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.
Pretty depressing April so far. Winter won’t leave.
And neither will the predators who haunt downtown Madison. Three unsolved murders. A scorched skeleton where a cathedral once stood. And a State Street that is becoming the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Regardless of the outcome of the open murder investigations, here is a simple question to ask yourself.
Is Madison a safer place than it was ten years ago?
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.)
The two University of Wisconsin athletic teams that achieved academic honors from the NCAA Thursday deserve praise for their hard work.
She was a young, spirited and lively woman who wanted to be a physician. A dean ‘s list honoree for fall 2005 and spring 2006, she was majoring in medical microbiology and immunology at UW-Madison.
She liked to cook, hang out with friends and volunteer for good causes. Engaged to a fellow student, she was looking forward to being married and having children.
Within the last few years, Madisonâ??s impressively low homicide rate has taken a slight shift. This time last year, all of Dane County boasted an annual homicide occurrence of less than two. Since the summer of 2007, the UW-Madison campus area alone has witnessed four fatal crimes, from the shooting of Austin Bodahl in front of State Street Brats to the fatal slaying of Brittany Zimmermann on West Doty St. As Madisonâ??s homicide rate changes, its campus safety strategies do not.
As eighth-graders across the state are busily preparing for the end of the school year, I hope each of them will take some time to stop and think about the future. Before they begin summer jobs or sports leagues, I encourage them to discuss with their families the upcoming school year and their plans for education after high school.
I don’t want any young people to think college isn’t for them, that it’s only for rich people, or that because their parents didn’t go, they can’t go. Whether they want to become teachers or engineers, or plan to work in exciting new fields in biotechnology and health care, or even if they aren’t sure what job is right for them, a successful high school career will open up opportunities for higher education that will provide many future possibilities.
“If we live in a culture of spin, there is a good deal of suspicion about claims of truthfulness, so this is also a culture of suspicion.”
The words are from Miroslav Volf, theologian from Yale University talking to a group of faculty and campus religious workers over lunch (last) Friday at Pres House just off the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
He was talking about the “obligation to truthfulness” for academics (if not the expectation for politicians), for people seeking justice in a world where truth too often seems expendable for whatever cause one is pursuing. Volf didn’t use the word, but satirist Stephen Colbert’s use of the term “truthiness” — let’s just pretend what I am saying is true — has come to be seen as a pragmatic substitute for the struggle to be truthful.
By Jacob Stockinger
Because this is the last issue of Rhythm, this is my last classical musical column for Rhythm.
Although this is premature by my usual standards, I want to go out by naming my Musician of the Year, something I usually do at the end of the calendar year.
My Musician of the Year for 2008 is Christopher Taylor, the virtuosic pianist who has taught at the University of Wisconsin School of Music for the past seven years and this spring used a sabbatical from teaching to prepare and perform all 32 piano sonatas by Beethoven in 10 concerts.
Stevens Point, Wis. – The official bogeyman of Earth Week 2008 is biofuels. A top United Nations official has called use of food crops to produce ethanol â??a crime against humanity,â? environmentalists are blaming ethanol production for destruction of rain forests, and food riots from Haiti to Egypt are being cited as examples of what happens to prices when land is used to grow fuel instead of food.
A cynic once said that the main issue for our society when it comes to the environment is do we care about environmental problems a little or not at all?
For a long time this has been a fair question, but it looks like things are improving. For example, my students at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater no longer look bored or doubtful when I start going on about climate change. Instead they want to talk about solutions.
(Jeff McKinnon is a professor of biological sciences at UW-Whitewater and serves as director of the university’s Undergraduate Research Program.)
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.
A girl falls ill with diabetes. In an effort to restore her flagging health, her parents turn to the Bible rather than medical science; she never sees a doctor. Prayer, however, fails to heal the youngster, and she dies. Authorities then puzzle over whether the parents, in denying her the medical treatment that almost certainly would have saved her life, have committed neglect, abuse, or even manslaughter.
Sound familiar? Actually, it’s not the story of Kara Neumann, the Weston teen whose death on Easter Sunday has generated headlines throughout the nation. Rather, it’s a description of the death of Shannon Nixon, a Pennsylvania youngster who succumbed to diabetic ketoacidosis (the same ailment that struck Kara Neumann) in 1995. Shannon’s parents, like Kara’s, were devoutly religious people who treated their daughter’s illness with prayer rather medicine. The results were similarly tragic, and confounding.
Shawn Francis Peters’ latest book, “When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law,” was published in October by Oxford University Press. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It took a while, but the property manager finally got a clue that it’s a crummy thing to hold someone to a lease for an apartment where his fiancée was murdered.
This week, Wisconsin Management Co. located its heart and announced it will release Jordan Gonnering from the lease for the Madison apartment he shared with fellow University of Wisconsin student Brittany Zimmermann. The lease was to have run until August 2009.
The Athletic Department announced Wednesday a new program to help freshmen athletes adjust to life at UW-Madison.
The Life Skills Academy is UW-Madisonâ??s extension of the NCAAâ??s Challenging Athletesâ?? Minds for Professional Success program, which has been in practice since 1994. In contrast to the Life Skills Academy, the CHAMPS program is aimed at all student athletes.
The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, is a familiar presence here in Madison.
He first visited in 1979, returned in 1981, when he performed the first Kalacakra Initiation Ceremony ever to take place in the Western Hemisphere. He returned again in 2001 to meet with UW-Madison Professor Richard Davidson about the benefits of meditation and, then, came back last summer to raise money for Buddhist charities. He ‘s planning to return July 19-24 to dedicate the $6.1 million temple at Deer Park, near Oregon.
The truth remains that Dane County does a lot better at accelerating start-ups than the Milwaukee 7 region. Of the $88 million of venture capital raised in the state last year, the lion’s share went to Madison firms – and most of that to four firms spawned on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Madison is the blueprint for the rest of the state on getting new companies going, with more than 200 young firms housed at its University Research Park.
Think our record-setting winter pokes holes in the case for climate change? On the contrary: In a warming world, scientists tell us Wisconsin can expect a future of more weather extremes and variability, including heavy snow. And these effects won’t be caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we generate now; they’re the after-effects of our lack of understanding going back at least a generation.
Lewis Gilbert is interim director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of the Task Force on Global Warming Technical Advisory Group.
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
Madison, Wis. – When Wisconsin-based economist David Ward thinks about the future of biofuels, his mind puts him behind the wheel of a brand-new Tata.
If you live in India, or follow the auto-show circuit, you might know that the Tata is a carâ?¦a really small car. Tata Motors â??Nanoâ? model is about 10 feet long, runs on a two-cylinder gasoline engine, and costs about $2,500. It is designed to appeal to Indias growing middle class, for whom automobile ownership was out of the question even a decade ago.
Of Margot Presley, the UW-Madison student in the film, Sewell told me, “Thank God for Margot. She is all about women’s issues. She’s sweet but she brings out things about inequality.”
With our economic and financial crises deepening, government insiders reportedly are debating whether we need to restore some regulation — or not. Given the state of things, we can expect further woes and no regulation.
Why have regulation when JPMorgan can gobble up Bear Stearns for peanuts, with the backstage encouragement and acquiescence of the Federal Reserve Board?
(Stanley Kutler is a UW-Madison professor emeritus of history and law.)
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race has attracted the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which admonishes Justice Louis Butler and other court members for making the state an unfriendly environment for business, potentially depressing business activity and discouraging investment in the state.
Over the years that I have studied the patterns and effects of civil litigation, I have never encountered any direct evidence of this, nor evidence that actual Wisconsin businesspeople (as opposed to their lobbyist spokesmen) are despairing about the state’s civil justice system.
(Marc Galanter is a professor emeritus at the UW Law School)
One of my favorite people of all time, longtime Menominee Indian leader and Wisconsin political activist Ada Deer, stopped by the office the other day just to say “hi” and bring me up to date on what she’s up to these days.
Ada, the first member of the Menominee Nation to graduate from the UW-Madison, officially “retired” last year frher job as director of American Indian studies at her alma mater, a job she assumed after serving in Bill Clinton’s administration as the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
….She’s now 72, but hasn’t slowed down a bit. In fact, she’s taken up a new cause: Wisconsin’s overburdened prison system, which is consuming so much of the state’s resources.
At one point during a legendary career of producing Hollywood movies that had titles like “Some Like It Hot,” “West Side Story” and “In the Heat of the Night,” Walter Mirisch was elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
That meant Mirisch hired the producer of the annual Academy Awards show and also handled various behind-the-scenes tasks, one of which, in 1974, involved trying to convince Katharine Hepburn to appear on the program to present an award to her friend, the producer Lawrence Weingarten.
If you think the big fight between the Big Ten Network and the cable TV industry is the pits for fans of college basketball, take a look at this.
The NFL Network, which is also at an impasse with the cable companies here and elsewhere, has been clamping down on churches that have been holding football viewing parties in their basements to raise a few bucks to help fund their activities.
….The NFL isn’t alone in its audacity, however. Before the start of last fall’s football season, newspaper advertising departments got a letter from the UW-Madison’s trademark licensing director, Cindy Van Matre.
At the risk of being told to move to Chicago if that’s how I like my elections, Wisconsin’s much-maligned 2007 state Supreme Court election was not as bad as many observers claim.
OMAHA, Neb. â?? It’s the kind of irony that is reserved for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
The University of Wisconsin, a team devoid of stars, was sent to a city that, for one week anyway, is teeming with headliners. Despite being the highest seed â?? a No. 3 â?? in its NCAA pod, UW is being overshadowed by O.J. Mayo of USC and Michael Beasley of Kansas State, freshman scoring sensations and soon-to-be NBA lottery picks.
Well, what good is the University of Wisconsin anyway? Why do we pour in so much money and what did we ever get in return? In 2003-2004, the UW was ranked No. 3 in the nation for total research expenditures among U.S. public universities. In 2005-2006 alone, we spent $703 million on research, of which $454 million came from federal grants. It is easy for politicians to attack the university or these funds as excessive and the benefits of these investments are often understated. The university’s discoveries and innovations have stimulated the economy and have resulted in miraculous treatments of deadly diseases. Let’s look at some of the things they have done.
Bernie Siegel was a Miami lawyer in 2002 when a cult-like organization known as the Raellians claimed to have cloned a human baby. Siegel filed a motion in a Broward County on behalf of the “baby,” suspecting all along it didnâ??t exist, and helped to expose a dangerous hoax. He soon founded the Genetics Policy Institute and became a global advocate for stem-cell research based on science versus science fiction.
INDIANAPOLIS — In the end, it probably won’t make any difference for the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team.
Still, it has to hurt when a team — indeed, an entire conference — is snubbed by the NCAA tournament selection committee.
INDIANAPOLIS â?? With just more than 6 minutes left in its Big Ten Conference tournament semifinal against Michigan State on Saturday at Conseco Fieldhouse, the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team was down 10 and on its last legs.
A key demographic is missing from the city ‘s recently-completed economic development plan — the young leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals and creatives of the Madison area. By not adequately addressing this demographic ‘s potential and needs, the city is squandering one of its most competitive advantages.
More than any other generation, young people today are entrepreneurs. To meet the small business owners, the tenants of UW Research Park and other key entrepreneurs in Madison is to meet an under-40 demographic. There is ample opportunity to provide dynamic support for young entrepreneurs and the talent coming out of UW-Madison. Young entrepreneurs are a powerful determinant of the city ‘s future economy. They cannot be an afterthought.
UW-Madison Athletic Director Barry Alvarez recently handed assistant AD Justin Doherty a copy of a letter he received from Bud Lea, the well-known former sports columnist and editor for the Milwaukee Sentinel.
In it, Lea described an experience he had during one of last month ‘s numerous snowstorms. He ‘d had chest pains and breathing problems and ended up being taken from his doctor’s office in Glendale to Columbia St. Mary ‘s/Ozaukee Hospital in Mequon.
There’s no one alive today who was around to witness the birth of Wisconsin’s dairy and cranberry industries in the late 1800s or the state’s rise as a manufacturing power in roughly the same era. But a new page in Wisconsin’s history of commerce is being written in our time – the emergence of stem cell medicine.
We released a set of five baseline reports on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program last month, the first new studies of the voucher program using individual student data since 1995. Since then, many stories and commentaries have been published. Some of those contained inaccurate, incomplete or misleading information. [A column co-authored by John Witte, professor of political science and public affairs at UW-Madison]
INDIANAPOLIS â?? Somewhere between the two-month Big Ten Conference grind and the survive-and-advance march through the NCAA men’s basketball tournament rests the conference tournament.
In the Big Ten, as in many conferences, it rests uneasily.
Experience is the word du jour in this political season. The debate over experience cuts two ways — it is, of course, a politician’s, not a historian’s, argument.
John McCain and Hillary Clinton have used it as a major talking point in support of their own candidacies and to build a case against Barack Obama. But presidential history attaches little importance to experience; it is strikingly absent in the historical credentials of our most honored presidents.
Certainly, inexperience blighted some recent presidencies, including those of John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and, more memorably, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
(Stanley Kutler is a retired history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This column originally appeared on truthdig.com.)
Thirty-nine students attend my Tuesday and Thursday, 2 p.m. American Literature seminar. Our classroom is the first one you see on the left, as you enter the unlocked humanities building.
If a psychotic gunman were searching for a tight cluster of multiple bodies – an easy target for either seeking revenge, casting out demons, achieving immortality, or whatever else his perverse purpose happens to be – he would find my classroom door wide open.
Who knew an evolutionary biologist had rock-star drawing power?
OK, he ‘s not Hannah Montana, but evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins ‘ visit to the UW-Madison campus this week blew off the charts for a Distinguished Lecture series event.
At a recent open forum soliciting input on the design of the new Union South, one of the architects posed a seemingly simple question: â??What makes a place uniquely Wisconsin?â? Initially, I thought it would be an easy question to answer.
Dates and venues for the WIAA state girls’ and boys’ basketball tournaments have become confusing.
Clearly, no one is at fault here. The WIAA and University of Wisconsin in Madison have formed a very workable partnership.
The WIAA is doing its best as it tries to conduct state basketball tournaments at the best possible sites. But at state basketball tournament time, the University of Wisconsin still has to prioritize its hockey, wrestling and men’s and women’s basketball programs, including possible postseason events.
When Bo Ryan was coaching four NCAA Division III champions at UW-Platteville in the 1990s, his best teams had a balanced offense, an impenetrable defense, a total willingness to buy into his system and a one-for-all, all-for-one attitude that created an industrial-strength bond in the locker room and on the court.
Big Ten champs, Big Ten champs, they began chanting with less than 4 minutes left.
Make that outright Big Ten champs.
“One team stands alone, and thats the team in that locker room, and it feels pretty good,” UW coach Bo Ryan said when it was over Saturday, the 65-52 victory against Northwestern that closed the deal for the Badgers.
….Sen. Hillary Clinton talks of her “experience,” Sen. Barack Obama offers “hope,” Sen. John McCain promises “economy” and to capture Osama bin Laden. Each very much wants to be president of the United States.
Who knows? Their thin words might or might not yet deliver a leader to restore our standing and image abroad, to stimulate economic recovery, to spurn torture, to respect the separation of powers, to rein in the malevolent growth of the American empire, and begin to heal the conflicts and divisions that have haunted us for the past quarter-century and more.
They should consider Franklin Roosevelt as a worthy model to emulate.
(Stanley Kutler is a UW-Madison professor emeritus of history)
Now that they’re here, it’s fair to ask the question. How in the world did they get here?
Here, of course, is the Big Ten Conference championship.
In later years, Kenneth Funmaker founded the Ho-Chunk language program and worked with UW-Madison linguists to develop computer programs to teach the language.
As tuition at UW-Madison has steadily increased over the past decade, access to higher education has declined for qualified lower- and middle-income students.
Better cancer treatment. Smaller, faster computers. Self-cleaning windows, even. This is just a small glimpse into the potential of nanotechnology, a science concerning the manipulation of materials at the molecular level. Sounds like a worthwhile project, right?
The concept and reasoning behind UW-Madisonâ??s new WiscAlert text messaging alert system are well thought out, but the system has flaws that need to be overcome to be a success.
The UW System revealed a new code of conduct Feb. 26 that allows the universities to expand their punishment of students for their off-campus behavior.
In your Feb. 21 article titled “Challenges remain for biotech,” The Capital Times reviewed an interesting talk given at the University of Wisconsin last week by Steve Burrill, a venture capitalist who has created a very successful business focused on biotechnology investments. In the talk, Burrill presented his viewpoints on the biotech industry as an investment.
As a biotechnology industry advocate, scientist, and entrepreneur of over 20 years and as a father to three children, I found the article and Steve’s talk too pessimistic and narrow in scope.
Score another win in the art world for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is a co-winner of the Best Online Archival Exhibit for a show about book bindings.
Nothing against Cal Poly or its many fine alums — John Madden, “Weird Al” Yankovic and Ozzie Smith to name three — but it’s time to make it a matter of policy the University of Wisconsin not schedule opponents unless they’re an NCAA Division I-A program. …
The state Senate recently passed a bill enabling UW System faculty and academic staff to unionize and attempt to gain benefits through collective bargaining.
Historian Jeremi Suri wrote a column about a plan hatched by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to end the conflict in Vietnam by pretending to launch a nuclear strike on the USSR.
The despondent faces of poor, sickly people in developing nations on our TV screens most nights can seem a world away from the majority of people of Wisconsin. But my work in some of the world’s most impoverished regions confirms that many of the diseases exacting a toll in Madison are decimating countries like Vietnam and Uganda.
One of the chronic diseases I’m most familiar with is diabetes, a condition once considered rare in the developing world. The incidence of diabetes is increasing in almost every corner of the world due to the same risk factors that we see in Western countries: obesity, poor nutrition and physical inactivity. By the year 2025, diabetes is expected to affect some 40 million, with 75 percent of cases occurring in developing countries.
(Linda Baumann is director of global health initiatives and a professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)
When we hear sedition is raging out of control at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, prompting student government to ban free speech on campus, citizens everywhere have a right to be alarmed.
What’s alarming, of course, is the apparent overwhelming ignorance of many of today’s student leaders at UWM about the principles of democracy and the Constitution of the United States.
In January, the Policy, Alternatives, Community and Education Project met to discuss initiatives for the upcoming year. Among the community-based objectives was to conduct rigorous ID checks during the sale of alcohol using electronic ID scanners as a means of curbing underage consumption of alcohol in Madison.
The cute girl in the YouTube video has a crush on Obama.
I know how she feels. I ‘ve had a crush on Bill Clinton.
I already know all the reasons why this is stupid.
In fact, I saw one of those reasons standing in line, waiting to get into the Stock Pavilion on the UW-Madison campus.
