Live from the State Capitol Tuesday night, Gov. Jim Doyle flexed his muscles and articulated lofty plans in his annual State of the State address. As the keystone of his education platform, Doyle reaffirmed his commitment to the Wisconsin Covenant.
Quoted: Fran�§ois Ortalo-Magn�©, a real estate economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
At first glance, the University of Wisconsin is thriving just as much as any other public university in the country. Enrollment is soaring: The number of new students has been steadily increasing since 2001, with each crop of freshmen possessing better academic records than the class before.
Susan Heegaard, executive director of the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, sent a letter to the Wisconsin Higher Education Aids Board last week calling for a change in the Minnesota-Wisconsin reciprocity agreement.
With all of America�s advancements in science and technology, our legal system should be adept at finding the truth in most of today�s murder cases. On Jan. 23, Roy Brown was released from prison after serving 15 years on a murder conviction.
In the next 800 words, you’re going to meet my new favorite coach. But first you have to guess who he is. Hint No. 1: Nobody in any division of college basketball won a higher percentage of his games (.908) in the ’90s than he did. (Login required.)
According to the Wisconsin Higher Educational Aids Board, grants are ââ?¬Å?ââ?¬Ë?giftââ?¬â?¢ aid; they do not have to be repaid.ââ?¬Â But if state Rep. Suzanne Jeskewitz, R-Menomonee Falls, has her way, grant-funded students will repay each dollar per course in which they earn sub-ââ?¬Ë?Cââ?¬â?¢ grades.
The dean of students position has been filled on an interim basis since former Dean of Students Luoluo Hong left the University of Wisconsin on a sour note in June 2005. Things will change this semester, however, when Chancellor John Wiley and Provost Patrick Farrell select a permanent replacement.
Ever get bugged during dinner by those earnest students shilling for their university’s endowment fund?
Feel free to use my excellent line: “Sorry, love to help you. But I’m still waiting for my college education to pay off.”
Heh, heh.
UW admissions policies regarding race are currently being debated.While many state officials oppose affirmative action, proponents of ââ?¬Å?comprehensive admissions,ââ?¬Â including Chancellor Wiley, believe it promotes diversity and equality.
Last fall, UW System President Kevin Reilly asked the Board of Regents to implement a ââ?¬Å?holisticââ?¬Â freshman admissions policy at all UW campuses. The policyââ?¬â?which has been used effectively at UW-Madison for yearsââ?¬â?requires admissions officers to consider non-academic factors in evaluating prospective students, while maintaining the primacy of academic factors. Non-academic factors include race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, motivation, leadership qualities and legacy status, among other things.
It’s Audrey Seiler meets Lonelygirl15 and it’s coming to YouTube this week.
Columnist Michael Hunt says Alando Tucker is the best player ever in UW basketball history.
How to solve Wisconsinââ?¬â?¢s ââ?¬Å?brain drainââ?¬Â? Looming over the head of the state Legislature for years, the ââ?¬Å?brain drainââ?¬Â conundrum is a complex problem to solve. One definitively wrong way to solve it? Free tuition.
Pat Richter attends University of Wisconsin men’s basketball games as a fan these days, and Richter the fan is thrilled that Richter the athletic director didn’t succeed in hiring Rick Majerus as UW’s coach in 2001.
Asked if he is happy today that Majerus jilted him six years ago, Richter’s response was emphatic.
“Oh, yeah,” he said recently.
There is a certain risk to making such calls, kind of like the peril that came with declaring Ohio State and Michigan the best football teams in the land well before the fact.
But with marginally less chance for damage control three months hence, we will proceed to the edge of this sturdy limb and pronounce Wisconsin as a Final Four team right here and now.
Author Gregory Krohm is a professor of actuarial science, risk management and insurance at the University of Wisconsin. The article “A New Season?” appears in the winter issue of the Cato Institute’s Regulation Magazine.
In case you missed Sunday’s New York Times story on Downtown Madison, I’ll give you the Cliffs Notes version:
Downtown revived.
Condos appear.
Drunken students plague new residents.
If you have been following the funeral ceremonies for former President Ford during the past few days, you might have noticed the presence of his pastor.
The Rev. Robert Certain led prayers for Ford at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Palm Desert, Calif., days after Ford died. Certain also led the procession of the late president’s casket into the Capitol Saturday, presided at Ford’s state funeral Tuesday and will lead services today at the Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Certain is somewhat known in Madison. His brother, Phillip, is the former dean of the College of Letters and Science at UW-Madison, and Robert Certain visits here frequently.
Inviting Ward Connerly to speak to a special Wisconsin legislative committee studying affirmative action is like inviting the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan to address a hearing on race relations.
….The irony is the embarrassing Grothman and Connerly show is taking place at a time when the University of Wisconsin System has a serious problem with affirmative action. Namely, we don’t have nearly enough of it.
Some major corporations have stopped job recruitment on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus because executives say the lack of racial diversity on the campus does not properly prepare students to succeed in their companies after graduation.
I learned about the Aramaic term earlier this week when I ran into Dr. Manucher Javid, a retired UW-Madison neurosurgeon who has made it part of his life’s work to introduce members of Downtown Rotary to the beauty and variety of the world’s religions.
An oft-heard complaint about the University of Wisconsin-Madison, justified or otherwise, is that its academic and research fruit falls close to the tree. It has world-class scientists and well-developed mechanisms for turning their best ideas into products or services, but most of that commercialization takes place within a half-hour drive from campus.
Not that flags can flutter on the airless surface of the moon, but if they could, the international lunar base camp on NASA’s drawing boards would be a prime spot to hoist Wisconsin’s colors. Cites UW-Madison technology advances. A column by Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council.
Certainly, it’s a relief that police have arrested and charged Antonio Pope with kidnapping and raping two UW- Madison students. Despite Pope’s arrest, troubling questions remain.
Way back when I was covering the Wisconsin Legislature we had a Republican state senator who spent much of his political career attacking the University of Wisconsin.
….Today’s Gordon Roseleip, the shoot-from-the-lip assemblyman from the Whitewater area, Steve Nass, has been rewarded for his over-the-top confrontations. The Assembly Republican leadership has put him in charge of the Colleges and Universities Committee, where he has the potential to do untold damage to the system.
It’s one thing to hold the UW administrators to account for their mistakes and misdeeds. It’s quite another, though, to punish the entire system – students, faculty and everyone else connected to the schools – in the mean-spirited “get even” way in which Nass specializes.
….
Yippee! They’d be getting a new chairman of the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities. They happily ripped open the shiny new package, only to find inside the Legislature’s version of the killer Chucky doll: Rep. Stephen Nass, R- Whitewater.
Criminal background checks are commonplace in the working world. Fortunately, the UW System Board of Regents voted Friday to join the club, adopting a policy requiring background checks for all potential employees.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has lobbied hard for a school of public health at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee throughout the past year. This is understandable ââ?¬â? he is the cityââ?¬â?¢s mayor, and heââ?¬â?¢s actively trying to rectify what he believes is a key liability of Wisconsinââ?¬â?¢s most populous municipality: poor public health.
Free tuition in exchange for 10 years of living and working in Wisconsin ââ?¬â? sound like a fair deal? This is one of many ideas the state education reform commission is considering to improve Wisconsinââ?¬â?¢s schools and economy.
What if Wisconsin voters in the recent election had been asked, as Michigan voters were, to amend the state constitution to “ban public institutions from using affirmative action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes”?
Quoted: Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Buildings across campus sport signs proudly proclaiming UW-Madisonââ?¬â?¢s ââ?¬Å?We Conserveââ?¬Â campaign to slash energy consumption 20 percent on a per-square-foot basis by 2010. UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said the program, announced in May, ââ?¬Å?will encourage smart energy use that will help protect the environment.ââ?¬Â
The Student Rights Coalition published a column Tuesday expressing their distaste for a recent decision by University of Wisconsin Chancellor John Wiley. The group criticized Mr. Wiley for enforcing an order by the Board of Regents to disallow the use of student-segregated fees to fund off-campus facilities for student organizations.
Much of the rhetoric surrounding the gay marriage ban last month claimed that its passage would eliminate the possibility of UW-Madison ever offering its employees domestic partner benefits. In meetings beginning Thursday, the UW Board of Regents may try to skirt the amendment and offer those benefits anyway in its unclassified pay plan.
In writing for the majority in the U.S. Supreme Court�s landmark 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O�Connor found the University of Michigan Law School�s use of affirmative action as part of its admissions process to be constitutional, so long as it is narrowly tailored and not reliant on a quota system (as was the downfall for Grutter�s companion case, Gratz v. Bollinger, in which the court struck down Michigan�s undergraduate bonus point system for minority applicants).
When Tom Flynn hears “Merry Christmas!,” he hears an implied insult coming from conservative Christians reasserting their dominance at a time when America is growing more diverse.Flynn is waging “war on Christmas,” and he says his side, the “Happy holidays!” crowd, is winning.The secular humanist will bring his message to the UW- Madison campus tonight, when he talks about “The Real War on Christmas.”
University of Wisconsin administration sent a memo Nov. 16 to the Student Services Finance Committee (SSFC) stating that university segregated fees can no longer be used to fund the rent of groups in non-university buildings.
Professional poker playerI grew up in Madison. While I now live on the West Coast, I love Madison, return regularly (every Christmas and summer) and will always consider Wisconsin home.It is also the state where I lived my formative years, attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, learned the art of poker at the Memorial Union, and launched my poker-playing career at locations throughout the state.
As second-year medical students at the Medical College of Wisconsin, we speak on behalf of many other medical students in support of the college’s circulatory control laboratory using dogs. An opinion column by three medical students.
Another election season has come and gone. In Wisconsin, there was little intelligent discussion about our environment and how we should protect, manage and use our incredible natural resources to maintain the quality of life and recreational opportunities most Wisconsinites cherish.
….Gov. Jim Doyle and his agencies, along with a new Legislature and new local leadership, now have a responsibility to lay out their vision for Wisconsin’s environment, including what actions they plan and what resources they propose to commit.
(Born is a UW-Madison emeritus professor of planning and environmental studies)
So much to skewer, so little space:
Animal rights activists last week won a court battle moving them closer to opening a “cruelty museum” next to UW-Madison’s primate lab.
It’s a free country. If the activists want to spend a rich California man’s money on a museum virtually no one will go to, so be it. As long as taxpayers aren’t footing a penny of the bill, let the museum fail on its own.
Chancellor John Wiley got two Christmas stockings filled by local Sierra Club Santas this week. One contained more than 700 postcards from students and community members seeking to close the Charter Street coal plant that was the subject of a mid-November permit hearing. And the other was filled with coal.
Engines of Inequality, a report by the non-profit Education Trust, recently gave UW-Madison a poor score for serving African Americans, Hispanics and American Indians.
The report, which focused on the country�s 50 state flagship universities, based its ratings on enrollment and retention rates for minority and low income groups.
You’re a Wisconsin public official who happens to be gay or lesbian.
When the time comes to be sworn in again, you get to swear to uphold a new constitutional amendment that forbids you from forming a marriage or a civil union.
So what do you do?
You’re a Wisconsin public official who happens to be gay or lesbian.
When the time comes to be sworn in again, you get to swear to uphold a new constitutional amendment that forbids you from forming a marriage or a civil union.
So what do you do?
President Bush is expected to sign legislation updating the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, now renamed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The name change alone is evidence the act is unnecessary and victimizes the rights of protestors by deeming their actions ââ?¬Å?terrorism.ââ?¬Â
Now that animal-rights activists have won the right to buy land for a museum next to UW-Madison’s primate labs, you have to wonder who’s going to visit.
It’s hard to imagine dad offering to pack up the kiddies for a fun day at a display of cruelty to animals.
For those who don�t think dirty political campaigning is a problem in the Midwest, look no further than a recent study conducted by the University of Wisconsin that found especially high rates of political advertising to low rates of election news coverage on television newscasts.
It’s not every day that Wisconsin has a chance to attract a major federal laboratory. It has been more than 30 years since the National Wildlife Health Center was established in Madison, and nearly 100 years since the University of Wisconsin was selected over the University of Michigan as the site for the National Forest Products Laboratory. Both labs have contributed immensely to the world’s knowledge of wildlife diseases and forests – as well as the state’s economy.
Ah, my favorite time of year is finally here. The semester has been long and difficult, but I can finally sit back, relax and vent ââ?¬â? itââ?¬â?¢s time to fill out class evaluation forms.
If you are one of those people hacked off because the University of Wisconsin football team isn’t getting its due this postseason, here’s a glass-half-full thought:
The Badgers may be on the outside looking in at the Bowl Championship Series party – despite winning 11 of 12 games – but just wait until a year from now.
She’s pleased to announce a breakthrough in the “breast wars” at Camp Randall Stadium.
With purple Waukee W’s covering them from head to toe, tireless Mike Hughes, his wife and their two young sons took off for Madison, Wis., last weekend in hopes of catching a few more trademark violators.Officially, Hughes was visiting his old hometown to watch the University of Wisconsin play a football game.
Since I became dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health on July 1, no issue has received more of my attention than the relationship between the school and the Milwaukee community and our role in addressing the health care needs of its underserved populations. A column by Robert Golden.
In his recent state of the university address, Chancellor John Wiley said that he was considering making it mandatory for all students to participate ââ?¬Å?in at least one documentable ââ?¬Ë?out-of-classroom activity.ââ?¬â?¢Ã¢â?¬Â
I don’t know about you, but it rankles me that the juggernaut known as the University of Wisconsin athletic department is picking on little high schools whose names just happen to begin with a W.The W, we are told, particularly the red W that for some absurd reason is called the “motion W,” belongs to the UW Badgers and no one else can use it.
I don’t know about you, but it rankles me that the juggernaut known as the University of Wisconsin athletic department is picking on little high schools whose names just happen to begin with a W.
Even in Madison, the University of Wisconsin’s non-conference football game against Buffalo ranks third on most people’s agendas today, right behind watching Ohio State and Michigan in this year’s Battle of the Century and heading to the woods to help thin the state’s deer herd.
Unlike in 2001, when Cooper was born, Amy Olson was turned away this fall when she wanted to sit in a Camp Randall Stadium first-aid station to pump her breast milk during the game.
