Category: Opinion

“You’ve told us about the 18 initiatives and the 40 or so metrics in the diversity and inclusion implementation plan. What should I tell my colleagues about how to focus our individual and group efforts? Which five initiatives should we concentrate on?” That is the essence of the question I heard posed by a department chairman at the first of the eight recently scheduled listening sessions on the new University of Wisconsin diversity framework. (W. Lee Hansen, emeritus professor of economics)

These folks are willing to shell out big bucks to show their support of the university through its athletic teams, in itself a commendable philanthropic gesture. Yet they actively support anti-tax politicians who have done their best to make things tough for the rest of the taxpayer-supported school.

Defending state employees has been an invitation to argue over the last several years as a fair number of our elected leaders have found it politically expedient to demonize state workers. And so the value of the services we need and value and pay for gets lost in self-serving government bashing.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.