To improve campus climate and truly benefit from the wide range of cultures and ethnicities that are represented in our student body, we must create cross-cultural connections.
Most students here are familiar with Gordon Commons. Regardless of your love-hate relationship with University Housing, you have to admit itâ??s a homey place to relax during free time. Well, fun at Popâ??s Club and Edâ??s Express will soon come to an end, as UW plans to tear down the building this upcoming summer. Even if you look at the upcoming project glazed with rosy assumptions, the $34 million project is probably unnecessary.
Depending on how much you read the paper, or how often you feel the need for that two-for-one Long Island special, you may or may not be aware of the lawsuit Brothers recently filed to prevent losing its current location. The suit came after the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents granted the university the right, under eminent domain, to build a performance facility on the property occupied, in part, by Brothers.
Deploy the models of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and BizStarts Milwaukee to encourage a national corps of mentors – seasoned entrepreneurs – to help high-growth ventures get out of the starting gates. Veterans with lots of scar tissue can help entrepreneurs avoid critical start-up mistakes, thereby improving the win ratio.
Diversity issues extend beyond race and nationality. I would argue we are a product of our experiences, and though skin color and nationality play a significant role in influencing our experiences, encouraging a diversity of experiences on campus cannot be measured by admittance data alone. UW-Madison cannot hope to achieve true diversity simply through programs aimed at aiding minority students. A truly diverse campus would embrace students from all walks of life, whose experiences are as vast as they are different and who are united by a common goal: to educate and better themselves.
During the Civil War and Reconstruction era â?? best described as our â??Second American Revolutionâ?â??the political parties marched in virtual lockstep in consistent, rigid opposition to each other. Democrats steadfastly resisted the Republicansâ?? organic program for a new nation, including the Homestead Act, the land-grant college program, a protective tariff, a transcontinental railroad, a national currency and a reordering of judicial power.
Party discipline soon weakened, and legislators again comfortably crossed party lines. Even at the New Dealâ??s high point, the Republican minority, after opposing many of the details, often supported major reforms, such as Social Security. More recently, in the mid-1960s, conservative Midwestern Republicans helped break filibusters and the obstructionist tactics of conservative Southern Democrats (many still mired in â??lost causeâ? nostalgia).
We have now regressed. Rarely in our history has partisanship been more narrow and rigid.
Written by Stanley Kutler, a UW-Madison professor emeritus
In the first-ever hockey games at Camp Randall on Feb. 6, the UW menâ??s team will play Michigan in a game preceded by the Badger women against Bemidji State. The dilemma: Be a part of history, or stay warm.
Members of the Wisconsin Legislature are weighing the merits of two bills aimed at clarifying the extent to which parents can legally deny, because of their religious beliefs and practices, conventional medical treatment to their sick or injured children.
As the debate over these measures unfolds, lawmakers should not allow the self-serving and dubious claims of a single, small church to shape laws meant to safeguard the health and welfare of our children. That happened once before in Wisconsin, and the results were a public policy debacle. [A column by Shawn Peters, who teaches on UW-Madison’s School of Education]
Diversity.
If the article stopped there, the comments section would still be ablaze. While most would focus on the bizarre nature of my minimalist post-modern commentary, the rest of the debate would focus on the definition of the term, the â??racistsâ? on campus who oppose it and the response to being called racist until someone cites Hitler and our comments hit a new low.
Charles Darwin seems to have had a boundless interest in the many forms life takes on earth. He could find something about any animal or plant that piqued his insatiable curiosity, and masses of such observations fueled his prodigious output of books and scientific papers.
The passage of recent school reform legislation in Wisconsin (SB370-SB373) has positioned the state to compete for Race to the Top funds and, more importantly, to address the pernicious achievement gaps in Wisconsin.
Noted: Carolyn Kelley is a professor of educational leadership and policy analysis in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They are co-authors of the book “Learning First,” Thousand Oaks, Calif., Corwin Press, 2009.
UW-Madison Professor Alta Charo was right — womenâ??s health would be sacrificed for overall health care reform.
Academic research and development, one of the few bright spots in Wisconsinâ??s economic landscape, doesnâ??t need to be a political football.
Political games abound in the absence of clear strategic direction, and thatâ??s what happened with the idea that the University of Wisconsin System should spread dollars for fresh water technology to all four-year campuses in the state.
The idea that fresh water technology should be proliferated, rather than focused, demonstrated a lack of understanding of the concept of clusters that grew out of the four economic summits early in this decade.
UW-Madisonâ??s long-standing focus on â??targeted minoritiesâ? is a much-too-provincial view of â??diversityâ? in the global world of the 21st century. This narrow approach ignores the many channels through which students are exposed to the wide range of subject matter, ideas, people, cultures, and attitudes that characterize UW-Madison.
For starters, in 2008-09 UW-Madison undergraduates came from cities large and small, spread across Wisconsinâ??s 72 counties and all 50 states, plus Guam and Puerto Rico, and more than 100 foreign countries.
The most â??targetedâ? of the â??targeted minorityâ? groups — African-Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics — included 2,088 students. â??Targetedâ? Southeast Asians added another 528 students. To this must be added the 1,149 Asian-American undergraduates who are not counted among â??targeted minoritiesâ? but bring with them a rich cultural heritage and unmatched academic prowess.
My body is sitting in an environmental health lecture in Bascom Hall with 250 students, but my mind is deep in the woods of northern Wisconsin. The glow of my headlight guides me through the early morning darkness as I walk quietly along the mixed maple trail to my deer stand. The air is cold. I can see my breath as I climb the ladder. Wrapped in layers and blaze orange, wearing heavy boots, and with pockets full of hand warmers, I get cozy and prepare mentally for a dusk-till-dark sit. I load my gun. As I wait for the sun to rise, my excitement builds.
I snap back to Environmental Studies 113 and scramble to take notes to catch up. Thanksgiving break is coming, I tell myself. I anticipate it not for the turkey, but for the hunt that excites me every year and for the chance to escape city streets.
Diversity is a recurring theme at UW-Madison and, as always, the discussion turns to race. Administrators who focus on the color of studentsâ?? skin continue to find a lack of diversity, which is a nice way of saying we are too white. Responding to this crisis of superficial uniformity has been a favorite task of chancellors, committees, and columnists for decades. While the overwhelming sea of good intentions is aimed at increasing diversity, I would argue that there are almost no students who pay any attention to race.
….The military, after all, does not rely solely on patriotic feelings to build its force, and neither should the civilian parts of government. One of the most powerful incentives the military has is the Reserve Officersâ?? Training Corps, which offers assistance to those seeking higher education. Itâ??s time for a civilian ROTC.
Thatâ??s the idea of a bipartisan group of senators and House members who are proposing to create the Roosevelt Scholars program, named after Teddy Roosevelt. Reps. David Price, D-N.C., and Mike Castle, R-Del., have introduced a bill in the House, and a similar measure is expected in the Senate this week from Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and George Voinovich, R-Ohio.
Although there is sentiment to include undergraduates in the program, the House bill is aimed at graduate students, because the federal government has a special demand for highly qualified employees who are otherwise attracted (and heavily recruited) by the private sector. In exchange for generous scholarships in fields such as engineering, information technology, foreign languages and public health, the scholars would commit to three to five years of service in an agency of the federal government.
The prevailing strategy behind UW-Madisonâ??s more than 40-year effort to increase the presence of â??targeted minorityâ? students remains as confusing as ever.
Good grief! UW-Madison is not going to use the Kindle e-book because visually-impaired people canâ??t find the button that makes the device read to them?
Pray tell: Where is the button on a regular book they can push to get that weighty hunk of paper and cardboard to read to them? How absurd can this tyranny of the minority get?
In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. So says an online opinion column by Alfred McCoy, UW-Madison history professor and author of “A Question of Torture,” among other works.
We are facing an epidemic in the United States today. From sea to shining sea, people everywhere are being infected. No, we are not talking about H1N1. Today in America 47 million people are testing positive for a lack of access to affordable and quality health care.
Most people assume that college students are not interested in the health care debate. But we have more at stake than anyone. Just because young people have no interest in attending town hall debates with disrespectful mobs screaming at each other, doesnâ??t mean we donâ??t support health care reform.
At the start of the musical â??The Music Man,â? riders on a train discuss salesman Harold Hillâ??s modus operandi. â??Now he doesnâ??t know the territory. Doesnâ??t know the territory? Whatâ??s the fellowâ??s line? Never worries about his line.â? This brief exchange helps explain why the Faculty Senate voted Thursday night to slow the process of restructuring of the graduate schoolâ??s research operations.
….This is a column in praise of two public institutions — one that solicits and deserves a lot of praise and one thatâ??s sometimes taken for granted: public radio and the Cooperative Extension Service, a program of the University of Wisconsin-Extension.
Author: Maria Cancian, Russell Sage Foundation and University of Wisconsin. Marriage promotion policies will not solve the poverty problem. While financial incentives or relationship-skills programs may help some couples, there is no evidence that government policies can substantially increase marriage rates. And many single mothers would be poor even if they married the fathers of their children, because both the mother and father have limited economic prospects.
Two heavy hitters took the time to weigh in on the debate about what the true role of the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Athletic Board should be. Steven Underwood and Donald Downs wrote a guest column which appeared on the Cap Times website Monday.
….At the October meeting of the UW-Madison Faculty Senate, the University Committee — the senate’s governing board — announced it had formed a seven-person ad hoc committee composed of faculty members to review the Athletic Board and determine whether it is fulfilling its oversight duties of the athletic department. It will be interesting to see what conclusions the ad hoc committee comes to.
Only one thing seems clear: As long as there is an athletic department on the UW-Madison campus, there will be an ongoing debate regarding the level and method of control that faculty on campus should be exerting over the athletics enterprise.
….The Athletic Boardâ??s self-report, supported by Professor Walter Dickey, current chair of the Athletic Board who replaced Professor Bruce Jones after Jones complained about not being informed of the Bret Bielema hiring as football coach, concluded that the Athletic Board is merely an advisory committee that has no binding authority when it comes to hiring head coaches. These decisions, the report stated, are made by the chancellor and athletic director. In this regard, however, the self-report belies both tradition and the rule of law at the UW-Madison.
Iâ??ve been to two town hall meetings on reorganizing the research enterprise at UW, and like other commentators, I donâ??t get it. Not only do I not get how the changes are going to fix some of the problems weâ??re facing on running our research programs but I also donâ??t get why so much of the faculty is so fearful of this proposal.
….If the county prevails, all sorts of adjusted pricing structures can be adopted. One or more days a week can be free admission days. There can be a maximum charge for children in a group. School classes can be free or reduced. County residents can get reduced prices or even season passes. UW, Edgewood and MATC students could get special student admissions,
Itâ??s worth a shot.
University of Wisconsin history Professor Jeremi Suri is working on his next book: a history of nation building that will be published around the time of the 10th anniversary of that sad day we call 9/11.
Suri has become one of the countryâ??s leading historians, even before heâ??s reached the age of 40. His most recent major book, “Henry Kissinger and the American Century,” is still getting rave reviews for its insight into what drove the former secretary of state and longtime U.S. diplomat.
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.”
Not long after he died, Mike Websterâ??s brain wound up in a plastic tub that was sitting on a table in the living room of a Pittsburgh man named Bennet Omalu.
University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly wrote an opinion piece for InsideHigherEd.com titled “So what do they want from us, anyway?”
In this column, Reilly identifies “four essential items that America wants and needs from its public universities in todayâ??s globally competitive knowledge economy.” He refers to these items as higher educationâ??s “Four Pillars of Promise.”
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.
When I was a kid growing up in Washington Heights at the northern end of Manhattan, a common rhetorical question indicating frustrated annoyance was: â??So whadya wanâ?? frumme?â?
Those of us who work in higher education sometimes evince that same attitude when we feel besieged by increasingly insistent stakeholders â?? students, parents, alumni, trustees, sports boosters, business leaders, and donors, as well as local, state, and federal elected and appointed officials â?? about what we have done for them lately.
The death of 9-year-old Kara Neumann from untreated diabetes is not unusual. Other children in the United States have died from treatable diseases while their parents prayed instead of seeking standard medical care.
The word â??diversityâ? has always drawn crowds and sparked discussions. Last Thursday, the UW community held a conference on campus diversity. Hundreds of people shared their opinions on the idea of â??Inclusive Excellence.â? The heated exchange lasted all day long, but most of the talks were limited to racial and ethnic diversity. Even though this is the centerpiece of the whole diversity ideal, such a narrow interpretation might compromise UWâ??s efforts to diversify itself.
John Milton Cooper, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of the forthcoming â??Woodrow Wilson: A Biography.â?
In April 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wrote to the UW-Madison, saying it was “extremely concerned” that experiments occurring here had “serious potential consequences to public health.”Documents recently released to me in response to an open records request show that a graduate student aided by others genetically modified undisclosed “select agents” to be resistant to antibiotics. They did it without NIH approval, which is required.
Last week the Student Labor Action Coalition marched into Chancellor Biddy Martinâ??s office, opposing the University of Wisconsinâ??s athletic apparel contracts with less-than-transparent multinational monoliths like adidas. And Biddy sat down and had what one SLAC member called â??a thoughtful and productive dialogue.â?
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.
Two decades ago, it seemed that not a month went by without some farmer or another challenging the term “sustainable agriculture.” Farmers wrote letters to editors in farm papers asserting that there was no definition for this ridiculous term; it meant whatever a person wanted it to mean. In fact, then as now, sustainable agriculture advanced straightforward principles – of elevating environmentally sound, economically profitable and socially responsible agricultural systems.
Various farmers and more than one agricultural researcher buttonholed me back then to say that agriculture had to feed the world and this fanciful approach undercut agricultureâ??s serious responsibilities. Some perceived sustainable agriculture as anti-technology and opposed to change. It was a contentious time in agriculture, born of the farm crisis – the terrifying hemorrhaging of farmers during the 1980s – and the growing awareness of environmental damage from many federal agricultural policies.
Into this hostile climate was born the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last week.
Among the estimated 7,000 students, University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty and the public who attended author Michael Pollanâ??s discussion of his latest book, “In Defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto,” were some 200 Wisconsin farmers.
The farmer delegation came to the Kohl Center on buses chartered by Madison-based feed company Vita Plus to hear for themselves what the much-discussed book was about, direct from Pollan himself.
….Mostly, the farmers attending the Pollan event seemed to be worried about how few of the students know anything about farming and have ever seen a farm up close. They’d like to do something about it.
Some farmers suggested that Chancellor Martin’s next effort might center on “Visit a Farm,” whereby entire classes, special groups or individual students and faculty would take a trip to an actual dairy or livestock farm.
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.
College students (and people in general) love to complain. Just ask Todd Jasperson. (Speaking of which, how about that weather the other day? I havenâ??t seen anyone make it rain like that since Pacman got suspended.) Whether itâ??s about politics, cops, reckless bicyclists or tuition, itâ??s easy for us to see the problem, but itâ??s not always easy to come up with a solution.
As a political observer following the shift occurring in our understanding about agriculture, I cant help but be reminded that change does not come peacefully. In fact, as Michael Pollan prepares to speak tonight to a concert arena filled with hungry minds in Wisconsin — after his book, In Defense of Food, was chosen as the University of Wisconsin-Madisons “Go Big Read” common reading for the university — a group called In Defense of Farmers has urged farmers to protest him by wearing green.
Ten years ago this month, my life changed. The security blanket of high school had been removed, and I was going away to college. Being a person who tends to fear the unknown, I was initially terrified. A decade later, I can honestly say that college was the best time in my life, at least so far.
I am one of a few UW-Madison undergraduate students who can personally testify to the notion that Halloween in this city ainâ??t what it used to be.
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.
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.
This past Friday, the Daily Cardinal Editorial Board had the opportunity to meet with Chancellor Carolyn â??Biddyâ? Martin to discuss some of the universityâ??s most pressing issues. With a year under her belt, Martin is due for some of the first appraisals of her job performance, most of which is tethered to the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates.
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.
â??Like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives.â?
That is how a shark expert, Matt Hooper, described Carcharodon megalodon to the police chief in Peter Benchleyâ??s novel â??Jaws.â? He was referring to the 50-foot-long, 50-ton body and enormous six- to seven-inch-long teeth that made the extinct megalodon shark perhaps the most awesome predator that has ever roamed the seas.
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.
Ever since we put solar panels on our off-the-grid cabinâ??s roof five years ago, I have been awed by how they power every electrical need of that building. Pumping water. Igniting the stoveâ??s burners. Lighting. They require no maintenance other than filling storage batteries with distilled water periodically. If we were on the electrical grid, it would make obvious sense to feed our excess power back into the grid.
The 40th anniversary of the Badger Herald student newspaper was Thursday, and the paper celebrated with a special front page that included two articles on the Heraldâ??s founding and growth.
A new initiative at UW-Madison is designed to make a larger point about what it means to engage in a process of integrated, rigorous and unfettered thinking.
When I first heard Tuesday that as many as 30 UW football players were experiencing flu-like symptoms that could be related to the H1N1 outbreak on the UW-Madison campus, my first reaction was to doubt the validity of the rumor.
