Category: Opinion

It’s worth noting that President Barack Obama’s new education initiative introduced last week has its roots right here on the UW Madison campus.

Noted: Carolyn J. Heinrich is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin formerly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has worked with Milwaukee Public Schools in an external research and evaluation capacity since 2006.

The battle over who should lead colleges and universities has been raging since the inception of higher education. It is most often, and stereotypically, cast as a fight between administrators and faculty members. Both of those parties, supposedly interested in what students need, are alternately said to be effective governors of higher education and major impediments to effective leadership.

Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature should give UW-Madison the right to work without micro-management. Take off the shackles that bind UW’s hands.

or multiple reasons I find possibly misleading either the study of economic development marketing by the University of Wisconsin’s department of agricultural and applied economics or Mike Ivey’s brief description of it, “WEDC marketing efforts a waste of money, new report suggests.”

Okay, so it wasn’t the most eloquent statement ever, but it was accurate.”Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.”

Rock County got an early Christmas present Dec. 19 when a Georgia recycling and packaging company announced plans to build a $52 million factory in Beloit that will employ 140 people. (Subscription required.)

My hope for 2015 is that Madison Mayor Paul Soglin will finally have the courage to close the hideously cruel University of Wisconsin Primate Center.

The post-World War II baby boom swept into American colleges in the 1960s, driving up total taxpayer costs and sending officials looking for financial answers.

Noted: We have seen a dramatic cultural shift since 1984. Nowhere has this been more evident than at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Back then, few researchers were entrepreneurially minded, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation WARF refused to license its patents to start-ups and most students aspired to find secure career paths in large companies. We had to seek permission from the chancellor to help organize a campus seminar on entrepreneurship, a process that took more than a year. There were no buildings in the University Research Park.

The post-World War II baby boom swept into American colleges in the 1960s, driving up total taxpayer costs and sending officials looking for financial answers.

When now-former Wisconsin Badgers football coach Gary Andersen unexpectedly caught the last train for the West Coast, one of the reasons suggested by pundits was that the UW has tougher academic standards for its players than a lot of other schools. This wasn’t denied by Andersen, who was reportedly unhappy that he couldn’t recruit a promising lineman from Sun Prairie because the kid didn’t have the grades for admission at the university.

I’m sure former Wisconsin football coach Gary Andersen longed to return to his roots in the West. but if a few little things that were important to him had been better in Madison, I can’t help but think he would have stayed longer.

Shared government is something that is essential to the functionality of this campus. It allows for faculty, staff and students to participate in significant decisions that concern the way that this institution is operated. Here at this university, Chancellor Rebecca Blank is showing a lack of shared governance.

Imagine, for a moment, that Wisconsin had a wholly uncontroversial program that allowed low-income students to use a state voucher to attend the private, religious school of their choice. And imagine this program wasnt constantly under attack by public school employees; instead, it is recognized as simply another option allowing flexibility for students and their families.

Rolling Stone magazine last week acknowledged that there were “mistakes” in an article it published describing the gang rape of a freshman named Jackie during a fraternity party in 2012 at the University of Virginia. It is not yet clear whether the discrepancies between Jackie’s account and reporting by The Washington Post, among other news outlets, mean that the story was only superficially inaccurate or substantially false.

Noted: If you’ve watched many of the talking heads on cable television try to discuss the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, you know what we’re talking about. Unfortunately, sometimes comments on newspaper stories and columns have a similar effect.In fact, it has a name: “The nasty effect. ”That’s what University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele dubbed the negative effect certain comments can have on a reader’s understanding.

Wisconsin yet again faces mounting budget deficit projections. The danger is that Gov. Scott Walker will now sell off the publics property to fill the fiscal potholes created by his tax policies. Chanting the GOP refrain of “lower tax rates good, higher tax rates bad” as if it were a magic incantation, he seemed to believe Arthur Laffers infamous cocktail napkin “Laffer Curve” depicting lower tax rates delivering higher tax revenues.

Stanley Kutler has written “Nixon’s the One” with Harry Shearer, now on YouTube, and the play, “I, Nixon.” He has written widely on Vietnam and is a UW-Madison professor emeritus.

Noted: I am all for research, but the column I read in the Journal Sentinel about two researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison being awarded a grant of $1.6 million in the first year and a recommended total of $7.7 million over five years to study the brain action of sleeping fruit flies and mice really irritated me “Are sleep studies a wake-up call?”

I was saddened by Bill Lueders’ article about UW-Madison’s ethically questionable experimentation on the baby monkeys “On the death of my monkey,” Nov. 13.

I’d like to introduce Norm Doll, a consulting engineer and adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Doll also sits on the Heifer International Board of Directors as Chair of the Heifer Foundation, the global partner whose mission is to grow and oversee an endowment to support the work of Heifer International. Norm is going to tell you a little bit about toilets. His post originally appeared on the Heifer Blog.

I am a UW-Madison student studying elementary education. To earn my degree and follow my dream, I borrowed $17,000 and I will be paying back $46,000 with interest over the next 20 years. To me, it’s worth it. I

Quoted: “We are only going to move forward if we can work together. And we are already collaborating on a number of fronts,” UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank told a conference crowd. “If you are going to have a state and a region filled with entrepreneurs and innovators, you have to have a university close by. Universities are also idea factories.”

After living in this new town with new people for only about two months’ time, much of the student body here on the University of Wisconsin campus has begun to feel the pressures of finding a place to live next year. They’re being bombarded with flyers and propaganda screaming that the race is on to select a home for the coming academic year.

When you listen to dozens of political candidates during the last weeks of the campaign, you hear themes. When your mind wanders, you even hear entire songs.

I recently read something that has changed me: “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” (Mia Sato is an Appleton resident and a University of Wisconsin-Madison student.)

As the election returns came in last week and we learned the Republicans strengthened their hold on state government, I began to wonder what new catastrophes the legislators could dream up.

A report by the labor union-backed Center on Wisconsin Strategy COWS, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests that the state is awash in low-paying jobs.

Noted: He also should keep a watchful eye on the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the statewide economic development agency that faltered badly on his watch during his first term; push for a larger state venture capital fund $25 million is paltry; advocate for better alignment between the jobs that exist and the training workers need; push the University of Wisconsin System to be more focused on entrepreneurs; and commit to developing a true alternative campus to UW-Madison in Milwaukee, the industrial center of the state.