Category: Opinion

Column from Grant Petty, a professor and chair of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Alicia Beltran is famous for her recent Kafka-esque pregnancy experience. She had stopped using painkillers and weaned herself off the antiaddiction medication. She provided full information to her health care provider. But instead of receiving prenatal care, she was ordered by the state to resume using antiaddiction medication. When she declined, she was arrested and, although she screened negative for all evidence of drug dependence or abuse, was committed to a facility for months before finally being released after a federal complaint was filed on her behalf.

Thousands of people with illnesses ranging from Parkinson’s disease to cancer, from heart defects to multiple sclerosis, cling to a hope that ongoing research using tissue from aborted fetuses will find a cure.

UW-Madison should consider this recommendation and cut the campus police department and contract with the Madison Police Department. The same should be done for Madison Area Technical College and any other public entity that separately has established its own police units.

On July 1, Elizabeth Garrett assumed the presidency of Cornell University.With this, half of the eight-member Ivy League schools now have female presidents. Garrett joins an illustrious group: Christina Paxson (Brown University), Drew Faust (Harvard University) and Amy Gutmann (University of Pennsylvania).

By R. Alta Charo:

If you’ve followed the news over the past several days, it’d be easy enough to think that politicians on the right, without exception, are and have been unwavering opponents of fetal tissue research while politicians on the left have callously enabled the sale and donation of fetal tissue for research use. George Will’s observation that the “nonnegotiable tenet in today’s Democratic Party” is “opposition to any restriction on the right to inflict violence on pre-born babies” is fairly representative.And also pretty misleading.Yes, Republicans tend to be anti-choice and Democrats tend to be pro-choice. But Republicans and conservatives have long supported Planned Parenthood’s retrieval of tissue from legally aborted fetuses.

From July 25: This fall, our students will return and we will pick up the mantle of teaching and learning once again, finding tremendous meaning and joy in a profession that focuses on helping people acquire knowledge. And politicians will take to the road, looking for trouble and finding it everywhere.

From July 25: This fall, our students will return and we will pick up the mantle of teaching and learning once again, finding tremendous meaning and joy in a profession that focuses on helping people acquire knowledge. And politicians will take to the road, looking for trouble and finding it everywhere.

The reorganization of the 13 UW Colleges into four regional groups should be viewed as a first step toward a regional reorganization of the whole University of Wisconsin System.

When Americans think about lobbying, they usually think about lobbying legislatures. Take the Affordable Care Act (ACA). According the Center for Responsive Politics, the ACA was one of the most lobbied bills in Congress over the last decade with more than 1,250 organizations registered on more than 5,000 issues.

As I think about the state budget challenges posed during the last six months, one positive result is this: The greatest successes for the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point came with strong support from our business and legislative partners throughout the region, as well as our students.

Dear Editor: As a tenured professor and faculty senator at UW-Madison, I am deeply disappointed with the University Committee’s hasty and ill-conceived reprimand of my colleague Sara Goldrick-Rab for allegedly damaging academic freedom and the university with statements she made on Twitter. Regardless of what one thinks about her tweets, one does not damage the principle of academic freedom by exercising it. It is bad enough that the Legislature has weakened tenure protections at the University of Wisconsin. The University Committee ought not to compound this situation by discouraging the fearless sifting and winnowing on which our institution once prided itself.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is a tenured professor of sociology and education policy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is an outspoken public scholar with a prolific social media presence, and she is devastated about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s recent changes to tenure and shared faculty governance at her place of employ. For several months, as Walker’s agenda has turned from talking points to reality, Goldrick-Rab’s Twitter feed has become a juggernaut of links to news articles, document explication, and 140-character cannon fire. Her most controversial tweet compares the psychological profiles of Walker and Adolf Hitler. She has put into very public practice the exercise of the exact academic freedom whose death she foretells. And she can, because she has tenure—for now.

OK, while we’re on the topic today of batty things people blurt out let’s not forget a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor by the name of Sara Goldrick-Rab.

Noted: Nor are there “terrifying” similarities between Walker and Hitler, as a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor [Sara Goldrick-Rab] recently tweeted. There aren’t even vague similarities. When Walker was in the Assembly and he and I went to the same church, we would on occasion chat. Not once did this sincerely (and seriously) conservative son of a Baptist minister express a desire to take over the world or exterminate whole populations. Didn’t happen. And you know, it’s even absurd that one has to say all this.

(Sara) Goldrick-Rab’s irresponsible expression of her concern for academic freedom and UW-Madison harmed the very causes she was trying to support. Her remarks about Gov. Walker and legislators allowed their supporters to take the offensive. But most damning of all, when the public should look to UW-Madison faculty for leadership in reasonable discussions of public policies, she offered little more than vitriol.

Letter to the editor from former UW and current University of Texas professor. “I have been at three of the best public universities in the country and believe that UW-Madison, with its deeply embedded shared governance approach, exceptionally strong research infrastructure, and its focus on serving the community beyond campus, is unparalleled in the opportunities it opens for student-faculty discovery and the impact it ultimately has on the public good.”

It’s a widely noted fact that colleges and universities are under new pressure to justify their value and function. The same is true of tenure-track faculty members, who are at the heart of the higher education system whose benefits much of society now claims to find mysterious, and whose job security is increasingly criticized.

The new, 542-page independent review commissioned by the ethics committee of the American Psychological Association has generated considerable attention, replete with a front-page story in The New York Times. Documenting the alleged involvement of some of the nation’s leading psychologists in enhanced interrogations conducted by the military and intelligence agencies in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America, the report accuses some association leaders of using their positions to protect the interrogation program from critics within the Central Intelligence Agency. Furthermore, it concludes, the APA itself “chose its ethics policy based on its goals of helping DOD, managing its PR, and maximizing the growth of the profession.”

Not being rich, our family has allocated much of our financial resources to sending our children to UW schools. But we’re not the only ones who put up dollars. Every Wisconsin taxpayer did also.

Ten of my family members with degrees work in Wisconsin. They pay taxes, buy homes, bring up families and contribute to life here as pharmacists, nurses, teachers, computer specialists and accountants. The taxpayers investment pays off.

A key talking point in the Obama Administration’s efforts to convince Congress and the public to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a proposed trade and investment treaty between the U.S. and 12 nations in the Asia Pacific region, now being negotiated—is that the U.S. needs to “write the rules” of trade in the Asia Pacific region before China does. Obama warned in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal that China would be able to “muscle other countries in the region around rules that disadvantage us” if the United States fails to participate in the TPP.

This interview, the sixth in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning economic policy. My interviewee is Daniel Hausman, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of “Preference, Value, Choice and Welfare.” — Gary Gutting

The subject of quotas for Asian American students in higher education is making news as groups of Asian Americans file lawsuits against Harvard and other elite universities.

What is it about the long-time favorite television show, Sesame Street, that has allowed it to influence generations of viewers?

Next week, Scott Walker is expected to announce that he’s running for president. When he does, he’ll give voters a decision many have never faced in their lifetimes: should you vote for someone without a college degree for President of the United States?

We do this because we care about our students, many of whom first-generation college students. Higher education is one of the few vehicles for social mobility, and we want to give them the best possible boost for their futures.

A number has a way of ending an argument. What can you say to it? There’s no nuance, no room for interpretation—it is what it is.