The first recommendation of the American Academy’s recent report “The Future of Undergraduate Education” is simple: we should work to improve undergraduate instruction.
Foxconn has donated $100 million to UW-Madison. Gov. Scott Walker and the rest of the GOP are so proud.
Right now, much of the west is affected by wildfires.An unlucky minority will have to evacuate their homes, and some will lose their homes altogether — or even their lives. But for millions more across the west, “smoke season” is a real thing.
—OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in San Diego. Distributed by www.OtherWords.org.
Chancellor Blank and other university leaders should see the giant strings attached to this gift and proceed with tremendous caution. In fact, they would do well to consult with faculty and students in UW-Madison’s highly ranked classics department. The Trojan horse was presented as a gift as well.
“(Even) if we get a little bit more rain,” said University of Wisconsin assistant research scientist and hydrologist Eric Booth, “It’s still going to add to this massive water that is slowly moving through the system and creating more problems.”
In the midst of political squabbling over state subsidies for the Racine County plant, Foxconn has continued to press forward with strategic investments in some of Wisconsin’s most valuable assets, including collaborating with the UW in, as Chancellor Rebecca Blank put it, “pushing the boundaries of knowledge.” We welcome the partnership.
And now, Madison. Add it to the growing list of communities across Wisconsin that are sharing in the economic surge brought by Foxconn’s immense plans for its $10 billion Wisconn Valley Science and Technology Park; construction is underway on the Mount Pleasant campus that will build ultra-high-definition display panels for use in medicine, self-driving vehicles, security and television sets.
The day always comes. But UW-Madison Marching Band director Michael Leckrone’s announced retirement is cause for sadness.
Noted: What this new tide of voters has also realized is that the remedy for such a regressive regime lies within our capacity. We can fight back by encouraging our peers to become civically engaged alongside us. Particularly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we are working to make sure that during welcome week, registering to vote is as routine as buying textbooks. Engaging students in activities that mobilize them to participate in the civic process is the key to translating our generation’s immense energy into real change — we know that when we vote, we win.
The debate on renaming spaces in Memorial Union at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was fundamentally about respect for African-Americans. Memorial Union’s Porter Butts Gallery and Fredric March Play Circle were both named for 1920s alumni who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was a terrorist group that Confederate veterans created in 1865 during the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War, to rescind all legal rights of African-Americans through fear, intimidation, murder and legal statutes. The KKK at its height of popularity had members in every echelon: governors, senators, mayors, law enforcement.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Union Council recently voted to remove the names of Porter Butts and Frederic March from spaces in Memorial Union after learning the two men “belonged” to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Raising the question of their association to the Klan was understandable and appropriate.
Since President Trump took office last year, his administration has been working to undo many Obama-era regulations affecting clean water, national parks, energy production and more. Most recently, President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has proposed weakening Obama-era regulations on coal-fired power plants.
Every Badgers football season it’s the same. The student section fills up slowly for each game and older fans grumble about it. Players and coaches plead with them to get there on time. There are often even angry letters to the editor.
Chalk one up for Mother Nature.With an assist from the farmers of Oaxaca, Mexico; Mars candy company and researchers at the University of California-Davis and our own University of Wisconsin-Madison.We’re talking about growing corn. Something near and dear to Wisconsin farmers. And corn, of course, requires nitrogen — an essential ingredient for plant growth.
No matter what happens, UW must send a strong message because there is more at stake here than the success of the football program.
When I was in graduate school in the early 1980s, I remember hearing Winston Brill, a professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on the radio. Brill was predicting that in the coming years we would develop corn capable of incorporating nitrogen from the air into its tissues, reducing this important crop’s hunger for soil-applied fertilizers.
In recent days, we learned that UW-Madison scientists in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, along with their colleagues at the University of California, Davis and Mars Inc., discovered indigenous varieties of corn capable of cooperating with bacteria to fix up to 80% of the nitrogen that the crop needs.
It surprises me that the UW-Oshkosh Foundation would sue the UW System and its Regents for a poor business decision that the foundation itself had made.
Yet, from the public censure of left-wing poet Anders Carlson-Wee, you would think that the zombified corpses of Joseph McCarthy and his legion of followers have returned to roam Twitter in pantsuits and safety pins. The poet’s case is pretty straightforward. He wrote a poem told from the perspective of a homeless person. It was meant to highlight the intersectional plights of this marginalized demographic and how the homeless have to prostitute their afflictions to get attention from people on the street. The tidal wave of outrage that drowned Carlson-Wee rested on his use of African American Vernacular English and the word “crippled.”
Adam Szetela is a Ph.D. student in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison requires three orientation programs for all new students; an alcohol awareness seminar, a violence prevention program, and a diversity-inclusion program.
When I was a professor of American studies at Berklee College of Music, I taught courses on social problems. (Adam Szetela is a Ph.D. student in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.)
For any incoming college freshman, stumbling onto campus the first day has to be a disorienting experience. There’s so much you don’t know, ranging from where to eat to where your classes are to why your roommate insists on only changing his socks every three days.
“It may be the case that some of that equipment simply can’t be fixed anymore,” said Mark Stephenson of UW-Madison’s Center for Dairy Profitability in a Wisconsin Public Radio story. “Any one or two years, you can get by not replacing it. But four years? Some equipment is going to have to be replaced.”
Attending an institution like UW-Madison is a privilege that changes the futures of thousands of young people each year. Because of this, getting into UW is not an easy feat.
Column by Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health who also holds master’s degrees in public health and children’s librarianship
Advocates for diversity in higher education emphasize a variety of reasons. They range from business oriented considerations, like the need for a diverse and well-educated workforce to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse marketplace or the belief that diversity fosters innovation and creativity. Another reason is based on the idea that diversity enriches the educational experience of all students on campus, not just minorities.
Freezing tuition for in-state students at public colleges and universities is welcome help for Wisconsin families. But state leaders need to be realistic. Unless the state can provide better funding, too, the freeze will continue to harm schools.
Although a simple renaming may not seem like a big deal, the new name for the GSCC confirms that the community they serve is free from labels or binaries.
Renaming these spaces provides a unique opportunity not only to acknowledge UW’s problematic past but to promise an inclusive future.
Rather than enhancing the neutrality of administrative law judges, the executive order diminishes them by making their hiring subject to political considerations. It means that administrative law judges will be more akin to Roger Goodell than a Supreme Court justice, no longer bound by precedent and legal reasoning, but rather incentivized to decide cases to advance political, not legal, objectives. This calls for Congress to protect the continued independence of administrative law judges.
-Steph Tai is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who represents amici in federal court and Supreme Court cases.
Noted: Patrick Iber is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
We work and live in a time when historical knowledge has become intensely politicized. That knowledge is political is hardly new, but the rise of Donald Trump has heightened the polarization. His administration governs with a torrent of disorienting dishonesty, and his cry of “fake news” seems to mean less that the news in question is false than that it tells a story about him that he finds discordant with his self-image. Journalists — writers of the first draft of history, as the cliché goes — have struggled to balance their responsibility to reporting discovered facts with reporting the views of those who reject those facts.
As UW-Madison economics professor Noah Williams wrote in a recent commentary on the impact of hefty minimum wage increases in Minnesota, “The distortions from the minimum wage increases led to higher incomes for some workers, but lower employment particularly among young and low-skilled workers, and higher prices for the products of low-skilled labor.”
I had hoped I was done with the depressing subject of sea-level rise for a while, but a study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon reveals a new dimension that’s too interesting and important to pass up.
Noted: The training and education of the committee. Committee members should receive training and educational resources that increase their knowledge of the impact of evaluation biases and ways to overcome them. Workshops of this sort have been offered to search committee members at Florida International University; Northeastern University; the University of California, Davis; the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin, among others.
Like most people in the state, I am following Foxconn with great interest.
By the time Speaker of the House Paul Ryan declared in April that he would be returning home to Janesville rather than running for reelection, Wisconsin had experienced one of the largest declines of the middle class of any state in the country. Its poverty rate had climbed to a thirty-year high; the state’s roads were the second worst in the country; the University of Wisconsin–Madison had fallen, for the first time, out of the rankings of the country’s top five research schools. A study estimated that 11 percent of the state’s population was deterred from voting in the 2016 presidential election by Wisconsin’s new voter ID law, one of the strictest in the nation.
The Summiteers of almost two decades ago who sounded the clarion call for a major strategy to establish Wisconsin as a player in the startup world must be pleased with remarkable progress reported in 2018 Portfolio analysis put out by the Wisconsin Technology Council.
Noted: Author Ryan J. Owens, J.D., Ph.D., is a political science professor at UW-Madison, a faculty affiliate at the University of Wisconsin School of Law, and the Acting Director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership.
Noted: The bill was passed without ever assessing the cost: Currently, $2.26 billion in general fund dollars are allocated to the Department of Corrections over two years. Meanwhile, just $2.14 billion is allocated for the University of Wisconsin System. Hundreds of millions of that come just from the extra costs associated with the truth-in-sentencing law.
Some welcome news came regarding the University of Wisconsin System late last week.
Colleges are beginning to see gains from programs that centralize advising across campuses, as in the California system and at Virginia Tech, or ones that better coordinate efforts among career counselors, financial-aid officers, and advisers, such as at the University of Wisconsin.
That does not mean, as Walker seemed to suggest, that the fight against partisan gerrymandering is finished. The court invited additional litigation. Bill Whitford, the retired University of Wisconsin law professor who was the named plaintiff in the Wisconsin case, said, “We are confident we can prove the real harms to real citizens caused by lawmakers who choose their voters instead of the voters choosing their representatives.
In “Two Minutes with Mitch” local radio personality Mitch Henck gives his two cents on the three-year sentence given to former UW-Madison student Alec Cook on sexual assault charges.
Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his long-awaited retirement from the Supreme Court on Wednesday, leaving conservatives to gush with joy and liberals to wring their hands. The vacancy sets off what will be a very interesting summer. -Ryan J. Owens, J.D., Ph.D., is a political science professor at UW-Madison, a faculty affiliate at the University of Wisconsin School of Law, and the Acting Director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership.
Role of citizenry in electing, holding judges accountable crucial for future sexual assault cases.
Letter to the editor: Gov. Walker cut state support of the University of Wisconsin System’s budget by $250 million in 2015. The shock of such a large cut led to many researchers, who bring millions to the university in federal grants and provide high-quality research and teaching, to look for positions outside of Wisconsin.
The Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison also issued a report last week that pointed out: “In 2016, more non-Hispanic whites died than were born in twenty-six states; more than at any time in U.S. history. Some 179 million residents or roughly 56 percent of the U.S. population, lived in these 26 states.”
The antiquated funding statutes of the tech college system, which date back to before the Vietnam War was over, is a prime example of the “sacred cow” of public higher education in this state.
MADISON, Wis. – The American Family Championship is being held at University Ridge golf course this weekend, and in just its third year it already feels like an iconic Madison event.
Each year, more than 6 million children in the United States are referred to Child Protective Services for abuse or neglect. Previous research on the consequences of early life stress and child maltreatment shows that these children will be more likely to develop a multitude of social and mental health problems. Teens and adults who experienced early adversity such as abuse, neglect or extreme deprivation are more likely to be socially isolated, spend time in jail, and develop psychological disorders including anxiety and depression.
Piece co-written by Tova Walsh, an assistant professor of Social Work and Affiliate of the Center for Child and Family Well-Being.
It’s safe to say when Jack Salzwedel started brainstorming the idea of a professional golf event in Madison with Steve Stricker 10 years ago — or even when the discussion turned serious three or four years ago — the American Family Insurance Championship that we know today was beyond even their hopes and dreams.
In 1957, I came to Madison from Illinois and began pursuing graduate studies at UW. The light of education in Wisconsin was such a welcome change from the darkness in Illinois.
The U.S. Supreme Court soon may redefine how legislators get elected to office. Two high-profile cases that seek to rein in partisan gerrymandering are slated for decisions by late June. The rulings could be landmarks. But, however the court comes out, the fight against gerrymandering will be far from over.
Op/ed by Barry Burden and Robert Yablon.
When UW-Stevens Point leaders announced a proposal March 5 to address fiscal challenges, the purpose was to invite dialogue to shape a plan for a sustainable future for our institution.
Keep an open mind about people’s backgrounds.
Column by Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison
The refrigerator was warm inside yet was still being used to store vaccines, which were likely useless. He was told there was no electricity to power the refrigerator because there was no kerosene to fuel its generator.
That’s the kind of problem NovoMoto, founded by two UW-Madison doctoral students, hopes to solve through its pay-as-you-go approach to providing solar power to people, schools and communities in places such as sub-Saharan Africa.
One late afternoon last fall, I was chatting with Ken Adamany, the long-time Madison music impresario, for an article I was writing on the 50th anniversary of Otis Redding’s fatal plane crash into Lake Monona.
