Former Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton tells the story of how she attended a recent gathering at which one of Gov. Scott Walker’s appointees regaled a group of young people about the give and take that is so much the bedrock of American democracy.
Open Government 101 is now in session. UW System officials — including the Board of Regents — please be seated.
Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president in large part because of voters who have not graduated from college. In the Indiana primary, for example, Trump won 47 percent of the vote among college grads — but 60 percent among those who had not earned a bachelor’s degree.
As former UW Athletic Director Pat Richter well knows, I wrote about the demise of the men’s varsity baseball team until I was blue in the face.
Letter to the editor: The kids playing baseball in Wisconsin deserve better.
Letter to the editor: Some of our UW faculty have moved to the University of Minnesota. Minnesota of all places! Good luck with the climate. It’s worse than ours.
A job for life. ”Those are the words Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is using to describe tenure. It may be a terrible tact to take for his state’s university system, but it’s a smart move politically.
Column by Republican state senator from Saukville: When fourth grade groups visit the Capitol, I explain to them my job is to listen to all of my constituents: students, teachers, and parents. In the end, I make the best decision for all of Wisconsinites in mind. UW System President Ray Cross has a similar dilemma. He must work with the legislature, the governor, the Board of Regents, the Chancellors, the faculty, and the students.
Letter to the editor: It’s funny how UW-Madison, which claims to be reeling from budget cuts by those nasty old Republicans in the state Legislature, has no trouble forking out $47 million to “upgrade” (gentrify) Witte Hall. This is merely one step (along with the $100 million upgrade of Memorial Union) in the process of transforming the campus into a four-star hotel and spa.
Letter to the editor: Is there nowhere in Wisconsin beyond the reach of the cement industry?
Letter to the editor: Regarding Gov. Scott Walker’s May 29 column, “We didn’t eliminate UW tenure,” there seems to be two main issues.
Letter to the editor: Chancellor Rebecca Blank’s sentiments in “Rebecca Blank: Dueling op-eds with Scott Walker dangerous for UW’s future is both understandable and wrong. Understandable because it is true that the chancellor is the one “under the hot lights” facing the bullies in the Republican Legislature and Gov. Walker, but wrong because bullies need to be confronted.
Letter to the editor: The Republican attack on UW has led to professors leaving the university in droves. UW-Madison professors bring in around $1 billion in research grants each year. That’s more than twice as much money as the university gets from the state.
Letter to the editor: In writing about professor Dietram Scheufele and his take on conflict surrounding the UW, editor Paul Fanlund sides with Scheufele’s belief that rhetorical framing is more important than the hard work of activism. Did Fanlund feel the same when the governor and Legislature tried to rewrite open records laws?
You can always find a surprising tidbit while reading a newspaper, but the May 26 edition of The Post-Crescent takes the cake. That day’s column by state Rep. Jim Steineke should be given an award for brazen misrepresentation. Mr. Steineke writes how much he appreciates those who work in education, yet for the past five years, Mr. Steineke has been at the forefront of those legislators who have led the attack against public education in Wisconsin.
Letter to the editor: With all due respect to UW English chair Caroline Levine, her comparison makes zero sense.
Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is pointing to data from the University of Wisconsin System showing only six tenured professors have gotten the boot over the last 20 years.
On May 20, the UW Colleges faculty council voted no confidence in our president, Ray Cross, and the Board of Regents. This followed no-confidence votes by numerous other UW campuses.
Politicians come and go. UW-Madison is here to stay — and so are the vast majority of its professors. That’s reassuring.
Walker’s attempt to eliminate language detailing that “Wisconsin Idea” pledge caused a lot of controversy in Wisconsin, and nationally. It was embarrassing for Walker because it reinforced an impression of him as a political careerist who had little interest in public education or public service.
Written by Ray Cross, president of the University of Wisconsin System.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos talking tough about UW faculty reminds me of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” where: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Ray Cross’s selection as UW System president in 2014 sounded promising. He had a Ph.D. in university administration and experience as an engineer, business owner, consultant, professor and college president. He’d been with the System since 2011 and seemed to be well regarded by colleagues, legislators and Regents.
I am always amazed when the people of Wisconsin are angry at the staff of our wonderful university over salaries and tenure.
Most faculty and staff at UW do not have tenure and accordingly can be easily dismissed for unwelcome criticism or imagined “arrogance.”
Almost 35,000 students graduated from college in Wisconsin this month. They and their families were proud of that accomplishment. They believed that their own investment in higher education would pay off in a better life.
By now the Mincome experiment is well known. In the 1970s, every resident of Dauphin, a small Manitoba town, was given the option to collect substantial cash payments without work requirements. Economist Evelyn Forget’s findings about Mincome’s positive effects on health and education helped to resuscitate the concept of a basic income in Canada. With basic income pilots on the horizon, it is worth considering new lessons from an old experiment.
Some people believe higher education’s financial woes in Wisconsin began the day Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2011. They would be mistaken.
In March 2013, Rebecca Blank had to know the touchy political terrain onto which she was stepping.
Today’s elite college students face a unique set of pressures. On the professional side life is competitive, pressured, time-consuming, capitalistic and stressful. On the political side many elite universities are home to an ethos of middle-aged leftism. The general atmosphere embraces feminism, civil rights, egalitarianism and environmentalism, but it is expressed as academic discourse, not as action on the streets.
Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, who served as Indiana’s governor from 2005 to 2013, just launched “Back a Boiler,” which is accepting applications for the fall semester in West Lafayette. The innovative program lets students avoid borrowing tens of thousands of dollars in loans — debt that forces many young people to put off buying homes and getting married.
Gov. Scott Walker is annoyed at faculty “no-confidence” votes against the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and UW System President Ray Cross. It comes as the university system appears ready to make significant campus-by-campus changes.
The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. The reigning Republican governor of Wisconsin was in Green Bay at the annual GOP state convention railing about overpaid and underworked university professors and suggesting they should be happy that they make more money than most working people.
Every year as spring unfolds, fruit growers around Wisconsin start feeling anxious, wondering whether a late frost will harm their crop. Overall, temperatures are warming across the state amidst global climate change, but this pattern is accompanied by unseasonable cold weather events, such as the late spring frost much of the state experienced earlier this month.
It would be a mistake to believe higher education’s financial woes in Wisconsin began the day Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2011.
Column by Lisa H. Cooper, an associate professor in UW-Madison’s English department.
Column by state Rep. Terese Berceau, D-Madison: “Oh, he’s been gone for a year to the private sector. They waited for the real estate market to get better and when the house sells, they’ll join him.” This was the explanation from a constituent when I mentioned all the For Sale signs in front of houses owned by UW-Madison employees.
Column by Paul Wilson, a professor of nuclear engineering at UW-Madison’s Engineering Physics Department, and the interim chair of the Energy Analysis and Policy program of the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies
Letter to the editor: While UW-Madison professor Caroline Levine’s (Enough With Scott Walker and the GOP — I’m Leaving) concern about the erosion of state financial support for UW-Madison is justified, her narrow solutions are problematic. She suggests large increases in student tuition at the same time another article in Cap Times states that the average student graduates from the UW System with $29,000 in debt. She bemoans that only 27.5 percent of students can be admitted from out-of-state (who pay significantly higher tuition).
Letter to the editor: UW English professor Caroline Levine’s opinion piece on UW brings to light a major challenge faced by public universities: the obligation to serve residents of the states that created and partially fund them versus maximizing the quality of their product.
Column from state Rep. Melissa Sargent, D-Madison: I’m about to embark on a journey that parents all over Wisconsin celebrate. My oldest son, Devin, is graduating high school and will be attending UW-Madison this fall.
Letter to the editor: As UW-Madison updates its policies to further prohibit smoking on campus, the grocery store’s removal of nicotine products — including e-cigarettes — greatly supports the many students who want to live and attend classes on a campus where smoking doesn’t exist.
The letter in Tuesday’s paper “Phil Hands cartoon insulted trade workers” was comparing apples to oranges. It does take a lot of training in a trade or technical school to become a welder. However, this writer has no idea what it takes to maintain a world-class university such as UW-Madison.
Tens of thousands of graduates are crossing commencement stages at campuses throughout the University of Wisconsin System this month. It is a grand achievement, and worthy of all the celebrations that are taking place. We have had the privilege of participating in a number of them.
It’s hard to recall a school year in Wisconsin with more conflict than the one that is drawing to a close. Changes to the University of Wisconsin System’s tenure and shared governance policies received much debate, pitting faculty, staff and their supporters against lawmakers and other state officials.
And so we ask once again: should we rethink the value of fraternities on U.S. college campuses? Is it finally time to acknowledge these organizations are an anachronism at best and a breeding ground for intolerance and bigotry at worst?
The suspension of Sigma Alpha Epsilon for UW-Madison is but the latest example of an American college fraternity exposed for racially insensitive behavior.
And so we ask once again: should we rethink the value of fraternities on U.S. college campuses?
Noted: The keynote speaker for the event will be Gail Ford. Over the past 13 years, Ford has worked in non-profits and post-secondary institutions to advocate for systematic changes to better align K-12 education programming with college-ready expectations. In March of 2015, she was asked to serve as the Interim Assistant Director for the Pre-College Enrichment Program for Leaning Excellence (PEOPLE) at UW-Madison. Her work with youth and professionals afforded her the opportunity to attend First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Beating the Odds Summit” at The White House in July 2015.
Letter to the editor from David Vanness, associate professor of population health sciences in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and president of the UW-Madison chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
Noted: The spotlight remains on local governments when it comes to equity. Madison and Dane County are still reeling from the very damning Race to Equity report published nearly three years ago. Violence among people of color has reared its head recently. Tension between communities of color and police remain high. Incidents of hate and bias on the University of Wisconsin campus continue, to say nothing of the near-constant microagressions students there report.
I sat proudly in Camp Randall on Saturday watching my oldest son graduate from UW-Madison. As a two-time graduate of UW, I looked out over the field of new graduates and marveled at what UW has meant to so many people.
Sure, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson took some poetic license in his address to Wisconsin graduates, but his central point remains the same: Being dumped by N. C. State still fuels him.
“We can’t do more with less,” UW-Extension Regional Director Julie Keown-Bomar told people gathered at a recent Menomonie meeting. “We have to do less with less. We cannot be the same cooperative extension service that we used to be.”
ever in all of Chinese history did a government in the territory which is now China ever lay claim to the waters of what Vietnamese call the East Sea and Chinese the South Sea and Americans the South China Sea because American trading vessels in the 19th century often crossed this body of water on the way to China.
University of Wisconsin System faculty members have expressed outrage after the UW Board of Regents voted recently on tenure changes and an email surfaced from UW System President Ray Cross stating tenure should not protect faculty “who are no longer needed in a discipline.”
Column by Eric Sandgren, an associate professor and former administrator at UW-Madison.
In a recently publicized private memo, University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross compared tenured faculty “who are no longer needed in a discipline” to railway brakemen who, he claimed, demanded “a job for life even when that job was no longer necessary.” Cross’ analogy fails on two counts: First, it’s bad history. Second, and more importantly, it misses the point; Professors are not asking for a “job for life.” We are concerned that shortsighted and misinformed policies threaten to undermine the university and its mission.
Last Wednesday, after the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay faculty voted no-confidence in UW System President Ray Cross and the regents, Gov. Scott Walker used the discussion to enter misleading claims about faculty salaries and state support for higher education.
Quoted: “Madison has had African Americans in prominent leadership positions before — two police chiefs and I believe at least two school board presidents,” said UW Professor of Education Gloria Ladson-Billings. “However, none of that matters without the backing of other decision makers. The President of the United States is a Black man who has been stymied at every turn. More important than ONE person’s election or appointment is the mobilization of an electorate who will get behind the person and their agenda.”
Editorial cartoon.
