Category: Opinion

WASHINGTON — The conventional wisdom on certain subjects is so deeply rooted that no amount of evidence disturbs its hold. That’s how it is with those dreary predictions that young Americans just won’t vote.

Since the late 1960s, the same chorus has been heard from election to election: The young don’t care. They’re disengaged. They’re too wrapped up in their music, their favorite sports and their parties to care about politics. Predicting that the young will vote in large numbers is like saying the Cubs will finally win the World Series.

As it happens, the Cubs are doing well this season, and the evidence is overwhelming that this year, the young really will vote in large numbers — and they just might tip the election.

John Wiley is leaving Bascom Hall, moving his faculty position from engineering to education and, for starters, acting as interim director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, and doing work for the Wisconsin Center for Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE). Ah, the leisurely joys of retirement.

The wild goose chase is an occupational hazard of journalism, and some of us are more susceptible than others. Some of us, and I count myself in their number, can get a little obsessed.
On Wednesday, the following, datelined Paris, appeared in the International Herald Tribune newspaper, which is the global edition of The New York Times: “Harry Rosenbaum, a 24-year-old student from Madison, Wis., was arrested in front of a bookshop at 30 boulevard Saint-Michel Friday night and charged with the theft of a book, it became known yesterday.”

Most of the stateâ??s economic indicators get dragged down by the performance in the city of Milwaukee. Hence, all strategies need to align our investments in development toward more jobs in the biggest and most stressed city in the state.

Thatâ??s not the only place we need more job creation, but Milwaukee ought to be priority No. 1. Is the powerful University of Wisconsin-Madison doing enough in that regard? Most observers would say no.

Is the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukeeâ??s mission of becoming a top research institution going in the right direction? Most would say yes. Eventually, that research and the resulting technology transfer should spell more start-ups and jobs.

Mark Twain once remarked about a man with two sons: One went to sea, the other became vice president, and neither was heard of again.

We have scant evidence that vice presidential nominees influence voters very much. Will possible John McCain voters be swayed by an added choice of Mitt Romney, Charles Crist, Bobby Jindal or any other equally insignificant? Some Democrats yearn for Hillary Clinton’s nomination, envisioning an irresistible union of race and gender politics. An office once mocked as totally obscure now has become a desirable prize.

(UW-Madison professor emeritus of history Stanley Kutler is the author of “Wars of Watergate” and of numerous writings on American constitutional law and the presidency. This column first appeared on truthdig.com.)

Nobody asked me, but I would have said the Kollege Klub — for breakfast. Only a few of us knew the popular campus night spot was open weekday mornings. It was great to sink into a booth with coffee and the Chicago newspapers — purchased a half block away at Rennebohm’s — and try to remember (or forget) the indiscretions of the night before.
The summer 2008 issue of On Wisconsin, the magazine of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, just out, includes a fun piece by Jenny Price in which she asks nine prominent UW-Madison alums to recall their “favorite place” in Madison during their years at UW.

I know there’s been a lot of discussion regarding the 911 call made from Brittany Zimmerman’s phone in Madison on the University of Wisconsin-Madison student was murdered. Rightfully so, as I think this is a much bigger issue than the Dane County executive has been making of it. Kathleen Falk apologized for the errors made by the dispatcher and the call center. Is this enough?

My new grad is 22, has a freshly minted diploma from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was turned loose Sunday after exhortations to remember that, from now on, he is “Forever a Badger.”

The idea of Eternal Badgerhood hit his old man hard. I am a fan of tuition reciprocity, and sending a Minnesota kid to Cheddar Land is the best college bargain in the country. But I would have had second thoughts if I had foreseen the psychic stranglehold Bucky would get on my boy, or if I had anticipated how alien I would feel when one of the grads crossing the stage in the Kohl Center (just one of a weekend’s worth of commencements in Badgerville) pretended that his name was Brett Favre.

The presumptive favorite, with history and much else on its side, is the Memorial Union Terrace. Some feel the Union Terrace is the very heart of Madison. In 2001, the Utne Reader ran a story titled “Soul Searching,” which sought to identify the “unique spirit” of several cities, including Madison.

The story asked: “Where do you go to find the true heart of your city? In Seattle, many would say Pike’s Place Market. In Chicago, Wrigley Field.” The story continued: “In Madison, the lakeside beer garden at the University of Wisconsin student union.”

A movie about one of the most notorious murder cases in Madison history: In June 1980, a brilliant UW-Madison chemistry student named Barbara Hoffman, who also worked as a masseuse, was convicted of murdering Harry Berge, one of her massage parlor clients. She was acquitted of murdering Gerald Davies, who had also been a client. Both men had listed Hoffman as a beneficiary on life insurance policies.

The District of Columbia, Detroit and New Orleans have all, at one time or another, been dubbed the Murder Capital of the United States.

Madison, a university town at heart, will never compete for that title.

Unsolved Murder Capital of the United States is more apt there.

There have been five unsolved murders in just the last 10 months in Madison – a place that, a lot of years, still doesn’t get that many total.

During their recent congressional testimony, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker refused to be pinned down on the goals, mission or even the meaning of success for U.S. forces in Iraq. But when Crocker talked about the proposed “Status of Forces Agreement,” he was clear. He promised that Congress would be “fully informed,” but, he said, there would be no “treaty” submitted for the Senate’s advice and consent. Crocker went unchallenged.

The details of the proposed agreement are apparently still pending. But last November Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House “czar” for Iraq, discussed the administration’s intention to reach an agreement that would protect Iraq against internal and external threats, defend the Iraqi constitution, deter foreign aggression, and support efforts to combat all terrorist groups. Lute stated that Iraqi national leaders wanted a long-term relationship with Washington as “a reliable, enduring partner.”

(This column by UW-Madison emeritus professor of history Stanley Kutler first appeared in the Washington Independent.)

I wanted to interview Ayers for one reason: My enduring interest in whatever became of Leo Burt, Madison’s most famous fugitive. Burt is more than that: He’s the great unfinished story of my half century in this city.

Ayers had been underground for 11 years; Burt has now been a fugitive for nearly 38 years, since he and three others (all eventually apprehended) set off a bomb targeted at the Army Math Research Center in Sterling Hall on the UW-Madison campus. The 1970 blast killed a young researcher, Robert Fassnacht, and caused millions of dollars of damage.

The instructional staff at UW is increasingly based on non-tenured educators rather than professors on tenured track. This increase is part of a national trend to hire cheaper instructors on yearly contracts instead of more expensive faculty research members