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Category: Opinion

Column: Reducing the stigma surrounding food insecurity

Daily Cardinal

Like many topics that involve socioeconomic status, food insecurity on campus has to do with shame. It’s one thing to struggle to pay Madison’s exorbitantly high rent, as many students do. But if you can’t afford to feed yourself, what are you spending your money on?

Letter to the Editor: Wisconsin should support Taiwan

The Daily Cardinal

A blog post by the Office of the Chancellor dated August 22 entitled “UW’s relationship with China,” which originally mentioned Taiwan in the student statistics, sparked a degree of controversy among Taiwanese students. Many Taiwanese students sent e-mails to protest, arguing that China is not Taiwan and that Taiwan is a sovereign and independent country. The Office of the Chancellor responded by revising the data to be more specific to mainland China.

Invest in the UW

Isthmus

The Wall Street Journal came out with its college rankings last week and UW- Madison came in at #67. There are a number of reactions you might have to that.

Why school cafeterias should be the front lines of policy change

The Guardian

Across the country millions of children are returning to school with the promise that school lunch will be “great again”. – Jennifer E Gaddis is an assistant professor in the department of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of the forthcoming book The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools

UW must train more in-state doctors — John Gillis

Wisconsin State Journal

Letter to the editor: The State Journal’s August 31 article, “White coats mark special entry”, noted that 71% of the class at the UW School of Medicine hailed from Wisconsin. If the administration of UW-Madison cared about meeting the state’s medical workforce needs, the percentage would have been over 90%.

Maps of Amazon fires show why we’re thinking about them wrong

The Washington Post

For weeks, we’ve seen headlines saying the Amazon rainforest is burning. But something unexpected happens when you map satellite data showing both the fires this year and those that have burned in the previous four years: The bulk of the forest remains almost entirely intact. –Tim Wallace has a PhD in geography from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is currently a visual storyteller at Descartes Labs.

Rick Esenberg and Luke Berg: The doublethink of the campus free speech debate

The Capital Times

Ultimately, the UW Board of Regents deserves great credit for crafting this campus free speech policy and taking, head-on, the unique and growing threats to civil discourse on today’s college campuses. With the above modifications, Wisconsin students and taxpayers can be assured that UW campuses will remain incubators of ideas, forums for debate, and truly “safe” for speakers of all points of view.

Natasha Oladokun: Many of us have survived despite America, not because of her

The Cap Times

Noted: Natasha Oladokun is a poet and essayist. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Jackson Center for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Harvard Review Online, Pleiades, Kenyon Review Online and elsewhere. She is associate poetry editor at story South, and is the inaugural First Wave Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

An all-woman team will edit the flagship political science journal this year. Here’s why that matters. – The Washington Post

Washington Post

In a bold move, the American Political Science Association recently appointed us — a team of 12 women — to edit the flagship journal of the discipline of political science, the American Political Science Review (APSR).

Aili Mari Tripp is Wangari Maathai Professor of political science and gender & women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Wisconsin’s Brain Drain Beyond the Numbers

Daily Cardinal

Nearly 60% of graduates each year choose to leave Wisconsin to pursue their post-graduate ventures — be it to serve other communities with Americorps and the Peace Corps, join the military or enter the workforce.

Editorial Board: Free speech and power in a protest-driven era

The Badger Herald

Freedom of speech has been an integral principle in American jurisprudence since our country’s conception. Generally, it is an idea celebrated and protected, regardless of political affiliation. Heralded as one of our democracy’s central tenets, it would make sense for it to be continuously upheld.

Editorial: Seeking justice

WISC-TV 3

It’s hard for us to see a just conclusion that doesn’t include Cephus’ reinstatement as a student in good standing at the university.

Tom Oates: UW-Alabama home-and-home series marks step in right direction for college football

Wisconsin State Journal

Column: Such a series between perennial top-25 teams, a staple on non-conference schedules well into the 1990s, has become all too rare in college football. If you’re looking for a root cause as to why fans aren’t going to games, having to pay increasingly big bucks to watch a steady stream of unattractive opponents is a really good place to start.

A Racist History Behind Trump’s Baltimore Attack

CityLab

Paige Glotzer is Assistant Professor and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book, Building Suburban Power: The Business of Exclusionary Housing Markets, will be published in April, 2020.

Bob Holvenstot: UW, DNR not doing enough to clean up lakes

The Capital Times

Letter to the editor: The University of Wisconsin, Department of Natural Resources and a local fishing club seem to be more interested in either studying a dirty lake, promoting a “trophy” fishery or catching those trophy fish, at the expense of the general interest of residents, especially those who own shoreline property.

Keller: Europe’s killer heat waves are a new norm. The death rates shouldn’t be.

The Washington Post

On the southern outskirts of Paris, a cemetery holds the bodies of the city’s unclaimed dead. Until recently, there lay a hundred whom some consider to be the first victims of global climate change. They were mostly elderly and poor, the forgotten people of the worst weather disaster in contemporary European history: the heat wave of August 2003, which killed nearly 15,000 in France alone and thousands more across the continent.

Opinion | McConnell Doesn’t Want the Senate to Talk About Trump’s Tweets. Here’s a Way Around Him.

New York Times

Whether Republican senators would rise to the occasion is debatable. With John McCain and Jeff Flake now gone from the Senate, it seems less likely that many of their Republican colleagues will take a stand against this racist tilt to our politics. But the only way we can know is to get them on record. A round robin would give them just such an opportunity.

-John Milton Cooper is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For discussion of women’s soccer equality, let’s talk about concussion

USA Today

Assistant Professor Traci Snedden from the School of Nursing: As we watch the Women’s World Cup and the sheer athleticism of these elite female players, what we don’t see is the lagging research on concussion injury in girl’s and women’s soccer. The rate of concussion among female soccer players has been called an unpublicized epidemic.

Dairy Innovation Hub should stay in state budget

Wisconsin State Journal

The $81 billion state budget the Republican-run Legislature is approving this week includes $8.8 million for research on dairy farming at UW-Madison, UW-Platteville and UW-River Falls. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is expected to — and should — issue partial vetoes to improve the Republican-proposed budget. But he should leave the Dairy Innovation Hub intact.

Editorial: Recognizing our roots

WISC-TV 3

This week, UW-Madison took some small steps to change that narrative with the dedication of a new heritage marker on Bascom Hill that recognizes the historical significance of the campus as the Ho-Chunk’s ancestral home.

Editorial: Combat Blindness International

WISC-TV 3

For 35 years Combat Blindness International, headquartered here in Madison and founded by UW ophthalmologist Dr. Suresh Chandra, has been restoring sight to more than 360,000 people in five countries.

Monkey Cage: Why Facebook is pushing Libra

The Washington Post

Facebook is issuing Libra, a new electronic currency, and everyone is rushing to explain it; perhaps the best overall explanation comes from Bloomberg’s Matt Levine. Most of the commentary focuses, unsurprisingly, on the economics. Yet there is also a very important political economy story. Here’s what you need to know about the politics of Libra.

Editorial: Birdies for Health

WISC-TV 3

The idea is simple: You make a pledge for every birdie made during the tournament to support The UW Carbone Cancer Center, American Family Children’s Hospital, Imitative to End Alzheimer’s, Department of Ophthalmology, or Transplant and UW Organ and Tissue Donation. American Family will match your donation up to $100,000.

Editorial: Freshwater is smart strategy

WISC-TV 3

In addition to addressing one of the most important human health and environmental issues of our time, creation of the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin is a smart economic development strategy for the UW System and for the state.