-at-home orders, reopening businesses and in-person instruction at K-12 schools. We support the AAMC’s guidance for face coverings. While there are horrible disparities among certain populations, and some location-specific challenges, the biology of the virus does not vary from city to city or state to state. National standards will allow all communities to make informed decisions.
Robert N. Golden, MD, is dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Joseph E. Kerschner, MD is dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin School of Medicine.See
It is certainly not a surprise to this editorial board that former Governor Tommy Thompson is seizing the opportunity of serving as President of the UW System to encourage greater investment in the UW to leverage the system in meeting the immediate and future needs of Wisconsin.
Written by Robert N. Golden, MD, is dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Joseph E. Kerschner, MD is dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin School of Medicine.
As DACA recipients breathe sighs of relief following Supreme Court ruling, Wisconsin, UW must ensure they are sufficiently represented.
Common Cause lawsuit goes after unabashedly partisan voter laws that benefit Republicans.
Let’s be honest. Madison has always struggled to expand or even maintain its ranks of professionals of color. I’ve witnessed firsthand the turmoil felt by Blacks about the price their families pay to live in a city where their numbers are so few and their sense of being scrutinized so constant. Which makes the perspective of Patrick Sims so relevant. Sims came through Chicago’s troubled public schools to graduate from Yale University and earn a master’s degree in the professional theater program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage unchecked across the country, many schools have begun to rethink their fall reopening plans.
Noted: I grew up in New England with no family ties to China, and started learning Mandarin in grad school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the 1980s out of a curiosity about an Asia that was on the rise. I benefited from scholarship money, and spirited teachers like Arthur Chen and Clara Sun. The Chinese language is a wide window into one of the world’s most influential civilizations, richest economies, largest military forces, and biggest populaces; it’s also a country whose ambitions aren’t about to go away.
Co-authored by Dr. Adrian Treves, a Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The letter that UW-Madison Athletic Director Barry Alvarez sent to Badger fans earlier this week warning that the department could be facing a $100 million hit to its budget did sound like it was setting the stage for a plea to donors to come to the rescue if money-making football isn’t played this fall.
Letter to the editor: The entire University of Wisconsin System should stay virtual until it can open safely for real.
It will take coordinated effort from national, state, and local leadership, individual behavior change, and funding to bring the outbreak under control and to return to in-person schooling safely. Measuring exactly 6 feet in between desks will not be enough to achieve these aims; we need to think about the big picture and consider how each reopening plan stacks up against these goals.
Chad Gibbs is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a George L. Mosse Graduate Exchange Fellow to the Hebrew University. His research focuses on Jewish resistance at the extermination camp Treblinka.
Noted: William R. Hartman, MD, PhD, Department of Anesthesiology, is principal investigator for the UW COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.
We’ve got some good news and some less good news regarding one of our favorite inclusive and equitable education programs.
Perhaps one of the empty pedestals at the state Capitol in Madison would be just the place for “Nails’ Tales,” which lost its spot by Camp Randall Stadium.
The result was a dramatic reversal of a rule that would have kept hundreds of thousands of foreign students off U.S. campuses, including about 5,800 students at UW-Madison, and further complicated a fall semester that was already hard to manage from fiscal as well as educational perspectives.
Editorial: Wisconsin can’t afford to lose thousands of foreign students from its campuses, especially those attending UW-Madison.
The frightening thing about UW-Madison professor Walter C. Stern’s column last Sunday, “To move ’Forward,’ we must confront troubled past,” is not how he tortures history to fit his ideology. It’s that he teaches his identity politics to your children’s teachers and — one suspects — many of the late-night visitors to State Street and Capitol Square this long hot summer.
No one is born with a fully developed social conscience, and no one could pass the selective purity tests being advanced by this UW-Madison group.
It took a lot of courage to take the stand Lincoln did that caused the Civil War and the division of the North and South in one nation. Taking down his statue would be a total insult to his actions and those who fought and died for the result of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Universities that often devalue, make invisible or disregard financial and human resources for their Black studies departments must affirm a verbal commitment to racial justice.
“Opening the economy is not the problem,” writes Laura Albert, Industrial and Systems Engineering professor. “Opening the economy without a plan to control the risk is the problem.”
He may be in the seat for only a year or so, but former Gov. Tommy Thompson brings a solid record of supporting academic research to the job of interim president of the University of Wisconsin System.
Judd Kinzley is an associate professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Thompson has the experience, the maturity and the stature to renew the system’s historic commitment to the Wisconsin Idea and to the communities from Superior to Kenosha that will only flourish if Wisconsin expands its commitment to higher education.
Letter to the editor: It’s yet another wasted opportunity to set our broken course straight, to charge boldly into a future that includes and respects everyone.
Letter to the editor: I remember a press conference to announce UW-Madison had recruited (poached?) an up-and-coming science researcher who arrived with two truckloads of high-tech equipment. Thompson and almost everyone else realized the university is a major driver of the state economy, and that increasing its profile is good for everyone.
The choice of Former Governor Tommy Thompson to serve as interim president of the University of Wisconsin System is nothing short of inspired.
Tommy Thompson’s new job title has the word “interim” in front of it. But we trust he’ll be much more than a stopgap administrator for the University of Wisconsin System.
Picking former Gov. Tommy Thompson to serve as the interim president of the University of Wisconsin is a good thing.
Somewhere in America, a 14-year-old Black boy is playing video games in his room, and his parents are satisfied that they are keeping him safe from COVID-19. But then, in Minneapolis, George Floyd is killed by a police officer, and his parents are reminded that their son’s life could just as easily be snuffed out.
Author Alvin Thomas is an assistant professor in the Human Development and Family Studies Department in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
So, University of Alaska System President Jim Johnsen, the sole candidate from a more than $200,000 search, has withdrawn from consideration to be the next president of the University of Wisconsin System. Walrus blubber apparently beats out bovine cheese.
Letter to the editor: Given these challenges, it looks like it’s going to be pretty difficult to attract other qualified candidates to even consider applying for this opening, and I’m afraid we have no one to blame but ourselves.
The Editorial Board began this week by informing our audience that our lack of coverage at the outset of the protests was not because of apathy or indifference, but technological difficulties.
Chelsea Hylton is a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison double majoring in journalism and Spanish. She is an LA Posse scholar and very passionate about the power that journalism can have. This column was first published by The Black Voice, UW-Madison’s black student online publication, and edited by Nile Lansana.
Noted: I read this past week an article in the New York University Review of Law and Social Change by McKenna Kohlenberg, a Milwaukee area native who is in the home stretch of getting both her law degree and a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy analysis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It uses Madison as a case study in what Kohlenberg calls the “illiteracy-to-incarceration pipeline.” She cites research that 70% of adults who are incarcerated and 85% of juveniles who have been involved with the juvenile justice system are functionally illiterate.
“Literacy strongly correlates with myriad social and economic outcomes, and children who are not proficient by the fourth grade are much more likely than their proficient peers to face a series of accumulating negative consequences,” Kohlenberg writes.
It was 51 years ago when, as a member of the Wisconsin National Guard, my unit was activated to help keep the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus open.
UW-Madison’s Odyssey Project works to expand educational access for students living in poverty and students incarcerated in our prison system, and the benefits are obvious.
As an emeritus faculty member at UW-Whitewater, I was shocked (but shouldn’t have been) by the University of Wisconsin System’s process of hiring a new president.
A sense of déjà vu swept over me this week. It was 51 years ago when, as a member of the Wisconsin National Guard, my unit was activated to help keep the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus open.
The recent protests in Madison demonstrated pent-up frustration with broken, white-dominated systems that have perpetually — and disgustingly — violated Black bodies, souls and freedoms. The presence of COVID-19 has only pushed the injustice further as more and more Black lives are taken daily.
Column by Hannah Sherfinski, a dual degree MD-MPH student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Michael Wagner, a UW-Madison journalism professor, and Jordon Foley, a Ph.D. candidate, published an article a few days ago on the Brookings Institution website based on a survey conducted in five “swing” states in the 2020 election, including Wisconsin.
Burden is a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Something remarkable happened in Ohio and Wisconsin this spring. While other states with presidential primaries scheduled for last month decided to postpone or modify them, the Buckeye State and Badger State held theirs.
Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, MPH, MSLIS, MD, FAAP, is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and also holds master’s degrees in public health and children’s librarianship.
