If you’re lucky enough to live long enough, sometimes the world will come around to your way of thinking.
Professor Max Carbon retired from the UW-Madison nuclear engineering faculty 15 years ago and during both his working and retirement careers has been a rather lonely voice touting the virtues of nuclear power.
During this frantic admissions season, it is easy for our applicants to think that the most important moment in their college career is when they rip open the mail to find out where they got in and where they didn’t.
But we in higher education understand that the admissions process has less to do with rewarding each student’s past performance â?? although high performance is clearly essential â?? than it does with building a community of diverse learners who will thrive together and teach one another.
When it comes to creating the kinds of diversity we sorely need in this country, however, disturbing trends and setbacks are making it difficult for many public schools and universities to succeed. The reality is that as much as we may want to believe that racial prejudice is a relic of history, conscience and experience tell us better.
The oldest sport at the University of Wisconsin and its most dominant program have a couple of things in common.
They have the sweetest digs on campus. You probably couldn’t guess them without a hint. They don’t get a lot of love or attention from people like me.
A guy with a gun in his kilt is not the State Street poster child the Chamber of Commerce wants for Madison’s main street.
That said, Tuesday night’s shooting won’t stop me from going down to State Street tonight to catch dinner and CTM’s production of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was in Madison over the weekend for the graduation of one of his nine children from a graduate program at the UW-Madison. And while he was here, he presided over a wedding ceremony as well.
Madison’s lakes are threatened. They are threatened right now. According to UW Madison lakes scientist Steve Carpenter the culprits are climate change, runoff pollution and invasive species. Sound familiar?
Simply three of the most talked about environmental influences of our times. And that’s why it is so important this Friday’s conference on the future of this regions lakes and watershed is focused on not just vision?necessary as it is?but also action. Immediate action.
We need both vision and action. We need a long term plan and sufficient resources to support it. We need organization and commitment. We need leadership. But we also need actions steps that can be taken citizens, elected officials and activists, researchers and scientists to reverse deterioration now and promote a cleaner future.
I knew better than to even try to dig up any dirt on LaMarr Billups. As Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said during a tribute to Billups at Friday night’s Spring into Jazz event presented by the Urban League of Greater Madison, Billups was involved in an enormous number of city and university projects and incredibly “he never made an enemy.”
I owe the high quality of my UW-Madison undergraduate degree to a long list of outstanding professors who not only taught facts but who sparked intellectual curiosity and academic growth in their students.
It’s a 15-foot by 15-foot cinder block cell, but it’s their cell and they’re sad to leave.
It’s a 15-foot by 15-foot cinder block cell, but it’s their cell and they’re sad to leave.
Max Thao and Ryan Cotant are the last UW-Madison freshmen to begin their college lives as residents of Room 809 in the West Tower of Ogg Hall.
Citizen involvement has been an underpinning of the two-year Future of Farming and Rural Life in Wisconsin Project. People from around the state had a hand in fashioning the list of recommendations released last week and featured on the front page of The Capital Times.
The recommendations — essentially action steps offered to policymakers, community leaders and interested citizens — will be discussed at the statewide Future of Farming and Rural Life conference May 14-15 at Monona Terrace. Information on registration is available on the project Web site. A report this summer will include the final recommendations.
This week Madison will have the opportunity to see living examples of the University of Wisconsin’s best tradition. In a gathering at the Memorial Union, we at the Wisconsin Alumni Association will be handing out the university’s Distinguished Alumni Awards.
But the awards aren’t the tradition I’m talking about — they’re just a bit of recognition, a highlight on UW-Madison’s true source of greatness. The university’s strength flows from its students, graduates, faculty, and staff. They’re the heart of the UW’s best tradition, which is encapsulated in the Wisconsin Idea, the principle that the university’s true purpose is to spread the influence of education and research to serve the entire state and indeed the world.
The Mifflin Street Block Party was a resounding success by nearly all accounts.
The University of Wisconsin is drawing the curtain on yet another eventful academic year. Faculty, students and staff have earned recognition for their work, and our sports teams collectively lead the nation.
The property-rights movement, said the speaker, “is not going away.” He added, “At some level I think they’re going to be successful.”
It was a notable statement, because the speaker, professor Harvey Jacobs of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is not a supporter.
Last Tuesday, students learned that football tickets for the 2007 season were sold out. Although not surprising in itself, as Camp Randall is routinely sold out, the real shock came to many students because they did not even know they were on sale.
Estimated at a cost of $1.3 million a year, a meager amount in comparison to the billions of dollars that make up the entirety of the budget, the addition of UW System domestic partner benefits to the Wisconsin biennial budget was unjustly denied last week by the Joint Finance Committee.
Scott Milfred is editorial page editor for the State Journal: smilfred@madison.com or 252-6110.
Instead of warning bar hoppers for the umpteenth time not to drink and drive, Michael Rothschild asked them what they wanted.
The UW-Madison emeritus business professor went to rural Wisconsin taverns six years ago to interview dozens of men ages 21 to 34 — the demographic most likely to drive drunk and crash.
Bartenders helped find and introduce Rothschild to what became focus groups of heavy drinkers prone to driving drunk.
“Just like Oscar Mayer might do if marketing a new luncheon meat, we asked: ‘What does the customer want?'”
President Bush has reiterated his oft-repeated assertion that we must support the troops. He must not be allowed to monopolize “patriotism,” “the flag,” and “the troops.” The rest of us can pay our respect to the idea of the nation, in our own mindful way, and as we see fit. On his own grounds, however, the president has a lot to answer for.
We can all probably agree that the NCAA is among the most hypocritical, overly regulated and insanely silly regulating bodies known to man.
For example, you could not give a UWM soccer player a ride were he or she trudging across Downer in a snowstorm or a hungry Wisconsin swimmer a couple of bucks for a sandwich.
In wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, parents worry about their children and whether UW-Madison would react appropriately if such a dangerous event were to occur here. The UW-Madison system recently started a review of the campusâ?? current security policies and instituted a plan to conduct future reviews to ensure that the campus has a safety plan should one of any number of different scenarios arise.
When I was a freshman, I wanted to live next to Lake Mendota. I knew the southeast dorms were not for this small-town boy. I felt lucky getting my first choice of Kronshage Hall, and when I moved in, my view of the lake from my room was one of the best in Madison. Even now, I still go out to Chamberlin and run along Lakeshore Path down to Picnic Point because it is one of the most serene runs in all of Madison.
That familiar yellow tag on our textbooks that reads â??usedâ? could mean catastrophe for all of us collegiate scholars because we may have unknowingly purchased an outdated chronicle of finite mathematics or an ancient account of what makes a good speech.
After a yearlong legal struggle, a federal court has ruled that the University of Wisconsin Roman Catholic Foundation is eligible to receive segregated fee funding. It seems that the final chapter of one of the yearâ??s most misunderstood stories has been written.
Demand for a business degree is booming worldwide.
In many respects, thatâ??s good news for me as the dean of the UW-Madison School of Business, but that same popularity also carries a downside.
I don’t even care if Joe Thomas is picked second by Detroit, fifth by Arizona or later this spring by the Milwaukee Bucks, who could use an athletic 6-foot-6 bruiser to give someone the business under the boards.
The only thing that seems important at the moment regarding the magnificent future of Joe Thomas – who one day just might be judged as the greatest professional player ever from the University of Wisconsin – is that Eric and Sally Thomas of Brookfield did some kind of job raising their son.
Type in “Virginia Tech” into the search engine at YouTube, and the top entries, surprisingly and poignantly, pre-date last week’s horrific campus shootings.
There’s an arena-shaking clip of the 2003 Hokies football team rushing onto the field to the tune of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” against the Miami Hurricanes. And there’s a cute little video prank where some students run through the streets with giant cardboard boxes over their bodies.
Both of these clips got to me in a way a lot of the network news coverage of the shooting and its aftermath didn’t.
You won’t go broke betting on the short-term thinking of teenagers.
Which is why the ad that landed in some UW-Madison students’ mailboxes right around the time of spring break is a work of marketing genius. It shows a young person wearing a T-shirt that reads:
“I went to Cancun on my Citi/AAdvantage Card, and I got 743 miles, a good start on my credit history and a bunch of memories.”
Is that great or what?
It is an American original, an act of grassroots democracy exported to the world.
Thirty-seven years ago, Earth Day launched a popular movement that changed our laws, culture and conventional wisdom, according to a column co-authored by Frances Westley, director of the UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
It is an American original, an act of grassroots democracy exported to the world.
Thirty-seven years ago, Earth Day launched a popular movement that changed our laws, culture and conventional wisdom.
April 22 represents our better nature – people power, an essential goodness and the enlightened leadership that inspires others across the globe. This annual observance has succeeded beyond anything its creator, the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, could have hoped.
UW-Madison real estate professor Morris Davis lives a secret life. He’s an international rock star. That secret will be out next Thursday when his group, The Contractions, plays the King Club and he takes the stage with his bass performing classic rock hits.
As the University of Wisconsin System attempts to have its proposal for $775 million in building projects approved by the stateâ??s budget committee, the UW System may face a rare opposition to its requests for new building construction. According to The Badger Herald, Republicans within the Legislature may try to block some of the more controversial building projects on the UW campus, such as the construction of a new Union South. Some of the projects, like Union South, will receive little or no funds from the state and will be funded by raising segregated fees and private donations. Some members of the State Assembly, however, may block some of the building projects so that segregated fees do not rise and make UW even more expensive for the average Wisconsin family, many of whom struggle to pay the $17,280 in total costs to send their son or daughter to UW for a year.
When a tragic incident occurs in this country as horrific and devastating as the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, we are often left with nothing more than questions. For those who have lost a friend, family member or colleague, these questions are usually the type of life-altering, existential ponderings that have neither simple nor speedy answers.
As more and more details have surfaced from Blacksburg, we have seen an increased demand for answers to these questions.
If you continue to charge low rent, you will eventually become low rent. Those were the words posted on my column a few weeks ago, and they couldnâ??t have been more accurate.
Today, the Wisconsin Legislative Joint Finance Committee will pore over hundreds of millions of dollars in University of Wisconsin building plans in an informational briefing. They will begin the process of determining which of the proposed campus building projects receive the stateâ??s approval.
My youngest uncle, now a retired law enforcement officer in Chicago, was involved in a stakeout many years ago and was shot in the chest. It was an extremely tense time for everyone but my grandmother because family members decided not to inform her that her youngest son was struggling for his life. They told her he was busy on a case out of town.
For parents of students away at college, the news Monday that 32 students were gunned down at Virginia Tech hit hard.
It’s not like we don’t already have enough things to fret about: Are they eating properly? Studying? In love? Depressed?
And why don’t they ever call?
I’m sure cell phones were ringing all over the UW- Madison campus, and others, as the news spread about the Virginia Tech shootings. On the students’ phones, the word “Mom” lit up.
Michael Quieto has been a well-known leader for the UW-Madison teaching assistants union.
With the flood of on-campus sexual assaults this academic year, UW-Madison students have more than a right to be concerned. Equally concerning is the confusion. Since most situations require students to walk home alone at night, they are left wondering how they can protect themselves.
Two days ago, La Crosse County joined a small contingency of Wisconsin localities, including Dane County, that provide full domestic partner benefits to its employees.
Concern apparently has been voiced across the state that the recent U.S. Patent Office decisions rejecting three patents held by the patenting and licensing arm of the University of Wisconsin could be a devastating blow to the state’s acknowledged leadership in stem cell research.
As one of the parties who lodged the thus-far successful challenge against the overreaching patents on human embryonic stem cells held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, let me reassure you that is simply not the case. And despite what WARF officials say, that’s not at all because appeals will be successful. A column by John Simpson.
Concern apparently has been voiced across the state that the recent U.S. Patent Office decisions rejecting three patents held by the patenting and licensing arm of the University of Wisconsin could be a devastating blow to the state’s acknowledged leadership in stem cell research.
As one of the parties who lodged the thus-far successful challenge against the overreaching patents on human embryonic stem cells held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, let me reassure you that is simply not the case. And despite what WARF officials say, that’s not at all because appeals will be successful.
Letâ??s put things into context.
The great state of Wisconsin is preparing to pass a new budget. The ins and outs of the budget process can be complex, long-winded, annoying and â?? most importantly to the general public â?? not sexy at all.
Aldo Leopold and his buddies would have enjoyed the moment. There I was, napping on a bench made of stone in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum when the pterodactyls approached. They surrounded me, but feigned disinterest and instead plucked last year’s crabapples from the Arboretum’s vast selection.
Was this a dream? No, it was turkeys, and how pleased the lovers of diversity who created the Arboretum would have been to see these giant birds enjoying a late afternoon fruit snack.
Wisconsin’s economic strength relies heavily on its educational foundation, and we are fortunate to have an extremely strong system of higher education, one that must be preserved and supported.
….Just as in the private sector, we must brand our uniqueness; we must characterize our programs and campuses so our students, parents, stakeholders and employers understand the value added that we provide.
Madison, Wis. – Researchers and engineers across Wisconsin are learning new ways to produce energy from cow manure, wood chips, organic sugars, soybeans, solar collectors, corn stover, wind farms, grease, waste from paper mills, and much more.
State businesses, architects, and builders are national leaders in planning and constructing â??greenâ? buildings that save energy and money.
The U.S. Congress is facing a critical funding decision in the near future, with dramatic implications for the well-being of the countryâ??and we are not talking about the Iraq War.
At first glance, the Women’s National Invitation Tournament is only slightly more compelling than a TV infomercial.
After all, the tournament determines the nation’s 65th-best basketball team, the title can be bought by any school willing to ante up for home games and the crowds are generally limited to family, close friends and a few dedicated fans.
Should College of Engineering students pay higher tuition than other undergraduates? If Engineering Dean Paul Peercy has his way, that would be the case.
After losing faculty members, the College of Engineering left many positions vacant due to lack of funding.
As students head into that happy place known as â??Spring Break,â? the sense of relief is practically palpable. Sleeping, partying and even homework are just waiting to be caught up on. Whether youâ??re headed to Cancun, California or just your parentsâ?? basement, thoughts of campus will, with any luck, be driven far from the collective student mind.
In early March, the Recording Industry Association of America launched a new â??deterrence programâ? to discourage illegal file sharing on college campuses. In response, UW-Madison officials deterred the program itself, refusing to hunt down and turn in the offending IP address users in campus networks. We support the universityâ??s decision, and hope the RIAA recognizes its folly in pressuring UW-Madison officials to infringe on studentsâ?? privacy with pre-litigation letters.
UW-Green Bay Chancellor Bruce Shepard writes that salaries of UW System faculty and staff have posed a daunting challenge on UW campuses throughout the state. In his opinion, the quality of what has long been considered a world-class university system is at risk.
The problem is money. Sanyer said UW-Madison requires international undergraduates to put up nearly $70,000 to be admitted. Now the hope is to have Shoaib enroll at Madison Area Technical College, which is requiring about $10,000 up front.
If you’ve had the fortunate misfortune to need an ambulance ride in Madison, you can thank UW Medical School Professor Marv Birnbaum for the fact that you’re up this morning reading the newspaper.
Whether it was the sunshine, the presence of grand marshal Bret Bielema or the basketball tournament visitors, Saturday’s St. Patrick’s Day parade attracted huge crowds.
His career is over, but Alando Tucker is still showing the way for the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team.
Asked how hard it would be for the returning Badgers to shed the extreme disappointment of their early exit from the NCAA tournament and start preparing for next season, sophomore Joe Krabbenhoft invoked Tucker’s name.
As many in the higher education community are well aware from news coverage here and elsewhere, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on behalf of its member labels, recently initiated a new process for lawsuits against computer users who engage in illegal file-trafficking of copyrighted content on peer-to-peer (P2P) systems.
In the new round of lawsuits, 400 of these legal actions were directed at college and university students around the country. The inclusion of so many students was unprecedented. Unfortunately, it was also necessary.
….Unfortunately, legislators, who earlier embarrassed themselves with an audit of UW faculty and staff sick leave usage, have shot themselves in the foot yet again.
Just as legislators were exposed by the news media as not reporting their own sick days, an examination of legislative salaries and benefits in Wisconsin compared to other states will once again reveal legislative hypocrisy. For Wisconsin’s legislators rank among the best paid in the nation when you examine their salaries, their generous per diem payments, their sick leave conversion privileges and their participation in the Wisconsin Retirement System.
In short, in a peer comparison with other legislatures, they rank far ahead of UW faculty and staff compared to their peers.
Segregated fees are continually a hot-button issue â?? and rightfully so. They are the additional charges tacked onto our tuition to fund student activities that, in theory, further the education experience at the university.
Madison is home to UW-Madison, the state’s premier and largest university with reams of employees with children. Education is highly valued and encouraged here. Many parents are politically active and willing to fight hard to advocate for advanced and special programming.
There were a number of moments Sunday when it became apparent that one of the best seasons in Wisconsin basketball history would not end well, but this one tends to stand out:
With a little more than 2 minutes left in the first half and UW down 12, the rattled Badgers were forced to call time out when they couldn’t even get the ball across midcourt against UNLV.
