Category: Opinion

Dear Editor: Introduced in April, a bill written by Rep. Andre Jacque, R-De Pere, would prohibit faculty from training resident physicians in performing abortions. Critics of the proposed measure fear for the loss of UW-Madison’s national accreditation in training OBGYNs. Others fear for a future further down the line that results in decreasing access to OBGYN professionals throughout the state.

Foxconn, which makes liquid display panels for computers, televisions and other devices, also has expressed an interest in UW-Madison research, which could further expand the company’s positive economic impact across the state. This week’s announcement is exciting and welcome, given that several other states had hoped to land the technology manufacturer and its 20 million-square-foot campus on at least 1,000 acres. But Wisconsin taxpayers still need convincing that the governor’s incentive package is worth its steep price.

Emergency: You need more disposable diapers, right away. You hop into your car and trust your ride will be a safe one. Thanks to your phone’s GPS and the microchips that run it, you map out how to get to the store fast. Once there, the barcode on the package lets you accurately check out your purchase and run. Each step in this process owes a debt to the universities, researchers, students and the federal funding support that got these products and technologies rolling in the first place.

Letter to the editor: The bill proposed by Rep. Andre Jacque to prohibit UW physicians from performing abortions and training others to do so is short-sighted and punitive.

Letter to the editor: As state lawmakers push to recruit university leaders from outside academia, we should consider what it means to employ the “business model” to higher education.

Jul 21 each year marks Racial Harmony Day. Ho Li-Ching explores whether students should be encouraged to discuss controversial issues related to race in the classroom and what’s stopping teachers from doing so. Ho Li-Ching is president of the Singapore Association for Social Studies Education and associate professor of social studies education at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

GOP state representative Andre Jacque has introduced a bill that would bar medical residents at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from learning how to perform abortions. It’s a move that would do a lot more than hurt abortion access — though that alone is a reason to oppose it. It would also chip away at women’s access to all forms of gynecological and obstetric care, particularly in the state of Wisconsin.

Celebrating 100 years of public radio.

It is good that Wisconsin lawmakers are concerned about free speech. But it makes no sense to protect free speech by limiting free speech. But that is exactly what the Wisconsin Assembly has done in approving legislation that threatens those who dare speak their mind on college campuses.

Letter to the editor: This Tuesday, July 18, there is a public hearing on a uniquely dangerous bill. This legislation if passed will do irreparable damage to the University of Wisconsin System and the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics Authority, while attacking health care access for Wisconsin women.

The Michigan Legislature, like the U.S. Senate, is a safe space for right-wing groupthink. That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn from a recent flurry of activity on the manufactured crisis of “campus free speech” in Lansing and Washington, D.C.

It is clear that lawmakers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are attempting to achieve politically neutral college campuses in the name of “protecting” free speech — campuses where all speech is considered equally valuable, no matter how morally repugnant, intellectually empty and psychologically dangerous.

President Trump and Senate Democrats are steadfastly opposed to one another over judicial nominees. Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Gary Peters, D-Mich., are now threatening to “blue-slip” Trump’s nomination of Joan Larsen to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Other senators are making similar threats. With Republicans poised to reform the blue slip, now seems an appropriate time to discuss what it is and how it works in practice.

Letter to the editor: Any claims that UW is partisan are just reactions to something the critics don’t want to hear.

Column: Right now there there are 664 African-Americans out of 31,407 undergraduates at UW-Madison. In the entire UW System, there are 4,640 African-Americans out of 151,895 undergraduate students. Yet rather than asking why the percentage of African-American students is so alarmingly low, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, is fast-tracking a bill to create safe spaces on Wisconsin campuses for right-wing purveyors of racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

Of course, Tommy Thompson deserves to be honored with a University of Wisconsin center that is named for him — and that explores his fascination with politics and the innovative policymaking that can and should extend from the electoral process. But the center must not get bogged down in the petty politics of the moment.

As a person of color studying at the overwhelmingly white University of Wisconsin-Madison, I believe policymakers also ought to hear my story and consider my experience, and the stories and experience of other students of color, before telling us whose voices are and aren’t being heard.

For more than a half century, the United States has operated what might be called a “Miracle Machine.” Powered by federal investment in science and technology, the machine regularly churns out breathtaking advances.

Video: In “Two Minutes with Mitch” local radio personality Mitch Henck gives his two cents on the debate over free speech on University of Wisconsin campuses.

Being called out of one’s names is not only about calling out racist, sexist, or homophobic slurs. It is about the power and control to chart one’s own destiny.

Free speech on Wisconsin’s college campuses has been getting a lot of attention at the State Capitol recently.

Letter to the editor: I am extremely proud of the Republicans in the Wisconsin Assembly, which passed the Campus Free Speech Act last week. I earned my master’s degree from UW-Madison in 1973 and lived through many violent protests during my time there.

A crowd of 200 dairy-involved attendees participated in the “Dairy Summit” hosted by the University of Wisconsin held at the Alliant Energy Center June 19, 2017. A host of speakers described everything from research to milk production, and dairy marketing to the future of dairying in Wisconsin.

The Capital Times has defended campus free speech since the days when U.S. Sen. Robert M. La Follette and Capital Times founder William T. Evjue were burned in effigy by pro-World War I militarists at UW-Madison.

State Journal editorial from a century ago: The University of Wisconsin’s own catalog lists 27 teachers in the department of German. And it was only a short time ago when every student at the university, regardless of what course be pursued, was compelled to study German. …That compulsory regulation has been eliminated. But German is still the language urged on our students. The German department has 27 instructors compared to 25 in all other modern languages combined.

Wisconsin’s economy is providing an interesting combination of positive and negative news.

This happens to be her last month at the helm of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, the super-active organization that serves the more than 400,000 UW-Madison alumni around the world.

Martina Kunovic is a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a visiting researcher at the Instituto Cubano de Investigación Cultural Juan Marinello in Havana in 2015-16.

After thinking that interest in and excitement about massive open online courses had faded to the background of the higher education landscape, I was surprised to see a recent flurry of news media coverage of MOOCs.

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.