Noted: “We believe the deal flow in Wisconsin is more than sufficient,” said David Guinther, a founding member of WISC Partners, an early stage fund launched by UW-Madison graduates who made their mark in Californias Silicon Valley. “Ive seen amazing changes in our ecosystem in Wisconsin since I came back five years ago.”
Quoted: Despite the UW System budget cuts now before the Legislature, he remains optimistic. As he said in December, after being named chancellor: “The best test of leadership is tough times.”
Thank you Wisconsin State Journal for Wednesday’s article “Campus pumps economy.” It is clear the University of Wisconsin System generates money for the state, lots of money, and at better returns than most stocks.
A recent column in The Badger Herald raised the question whether it would be better policy for police to investigate sexual assaults, rather than the university. This question is frequently raised, and we thank the writer for creating an opportunity to respond publicly to this idea. This is an important and complex discussion that is taking place not only at the University of Wisconsin, but also at the national level. Noted: Associate Dean of Students Kevin Helmkamp and Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Student Title IX and Clery Compliance Tonya Schmidt collaborated on this piece.
The idea to radically remake the UW as a so-called public authority — with dramatically less state involvement and support for the system — is unpopular for a number of reasons, some good, some bad.
I think we can agree that Frank Kaminsky just completed the most impactful career in University of Wisconsin men’s basketball history.
For fans, this is an emotional decision. For Dekker, it’s a business decision, plain and simple. That’s why it’s hard to find fault with Dekker’s announcement that he will pass on his final year at UW to enter the draft.
Noted: UW-Madison law professor Donald Downs comments.
Prestigious candidates for the director of the Carbone Cancer Center as well as a position for the top-level researcher in the UW-Madison nursing program both sited the proposed budget cuts as a reason not to accept the offers. They will gladly go where a state is willing to invest in their expertise.
All it took was some flowery language, unnerving descriptions and a horrible story — backed by weak journalism — for a national outcry to follow Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus” article, slammed by a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism report as a “journalistic failure.”
Our JanSport brand has the privilege of providing some of the licensed collegiate apparel for the University of Wisconsin. We’re proud that we screen and embroider it at our facility in Appleton, Wisconsin, which employs nearly 800 hardworking men and women.
These discussion sessions seem to us good faith efforts to make the UW more transparent and accessible in the true spirit of The Wisconsin Idea. We very much appreciate the UW’s leadership here. We need it.
The Wisconsin Badgers men’s basketball team stood out on the national stage this season for reasons the Dukes and Kentuckys of the college sports world can’t touch.Thank you, Coach Bo Ryan and Co., for the example and lift your team gave to our city and state.
On April 3 2015, a group of prominent biologists and ethicists writing in Science called for a moratorium on germline gene engineering; modifications to the human genome that will be passed on to future generations. The moratorium would apply to a technology called CRISPR/Cas9, which enables the removal of undesirable genes, insertion of desirable ones, and the broad recoding of nearly any DNA sequence.
Quoted: “One side is fundamentally rewriting the rules,” says political scientist Ken Mayer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Letter to the editor from Rep. Chris Taylor, D-Madison. Noted: “Walker’s proposed $300 million cut to the UW System would be the largest in state history, would certainly stall the economic growth the system produces, and would inevitably cause leading scholars to leave or not come to our state.”
A week ago in this space, I told you why I thought Kentucky would beat the UW on Saturday night. As I pointed out, good, mature, well-coached teams usually find ways to win. I suggested if the Badgers could hit three-point shots like they did a week earlier, “they can send the NBA feeder program otherwise known as Kentucky to its first defeat of the season. I wouldn’t bet on it. Neither would I bet against it, however.”
Column State Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, D-Alma.
Column contrasting UW, KU athletically and academically. Snippet: As a reporter in Kentucky, I often heard from higher education leaders and politicians that they wished UK had paid less attention to basketball over the last several decades and more attention to academics. At the time, UK was just exploring creating a university research park like the one UW-Madison launched three decades ago.”
Three years ago, Sam Dekker took an inbound pass in the closing seconds of the Wisconsin high school basketball championship game.
With the need to balance budgets and an aversion to increasing taxes, several states, including our own, are looking to cut back on spending for public universities. The time is right for a thoughtful discussion about the costs associated with higher education. It’s too bad we have near hysteria, instead.
Wisconsin has an exceptional system of technical schools that do just what he proposes. One of the advantages of an education provided by a university such as UW-Madison is the critical thinking skills students hopefully develop — skills that Johnson apparently lacks. If he had such skills, he’d easily recognize how UW is an economic boon to the state because of its work.
I don’t usually feel bad for highly placed, well-paid officials, but I felt bad for System President Ray Cross when a UW-Milwaukee English professor was able to extract the resignation promise during his Wednesday Q & A.
Column by Givnish, the Henry Allan Gleason professor of botany and environmental studies.
It can be statistically proven that the wealth of nations lies not with the oil and minerals in their lands, their strategic locations or the prominence of their armed forces, but rather in the level of education that their citizens have achieved. I will testify that I have found the pathway to happiness and success through education.
I am dismayed by Judith Shulevitz’s belittling response to student trauma. I teach an undergraduate class on “Sexualities and Race.” We discuss challenging issues like campus rape, human trafficking, pornography and sex work. “Scary ideas” certainly. Tragically, for some students these ideas are also scary realities. My students engage these issues with intellectual rigor and great courage. Yes, I give trigger warnings, and try to make my class a safe space.
Former Regent and Ambassador Loftus letter to the editor: Speaker Robin Vos and other legislators are right to question handing over control of the University of Wisconsin System to a quasi-public authority as called for in the proposed state budget. The danger is all too real that such a move would undermine the Wisconsin Idea by reducing public input into the university and the number of Wisconsin students who could attend. And that would fly in the face of the university’s underpinnings as developed by UW’s fifth president, John Bascom, the true founder of the Wisconsin Idea.
Letter to the editor from faculty member Daniel Greenspan: I strongly believe that the possible granting of public authority status to the University of Wisconsin System is an important opportunity.
By Jenny Seifert and Stephen Carpenter: Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and the Yahara lakes may be half a world apart, but they are connected by an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.
As a University of Wisconsin-Madison freshman, I would like to take the opportunity to voice my opinion about the proposed $300 million budget cut to the UW System for the 2015-17 biennial budgets. The affordability of UW-Madison relative to other highly regarded institutions is what makes this school attractive to so many students. I personally foresee an issue with these cuts, specifically for freshman and future attendees of UW System schools. I was drawn to UW-Madison because of the innovation and dedication to students at a fair price. I fear that those accepted into other highly regarded universities across the country will begin to choose elsewhere if tuition is raised, ultimately lowering the quality of students in attendance.
Column by Robert Wolfe, a UW-Madison sophomore and WISPIRG campaign coordinator.
They’d gladly boot every fraternity off campus tomorrow if they thought they could get away with it. But for now they are content to pick them off one by one.
UW-Madison’s complete turnaround on monkey maternal deprivation experiments highlights the lack of ethical oversight on this issue.
I and the writers of a couple of rather unkind letters to the editor had the same reaction to a recent bit of news out of UW-Madison concerning music preferences among man’s and woman’s second-best friend:
I recently learned that when the semester ends in May, nearly half of my immediate co-workers, maybe more, will be out of a job. Of course, adjuncts like me are often “out of a job,” since our contracts go only from semester to semester. But because I’m an adjunct in the University of Wisconsin system — the one that’s made headlines thanks to Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed $300-million budget cuts over the next two years — this time it feels different.
The N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament started Thursday, but for most Americans the real action began days before, as they pored over brackets, competing to make the most accurate predictions — for money, or just office glory. These days, when statistical algorithms can figure out what breakfast cereal you want based on your browser history, stats-minded hoops fans have thrown lots of complex analysis at the problem of picking winners.
The Retirees Association of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, a 200-plus-member organization of retired faculty and staff, has grave concerns about the devastating cuts in Gov. Walker’s proposed budget for the UW System. Collectively, we have experienced much smaller cuts in the past and are aware of the negative impacts cuts have on student educational experiences and opportunities.
The more you learn about football and brain injuries, the smarter Chris Borland looks.
It’s not only the well-publicized skills gap that prevents employers across the country from finding, hiring and keeping the workers they say they want. There’s also a wage gap, benefits gap and job-security gap.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for new elections in December 2014, he argued that he needed a stronger Likud Party that would enable him to govern more effectively – without the roadblocks thrown his way by the coalition partners on whom he depended. It appears that he has succeeded in this endeavor. While the results of the yesterday’s elections are not yet final, it appears that the Likud has significantly increased the number of seats it will have in the next Knesset from 18 seats to around 30, enabling it to be a relatively more dominant centerpiece of whatever coalition eventually emerges.
Here in “idyllic” Madison, Wisconsin, we are regularly told we have one of the most “livable” cities in the U.S. … but livable for whom? It was apparently not livable for Tony Terrell Robinson. Post written by Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor and Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education.
Borland’s announcement that he was leaving the game after one very successful season playing professional football could have a profound impact if we look at is an example of a young man making an educated, principled decision about his life and his future.
With a week of bullets filling the air from West Towne Mall to Rutledge Street, a gun battle on the near-east side and Madison police officer Matthew Kenny shooting and killing Tony Terrell Robinson on Willy Street, Madison’s racial problem is clearly going from bad to worse. Rather than be part of the parade of white guys in the media weighing in on this story, I offer this space to a smart woman of color—a colleague with whom I served on both the Urban League of Greater Madison and Madison Prep charter school boards. UW–Madison professor Gloria Ladson-Billings, the floor is yours. Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of a blog posted on Saturday, March 7.
UW-Madison’s decision to halt plans to remove newborn monkeys from their mothers as part of a controversial experiment is a step in the right direction. However, the 40 monkeys involved will still face tremendous suffering and distress for their short lives before being killed for questionable human benefit.
Search the word “humanities” online and up pops the phrase “humanities under attack.” The majority of undergraduates today are majoring in business, science and technology disciplines. Technology—and its promise of being able to fix all problems—is, it seems, king.What does all this mean for higher education? Why have the humanities undergone a crisis of legitimacy? And why does this matter?We asked four former university presidents—of Clemson University, University of Florida, University of Wisconsin and Virginia Tech—to give us their perspectives on these questions.
As the lead author on a recent study on music for cats, I’d like to address concerns expressed by some readers in the State Journal.
When does a 13 percent cut in the University of Wisconsin System’s budget become a “modest” 2.5 percent? When this cabal of truth-challenged Republicans running Wisconsin government says it is.
At a meeting between the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and state legislators in the fall of 2013, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos questioned the role of UW faculty in decision-making. Vos declared that changes to the universitys system of shared governance — the set of practices under which faculty, staff and students participate in significant decisions concerning the operation of their institutions — were a matter of “when, not if.”
Might I suggest that thousands of dollars could be saved by not funding research by UW-Madison emeritus professor of psychology Charles Snowden.
We’re happy to see UW-Madison included in the list of now 101 schools around the U.S. that are part of the investigation into possible violations of federal law over the handling of sexual assault complaints on campus, not because we think UW is guilty, and not because we like the idea of the UW even being associated with guilty schools, but because we believe UW can be part of the solution. In fact, UW should be part of the solution.
Column about the community center by Megan Stefkovich, a freshman majoring in biology.
Letter to the editor from Rep. Dana Wachs, D-Eau Claire, the ranking democratic member on the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities.
There has been considerable debate over the past month on the role of a public university and the meaning of The Wisconsin Idea. Recent commentary has ranged from historian John Gurdas eloquent definition of The Wisconsin Idea, to blogger Rick Esenbergs question: “What is it”?
I paid $17,000 in state income tax in 2014. I sometimes wish I lived somewhere without income tax, but I enjoy Wisconsin and feel our government usually invests my tax dollars to create good jobs and improve the quality of life.
There has been considerable debate over the past month on the role of a public university and the meaning of The Wisconsin Idea. Recent commentary has ranged from historian John Gurda’s eloquent definition of The Wisconsin Idea to blogger Rick Esenberg’s question: “What is it”?
As a UW student I am concerned for the future of the UW System with the recent release of a $300 million cut in the next two years. With a $2.2 billion deficit across the state, it is going to be difficult to find room to make these cuts, and the UW System does not have any “fat” to trim.
Much criticism of Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal for the University of Wisconsin System has focused on the $300 million in cuts envisioned for the coming two years.
Hansen, of Madison, is an emeritus professor of economics at UW-Madison.
Noted: Sean Dinces is the Allan H. Selig assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Innovation campus has an advantage over any other facility in the state because of the major corporate employers located in this region. Southeast Wisconsin actually holds more patents than Dane County, the home of UW-Madisons $1 billion research engine. How is that possible? Because corporate giants in this region generate patents as their own research and development realize what the market demands.
