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Category: Opinion

Editorial: UW regents’ assault on free speech is indefensible

Capital Times

Unfortunately, the current UW Board of Regents — with the notable exception of state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers — no longer recognizes this essential premise of the University of Wisconsin. They have made clear their abandonment of a commitment to sifting and winnowing, and the Wisconsin Idea that extends from it, by voting to restrict First Amendment rights on UW campuses.

Ellenberg: How Computers Turned Gerrymandering Into a Science

New York Times

MADISON, Wis. — About as many Democrats live in Wisconsin as Republicans do. But you wouldn’t know it from the Wisconsin State Assembly, where Republicans hold 65 percent of the seats, a bigger majority than Republican legislators enjoy in conservative states like Texas and Kentucky.

How Computers Turned Gerrymandering Into a Science

New York Times

MADISON, Wis. — About as many Democrats live in Wisconsin as Republicans do. But you wouldn’t know it from the Wisconsin State Assembly, where Republicans hold 65 percent of the seats, a bigger majority than Republican legislators enjoy in conservative states like Texas and Kentucky.

Trans lab should be lauded for work

Wisconsin State Journal

The work of Dr. Budge has made a significant impact on the field of transgender psychology. Her work is often lauded as being cutting edge and addressing the day-to-day challenges faced by gender diverse people.

Richard Monette: Redistricting case misses chance to test state’s own constitution

Capital Times

As a longtime professor of Wisconsin constitutional law and government, I have been lamenting that Wisconsin’s constitution and institutions have been largely absent from the Wisconsin redistricting case just argued in the U.S. Supreme Court. Simply put, the case should have gone through the state court system using state constitutional arguments.

Wisconsin Voter-ID Study: Flawed and Unreliable

National Review

arlier this week, professors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison made national news, including a story in the New York Times, with the claim that that nearly 17,000 potential Wisconsin voters had been “deterred” by the state’s voter-ID law. All the usual suspects responded on cue, repeating all the expected talking points, with the clerk of Milwaukee County suggesting that the survey shows that “Jim Crow laws are alive and well.”

Everything you need to know about the Supreme Court’s big gerrymandering case

The Washington Post

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a major new case about partisan gerrymandering. The case began just days after the Nov. 8 election, when a federal court struck down a Republican-drawn legislative map in Wisconsin for being too partisan. Because of special rules for some voting rights cases, the Supreme Court is required to hear the case.

Hyde: Prize and prejudice?

Times Higher Education

Are the Nobel prizes sexist? If they are, then perhaps some are more sexist than others. The prize for literature has been awarded to 14 women and 95 men. The peace prize has gone to 16 women and 81 men. Of the others, female laureates number 12 in medicine/physiology, four in chemistry, two in physics, and just one in economics.

Taken as a whole, just 5 per cent of the 911 winners have been female, and in our opinion pages this week, Janet Shibley Hyde, director of the Center for Research on Gender and Women at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, considers why this might be.

UW–Madison’s new welcome mat

Madison Magazine

The University of Wisconsin–Madison has never really had a front door, an obvious entry spot with a “Welcome” mat and a bowl of hard candy on a little table when you walk in. I suspect a great many folks start their visit to the ever-more-sprawling campus at the Memorial Union. But that’s really more like a rec room leading out to the patio and the backyard. Bascom Hall is a kind of elegant grand entry, but the building is primarily offices.

Judge James Troupis: Free speech: a challenge for civil discourse

Capital Times

Column: How is it that it remains virtually unimaginable that the governor of this state, a governor confirmed three times by Wisconsin voters, cannot appear at the state’s flagship institution to address the most consequential legislation in the state’s history without a potential riot?

Matthew T. Hora: Opposiing UW cultural diversity courses hurts state’s workforce development

Capital Times

Column: [B}ased on my research about the skills employers seek in today’s job applicants, it is clear that Republican hostility to these courses is detrimental to Wisconsin’s ability to educate and train a competitive workforce. In fact, opposition to multicultural education in the state’s public colleges and universities will negatively impact one company in particular: Foxconn.

Patz: Quitting coal: a health benefit equivalent to quitting tobacco, alcohol and fast-food

The Guardian

Imagine, for a moment, that climate change was not synonymous with doomsday scenarios, but rather presented an opportunity to radically transform society for the better. This is not an attempt to downplay the seriousness of the risks facing our climate. Rather, it is about reframing the choice we face, away from the prospect of bleak minimalism often associated with a low-carbon future.

Journal Times editorial: Get your deer tested for chronic wasting disease

Racine Journal Times

“There still have been no known instances of humans contracting CWD, but hunters should know the new study demonstrates the risk isn’t nonexistent,” Keith Poulsen, of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, told the Wisconsin State Journal last week. CWD is related to incurable illnesses, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease found in humans, which can cause dementia and death.

Editorial: Workforce challenge is job No. 1

Wisconsin State Journal

Universities including UW-Madison are stressing entrepreneurial skills across campus, which will help young people move promising ideas into the marketplace. Technical colleges are partnering with employers on internships and incentives for targeted fields, and trying to eliminate waiting lists for popular programs. The University of Wisconsin System must redouble its efforts to connect graduates with businesses here. And the Legislature should consider financial incentives for students who stay.

Nadler: How to Fix American Stupidity

Time.com

When so many obviously intelligent and well-educated Americans claim that global warming is a “hoax”; when we seem obsessed with vilifying an entire, fourteen centuries-old religious tradition simply because of recent heinous actions of terrorists who profess to act in its name; when, nearly a century after the Scopes Trial, there is still significant public resistance to the theory of evolution, with one recent poll revealing that 34% of the population rejects evolution — over one third of the country! — and when voters elect a man so obviously unprepared and unfit to be president, I begin seriously to worry that we Americans are exhibiting greater and greater stupidity.

Issues of diversity, inclusion must be addressed with same level of commitment as Alcohol Edu, Tonight

The Badger Herald

As freshmen, we often experience some culture shock in our first two weeks of class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For some of us, the school is bigger than anything we’ve ever seen. For others, classes are harder than we expected. But, for a lot of students, especially minority students and members of historically disadvantaged communities, the obvious lack of diversity comes as a big hit.

Schwartz: Guatemala’s president tried to shut down a U.N. commission that announced it was investigating him

Washington Post

On Aug. 27, Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales ordered the immediate expulsion of the head of the U.N. Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, Iván Velásquez. Within hours, the country’s Constitutional Court had blocked the move. (Rachel A. Schwartz is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.)

David Wandel: Congrats to professor Shakhashiri

Capital Times

Every so often there is an action that has a perfect reaction. And so it is for an old friend, professor Bassam Shakhashiri. He is the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Grady-Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public.

Charlottesville May Put The Brakes On Campus Free Speech Laws

Huffington Post

The sight of white supremacists marching through the heart of the University of Virginia, carrying flaming Tiki torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us!” — followed by the killing of a counterprotester at a rally in downtown Charlottesville the next day — may put the brakes on state efforts to strengthen campus free speech protections.

Hicks: Memo to the Google memo writer: Women were foundational to the field of computing

Washington Post

The rampant sexism in the tech world was put on full display this week after an internal memo from a Google software engineer went viral on the Internet. If we are to believe the memo’s author — who was fired from the company Monday — women are more prone to “neuroticism” and less likely to pursue leadership roles in the tech industry because of “biological differences.” (Marie Hicks is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing.”)

Tom Still: Key leaders offer support for Foxconn deal

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MADISON — After lawmakers finished grilling members of the Walker administration over the details of a proposed incentive package to bring Foxconn Technology Group to Wisconsin, the mood in Thursday’s public hearing audibly changed.

What rural Wisconsin voters think of Donald Trump.

Slate

The divide between urban and rural communities, which has existed essentially everywhere for centuries, took on a singular importance to many of us when Donald Trump was elected last November. In her new book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, political scientist Katherine J. Cramer looks at what happened in 2016 through the lens of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s rural popularity, despite policies that would endanger his rural and working-class constituents.