Category: Opinion

UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley has done a thoughtful job of hinting he might not want his job for life and might even retire in the near future.

…we’ve had far too many examples of government cover-ups and outright fabrications to dismiss out of hand as loony anyone who raises questions about the “official” version of events.

And where better to have a free and open discussion of controversial ideas than on a college campus?

Apparently, the biggest mistake made by Kevin Barrett, a part-time instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was appearing on a right-wing radio talk show in Milwaukee.

I admit I have more than a little sympathy for the folks living in the UW-Arboretum area who don’t want to see a developer “improve” three lots at Arboretum Lane and Arboretum Drive.

The latest in the academic follies comes from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where the administration has cleared the way for an instructor to teach his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were plotted by the US government to create an excuse for war.

By now, most everyone has heard about the recent academic freedom conflict at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

It is a new day, indeed, on campus. I look forward to the UW biology department hiring scholars who support the scientific claims of the intelligent design movement and former Harvard President Larry Summers’ views (more accurately, suggestions) regarding the innate differences in mathematical ability between men and women.

I anticipate the fireworks when the Medical School adds a professor with substantial experience in turning gays and lesbians into heterosexuals. The sifting and winnowing should be hot and heavy. Quaere verum, baby (“Seek the truth,” for those millions of us not as smart as professor Barrett – I looked it up).

The University of Wisconsin will allow part-time lecturer Kevin Barrett to teach a fall class on Islam, including his theory that the U.S. government planned the 9/11 terror attacks to launch a war on Muslim nations.

Author: Tamir Moustafa, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is a visiting fellow in the law and public affairs program at Princeton University.

Academic freedom, free speech and ââ?¬Å?sifting and winnowingââ?¬Â are sacred principles at the University of Wisconsin System.

For as long as anyone can remember, candidates for public office have circulated their nominating petitions on the Memorial Union Terrace.

Packed with Wisconsinites, most of them in a mellow mood, the terrace is an ideal spot for would-be contenders to gather the signatures they need to earn a place on local and statewide ballots.

Canon advises congress

On very short notice last week, UW-Madison poly sci prof David Canon found himself in Washington, testifying in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, urging senators to renew and strengthen the Voting Rights Act — the four-decades-old law that ended poll taxes and literacy tests that had disenfranchised voters, particularly African Americans.

The hazards of books

University Communications’ Susannah Jacobson fulfilled a life-long goal by competing on “Jeopardy!” (It airs at 4:30 today on Ch. 15.) She was worried because “with only a few weeks between the call and the taping, I crammed over my lunch hour using a book of lists made for game show prepping. A few days before the show I realized that the book was full of glaring errors.”

However, her final showing was more-than-credible, she reveals.

Look, I don’t denigrate the danger posed by clowns. I lived in Madison in 1970, when four inept young men tried to blow up the ammunition plant near Baraboo by flying over in a single-engine airplane and dropping a Molotov cocktail onto the snow- covered roof of one of the buildings.

A few months later, these same guys managed to blow up Sterling Hall on the UW- Madison campus, killing one researcher and destroying the work of dozens. I don’t think we should wait until clowns manage to get lucky and kill people before we stop them.

Ever been haunted by a ghost on campus? John Allen, associate editor of On Wisconsin, is collecting campus ghost tales.”I’ve gotten about 50 stories so far,” says Allen, perusing his e-mail. “Ghost stories are a favorite urban legend. I’m hoping to get a list of what is out there.”

The UW Board of Regents calls student fees “stealth tuition.”
A student government committee at UW-Madison uses the slang “seg fees.”

But ask average UW students for their own definition of segregated fees and they will invariably tilt their heads and effuse a blank shrug.

I turn 64 just six days after Paul McCartney. So I’ve been pondering the lyrics of his famous song with more than passing interest and marveling at where the time has gone.
Coincidentally, I completed a 42-year journey a few days ago while christening my new racing bike.

Opinion column mentions a sister city program originated in the 1950s from Ed Zawacki, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor.

When I graduated from high school, the official choreography of the event required everyone in my class to line up in height-order lines by gender. After that the two lines were placed side by side, so that we would process in and out of commencement next to a person of the opposite gender who was the exact same rank, height-wise, as we were.

With the release of a University of Wisconsin-Madison appeals panel report that damns the university administration’s treatment of Paul Barrows, the UW Board of Regents and administrators are now honor bound to reassess the status of the former vice chancellor for student affairs.

Bill Cronon and Northland College are a natural fit. I saw the bond instantly a year ago this month when our Wisconsin Idea Seminar bus from Madison pulled into Northland’s campus in Ashland for a dinner visit with faculty and students.

Cronon, the UW-Madison’s pre-eminent environmental historian who was our seminar’s guest lecturer for the week, launched immediately into an enthusiastic description of the college’s “green dorm,” the McLean Environmental Living & Learning Center, powered by a wind turbine and photovoltaic panels.

….it’s most appropriate that Northland will honor Cronon’s considerable achievements by awarding him a doctorate in humane letters at the college’s commencement on May 27.

After listening to the representatives of big business at a forum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently, you might be led to believe that the UW System should exist for the benefit of corporations alone.

At this juncture, it seems apt to reflect upon one of the more troubling story lines to cross the pages of this paper over the course of the past year. In the Paul Barrows saga, we have witnessed a story of polarizing proportions, and yet, at long last, we may finally begin to look toward a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

So if government is going to fund the expression of a wide variety of moral, political and cultural views, it cannot exclude religious perspectives. To do so would be to take sides in the great debate between religion and secularism. It would advantage non-religious ways of thinking and would send a message that perspectives drawn from faith are disfavored.

But if a wall of separation is not quite accurate, metaphors – even bad ones – are powerful things. We let go of them reluctantly.

As a case in point, John Wiley, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently announced that the school’s student government may not allocate student fees to a Catholic student organization if those fees are to be used for “religious activities,” apparently believing this would be prohibited by the wall. Wiley is reviewing his decision.

Few provisions in the U.S. Constitution have resulted in more confusion and disagreement among lawyers and judges than the First Amendment’s prohibition of laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”

Juan Gilbert invents computer software to learn by. A major breakthrough he’s had is not high-tech, however: He has cracked the puzzle of how to turn unheralded African-American students into academic whizzes. The key is what he calls the Asian model.

This finding may amount to a godsend for academic America, which is struggling to better reflect the nation’s racial diversity. The Journal Sentinel recently reported that, despite its prestige, the University of Wisconsin-Madison ranks low as a recruiting stop for many major corporations because it’s too racially homogeneous.

“We’re helping remind people that we’re the campuses, the students, the faculty, and alumni” that make up the System, Bonner said. She said that the effort is aimed at undoing some of the “administrative hatred” between the two ends of State Street.

Leesburg, Va. I RECENTLY did some research for a satirical novel set at a university. The idea was to have a bunch of gags about how colleges prostitute themselves to improve their U.S. News & World Report rankings and keep up a healthy supply of tuition-paying students, while wrapping their craven commercialism in high-minded-sounding academic blather. I would keep coming up with what I thought were pretty outrageous burlesques of this stuff and then run them by one of my professor friends and he’d say, Oh, yeah, we’re doing that.

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/04/23/opinion/edshakes.php
lleague of mine once asked me who had made me into a writer. “And I don’t mean one of those creative writing professors,” he said to me, a creative writing professor.

“Well, who do you mean?” I asked, probably ungrammatically, a thing creative writing professors get to do.

Higher education is again on the public and political agenda.

Listening to Paul Barrows discuss the unfortunate saga that has enveloped his life for some two years now, one thing is clear: for the former vice chancellor, things are not yet over.

You could hardly ask for a better textbook example of mishandling a personnel issue than the way the UW top brass treated Paul Barrows. The entire story reeks of conflict of interest. The university used unsubstantiated claims to ruin Barrows’ reputation and spent more time covering its derriere than it did on properly investigating Barrows.

The announcement of a $50 million private donation to help fund the proposed Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery has gained headlines throughout Wisconsin. While the generosity of John and Tashia Morgridge should be lauded, serious questions remain about how the facility will operate.

It seemed peculiar that Paul Barrows, an embattled former University of Wisconsin Vice Chancellor now relegated to a permanent backup position on campus, would request that his hearing before the Academic Staff Appeals Committee be open to the public. These things are kept private for a reason � pleasantries do not exactly rule the room. But Mr. Barrows fought for open doors nonetheless.