Category: Opinion

Opinion column on faculty tenure issue.

This past Saturday, September 12, following an announcement in President Obama’s weekly address, the US Department of Education released its College Scorecard.

National attention on issues facing boys and men of color has been elevated in the wake of My Brother’s Keeper, President Obama’s initiative to improve life outcomes for boys and men of color in the United States.

The UW Madison’s Big Read program is meant to be a shared experience on campus of reading a selected book together. This year, five thousand students who attended Chancellor Becky Blank’s Convocation prior to the start of classes each received a copy of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. It’s the seventh year of the common book program.

MULTIPLE TIMES OVER the past few years we have expressed concern about Wisconsin state government’s declining support for the University of Wisconsin system. The percentage of student education costs paid by the state — the same thing is happening all around the country, by the way — has been declining for years, while the percentage burdening families and students has risen rapidly.

The numbers speak for themselves: starting this year, thousands of students will be affected. But this is not the end of the line.

Though Gov. Scott Walker’s name is etched into the financial paperwork, a name on paper cannot, and will not, shut down a democratic laboratory. As students, when we move forward, our university moves forward. Possessing the ability to adapt to a new sociopolitical climate is a fundamental aspect of belonging to a progressive institution. So, again …

Now what?

The answer is dependent on us, the student body.

Noted: It was impossible to miss the sense of apprehension over misguided politics like the proposed ban on fetal tissue use, or the terrible risks involved in devaluing the University of Wisconsin. But these issues too served to focus the vision for the future that is being created along East Washington Avenue, at the UW Research Park, Epic and elsewhere.

Reverend Mitchell’s comment, taken irresponsibly out of context, offered that these arrests are predicated on the poverty in which three out of every four black Madison youth live. While large insured entities can cover the fiscal loss, the real cost is to Madisonians, as the homes they return to after arrest are primarily within black communities.

Respect for human dignity is essential in the performance of scientific research. As a University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduate in the Medical Scholars Program, I heard a declaration from more than one professor that ethical questions about experimentation could be set aside and dealt with later as long as there was great potential for medical breakthroughs.

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.