Category: Opinion

(Video) Neil Heinen talks about the University of Wisconsin comprehensive campaign that’s aiming to review the UW’s focus on its goals and raise money to help reach those goals.

Noted: Jeremi Suri is the Mack Brown distinguished professor for global leadership, history and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the E. Gordon Fox professor of history, director of the European Union Center of Excellence, and director of the Grand Strategy Program at UW-Madison from 2007-2009, associate professor at UW-Madison from 2005-2007, and assistant professor  at UW from 2001-2005.

Despite decades of public discourse and hand-wringing, the racial achievement gap persists across the country. Attention to this troubling pattern intensified once again this fall in response to the results of a new test in California — written specifically to reflect the recently implemented Common Core education standards.

The brutal shooting death of a 9-year-old boy is just the latest headline-grabbing act of gang violence on the streets of Chicago.

With higher education costs skyrocketing, Congress should be making it easier not harder to ensure students have access to an affordable college education. Yet, Senate Republicans, led by Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), have twice blocked the renewal of the longest standing federal financial aid program — the Perkins Loan.

Having spent six years in Silicon Valley earlier in my career, I am a Steve Jobs fan. A new biography, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader, contains important lessons for higher education.

You may recognize me as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, a position I’ve proudly held for more than five years.

When and why do people get involved in mass violence? What pushes individuals in a precariously tense region into brutality and blood — and what can prevent such slaughter? With gut-wrenching stories reaching us daily from Syria, Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, North Korea, Central African Republic, Libya, Nigeria and Congo, that urgent public policy question is being tackled by a number of academics, researchers and policymakers, including the Early Warning Project, a public prevention system for mass atrocity and genocide that combines statistical modeling with insights from an expert opinion pool. A month ago, the EWP released a detailed risk assessment for such violence.

Time Magazine reported institutions worth $2.6 trillion in assets have pledged to divest from fossil fuels. However, I am disappointed this value does not include UW-Madison’s endowment.

Since the beginning of the fall semester, I’ve received all the standard back-to-school emails from university officials, offices and organizations. “Remember to get your free flu shot,” “Scholarship application deadline approaching,” “Join our team.”

I had to wonder what Aldo Leopold would say.What would he think about allowing deer hunting at night or about letting hunters “shine” deer with bright lights to freeze them in their tracks so they can be shot more easily?The father of the conservation movement was an avid hunter but he could be tough on hunters who didn’t measure up to his ideal of the hunter’s ethic. In his seminal book, “A Sand County Almanac,” Leopold complains about hunters who kill does and young male deer then leave the carcasses to rot in the field while they pursue bigger bucks.

If we’re going to have the “guns on campus debate” – and due to warring pieces of legislation, we must – let’s at least argue the issue using accurate information. And according to that information, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, if it were a city – and it sort of is one, like Vatican City is within Rome – would be one of the safest around.

On Oct. 12, it was announced that state legislators Rep. Jesse Kremer, R-Kewaskum, and Sen. Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostberg, circulated legislation that would revoke the exception to Wisconsin’s concealed carry law that allows the University of Wisconsin System and technical colleges to ban concealed carry within campus buildings.

Genome editing, 3-D printing and robotics — these sound like subjects for doctoral students or headlines for a conference of tech savvy entrepreneurs. And they often are. They also are a slice of the activities planned for the fifth annual Wisconsin Science Festival, taking place in 36 communities across Wisconsin on Oct. 22-25, for people of every age and background.

UW-Madison is touting the results of a survey that show only 5.9 percent of the liberal arts class of 2012-13 is unemployed and that a plurality of those in the workforce make between $30,000 to $40,000 a year.

A US federal court has found that Apple infringed a patent held by the patenting arm of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The patent describes a mechanism that could be used in speeding up processors and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), who own the patent, claimed that Apple has used this technology in the processors for its recent iPhones and iPads.

Thank you to the Star Tribune for bringing critical attention to the issue of farm-work injuries and deaths in Minnesota over the last decade (“Tragic Harvest,” Oct 4-7). I began my career in farm safety 30 years ago, and spent almost 18 years as the agricultural safety and health specialist in Minnesota, leaving to become an associate dean in Wisconsin in 2008.

Column form Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, a liberal research, advocacy and communications organization dedicated to fighting for a state with equal economic opportunity for all.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison. The words “of Wisconsin” are right there in the name, just in case anyone needed reminding that the UW System schools are funded by the taxpayers of Wisconsin primarily to serve students from the Badger State.

Column from W. Lee Hansen, professor emeritus, economics, UW–Madison

As more and more videos are released by the Center for Medical Progress, the prohibition of the sale of aborted baby parts is a critical issue for Wisconsin, and for the nation. Now is the time to end the victimization of the unborn for profit, especially when they are dismembered in the womb for the harvesting of their organs.

Noted: A study from the University of Wisconsin found that a person’s chances at a callback interview for an entry-level job dropped by 50% when that applicant had a criminal history. And much like the criminal justice system itself, re-entry employment discrimination has a disparate impact on Americans of color.

That same study found that while 17% of whites with a criminal record were given a call back, only 5% of African Americans were given that same opportunity to continue in the interview process.

[The study in question is “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” a 2002 sociology dissertation by Devah Pager later published in the American Journal of Sociology. Pager is now a professor at Harvard.]

Studies have long shown that a college student’s odds of achieving financial security and a better quality of life improve when he or she earns a degree.

Is the Republican drive to limit research using fetal tissue a product of the gerrymandered Wisconsin Legislature? Republicans have a partisan lock on the Legislature thanks to boundary lines they drew in 2011.

Republicans in the state Legislature apparently think they are making a principled stand against abortions, but the impact of their proposed legislation to outlaw research on tissue from aborted fetuses would probably do little to deter abortions and would very likely be extremely damaging to the University of Wisconsin’s future as a research institution.

Since the economic downturn signaled by the fall of Lehman Brothers, law practice has become more competitive. Firms have failed, they are hiring fewer entry-level lawyers and, as a result, student demand for legal education has plummeted. According to the Law School Admissions Council, the organization that administers the LSAT, the number of students taking the exams was at an all-time high during the 2009-2010 academic year — 171,514 — and dropped to 101,689 in 2014-2015. The 205 American Bar Association-approved law schools are now competing for the best students in this shrunken pool.

He can start by rejecting an unnecessary and purely ideological attack on UW-Madison research that Chancellor Rebecca Blank warns would be a “direct hit” to her institution’s reputation — much worse than the $250 million the governor and Republican-run Legislature cut from the Madison campus and other University of Wisconsin System schools this summer.

Before Wisconsin Badgers running back Melvin Gordon completed his then NCAA record-setting 408-yard rushing performance, the Nov. 15, 2014 Wisconsin-Nebraska football game in Madison was interrupted for a special announcement: University of Wisconsin alumni John and Tashia Morgridge would match up to $100 million in donations made by others to UW-Madison.

Service workers are proud to work at UW and strive to do excellent work, but are easily forgotten. They, too, would like to receive some acknowledgement and reward for their work.