Category: Opinion

You’d think I’d be in favor of the “campus free speech” bills the Wisconsin Legislature is considering. I’m a strong proponent of free speech on campus, and I believe that our students benefit from being exposed to all kinds of views, even those that mock or directly attack the values they were raised with by their families.

Noted: That’s the conclusion of a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine identifying four Trump appointees as carriers of the disinformation virus. What makes them especially dangerous, says the author, bioethicist R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin law school, is that the “alternative facts” they’re purveying could influence an entire generation’s attitude toward contraception, for the worse.

A couple of weeks ago collaboration by several schools and colleges at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW System and UW Extension focused on helping every child thrive.

A couple of reports from two of the University of Wisconsin’s most influential thought and research centers allow for some cautious optimism about the battle to reduce poverty in Wisconsin, while also offering evidence of the need to step up the fight.

The right-wingers who control state government these days are determined to pass blatantly unconstitutional laws to limit protest on the UW’s campuses and “protect” conservative speakers from unruly protesters.

Dave Zweifel column: It’s unlikely that any of these modern-day speech police have ever bothered to read any history about protest and free speech controversies in our higher education system. It’s been the case throughout the UW’s history and in many cases, it was the conservatives who were shutting down the liberals.

By the standards of the politically charged Wisconsin inhabited by UW-Madison administrators and Republican leaders of the state Legislature, the creation of a Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership is a sublime kind of genius.

Letter to the editor: UW Chancellor Becky Blank and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos are fooling no one.

Letter to the editor: Anyone who thinks that the proposed Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership at UW-Madison “is a fine idea,” as Friday’s State Journal editorial contended, should read Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.”

The country’s most powerful engine of upward mobility is under assault. Public colleges have an unmatched record of lofting their students into the middle class and beyond. For decades, they have enrolled teenagers and adults from modest backgrounds, people who are often the first member of their family to attend college, and changed their trajectories.

Noted: Fewer people, especially fewer children, are living in poverty in Wisconsin than ever before. In fact, we’ve seen a “significant reduction” in poverty across our state the past several years. That’s the data presented in a new report from UW-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty.

I’m not a fan of Ann Coulter. I disagree with her on most issues and I don’t like her style. A little too nasty, even for me. If she’s coming to a venue near me, I’m not likely to be in that audience.

It’s been interesting to follow the discussion from our legislators (mostly Republicans) related to the issue of free speech on university campuses. I applaud their support of the right of people to express their opinions, no matter how offensive, without the threat of being silenced.

Our UW System considers undocumented students “international students” for tuition purposes; that is, they must pay three times what resident students pay, without the ability to access any federal or state financial aid.

Letter to the editor by Tishler, a UW-Madison emeritus professor of landscape architecture

The UW System has about 180,000 students, a number that includes young adults of all stripes. It seems politics knows no boundaries when it comes to families and higher education.

UW administrators seek to guarantee that differing views can be expressed and challenged. They stumble sometimes; but we respect their efforts to ensure that, when exchanges get intense, everyone can be heard.

Letter to the editor: UW System has policies that protect free speech and ensure discipline for students who violate free speech. The Vos and Kremer legislation demeans one of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the country.

That liberals run American universities is never going to be a man-bites-dog news headline, but the urgent question ought to be: When are university liberals going to stand up and defend liberalism?

Racist hate speech on campus has become the de facto litmus test for free speech protections today. But racist hate speech may not be doing what progressive free speech defenders think it is doing.

For the last couple of years, one of the two biggest topics of discussion regarding college education in the U.S. has been the widespread assault against free speech by “progressives.” (The other is the rising level of student debt and the inability of many students to pay off their obligations.) Speakers who don’t toe the leftist party line are shouted down and students who don’t are apt to be accused of “hate speech” and hauled before a “bias response team.” Debate, say many leftists, should be curtailed in the interests of “fairness” and “sensitivity.”

Both UW-Madison and Edgewood College have joined Madison College as partners in the Madison School District program to get high school students thinking about college and career possibilities earlier and more strategically.

“You’re the whitest black guy I know”.

Columnist: Freedom of speech includes both sides.

The U.S. corporate income tax wastes resources: avoidance distorts business decisions, compliance imposes administrative costs, and very interested parties fight vigorously over its details. Its complexity enables some profitable corporations to avoid taxes altogether and it increasingly provides a smaller share of federal revenue, falling from about one-third in the 1950s to about a tenth today. Its complexity obscures transparency and provides opportunity for various interests to seek and obtain favorable treatment.

Driving me to ballet, my mom would describe how she expected the world would have mirrored “The Jetsons” by then — a futuristic utopia with breakfast at the push of a button and families buzzing around in spaceships. Stuck in traffic, we laughed. No flying cars in sight.

With both sides making valid arguments, finding which one is in correct is far more difficult than we might imagine.