Category: Opinion

Noted: Well, Rep. Nass has been trying to defund the Havens Center on the Madison campus. The what? The Havens Center. It is the Progressive Dane of the already left-wing UW sociology department.

The Havens web site is currently promoting a rigorous intellectual course of study designed to prepare our best and our brightest to confront the real-world challenges of the future. The program is called “Getting Real: The Future of Hip Hop Studies at UW-Madison.”

University of Wisconsin Law School Professor Ann Althouse is, like Madisonâ??s ever more digitally inclined Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, a busy blogger.

Althouse tends toward the right edge of the ideological spectrum, although she is adventurous enough in her thinking and her interests to avoid the easy compartmentalization that is the fate of so much of the blogosphere. She links to my columns now and again, which is either a sign of her good taste, open-mindedness or sense of humor.

Of late, however, Althouse has been taking something of a battering not for something she wrote, nor even for some crazy article she linked to, but for the responses to her blog posts.

I completed more than a year of service on a federal grand jury in Madison last fall.

And now, as I prepare to discuss the classic jury film “Twelve Angry Men” starring Henry Fonda in the course on democracy I teach at UW-Madison, I’ve been thinking about my experience quite a bit.

University of Wisconsin-Madison guru Joel Rogers, noting the loss of 130,000 jobs in the last 20 months, told Competitive Wisconsin recently that the state economy is in “very bad shape.” His graphs show the most cruel impact is on Hispanics and African-Americans.

Ever since this piece on the hiring process in philosophy was published in Inside Higher Ed, there has been a lot of discussion about the role that pedigree should play in hiring committeesâ?? decisions about job candidates (see here, here, and here).

John Basl is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

This is Banned Books Week, the annual public awareness event spearheaded by the American Library Association and other organizations that promote the virtues of our freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The ALA has long maintained that intellectual freedom – the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular – is at the bedrock of American democracy.

Yet no year goes by without numerous attempts to ban books from public libraries or from our schools – elementary to college.

Author Michael Pollan says we shouldnâ??t eat anything our great-grandmothers wouldnâ??t recognize as food. I donâ??t know about your great-grandmothers, but much of what mine would have recognized as food was deep-fried in grease or boiled into mush in hopes it might still be safe to eat after sitting around all day in an unrefrigerated cupboard.

Average Americans are disconnected from the food they eat every day. That is one of the few statements from Michael Pollan that doesnt give me heartburn.UW-Madison has served up Pollans recent book, “In Defense of Food,” as the main course for its Go Big Read campus-wide book discussion this year. Chancellor Biddy Martin says its selection was meant to generate discussion about an important topic, and not an endorsement of the book, Pollan or his adopted food system ideology.

The average American is disconnected from the food they eat every day. That is one of the few statements from Michael Pollan that doesnâ??t give me heartburn.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has lauded its recent coverage of the continuing medical education program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health Editorials, Aug. 16. These articles may mislead readers into viewing our CME program as little more than a paid mouthpiece for commercial interests that seek to manipulate physicians.

Nothing could be further from the truth, writes Robert Golden, dean of the school.

Itâ??s a very big day for the nationâ??s community colleges. In todayâ??s Washington Post, our president praises them, and calls for additional funding to support their work. In particular, he writes, â??We can reallocate funding to help them modernize their facilities, increase the quality of online courses and ultimately meet the goal of graduating 5 million more Americans from community colleges by 2020.â?

MENOMONIE, Wis. — A healthy University of Wisconsin System is essential to rebuilding the state’s economy. Yet glaring discrepancies in compensation for the faculty and academic staff who power

UW institutions in the state pose a serious threat to our future viability.

Let me explain: Wisconsin has three broad groups of educators who are paid with public funds: the K-12 teachers, those who work in the Wisconsin Technical College System, and the faculty and academic staff who teach for the University of Wisconsin System.