Category: Opinion

THERE is a way to get beyond the religious morass created by President Bush’s position on embryonic stem cells.

The University of Wisconsin System has to keep its acronym because repainting all those W’s would cost too much and confuse alumni. Readers who think I was hornswoggled by the System’s constant calls for cash think it should be called “The University of Whining.” Based on the students I know, I think it should be “The University of Wanton Whoopee.”

By PAM BELLUCK
Published: June 12, 2005

BOSTON � It sounds like a terrific solution to a thorny consequence of infertility treatment: take the extra embryos created during in vitro fertilization treatment for one couple, and donate them to other couples who are having trouble conceiving children but who desperately want them.
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Currently, 48 million Americans are on Social Security. That includes 30 million retired workers and 3.1 million dependents and 6.7 million survivors, a group that includes children who have lost a parent and, consequently, any means of support. Also, nearly 8 million disabled workers and their dependents receive benefits.

It’s a program begun in the dark days of America’s Great Depression and was in no small part modeled by progressive thinkers here at the University of Wisconsin who signed on to President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal for the American people.

The president of the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation wants the Madison Landmarks Commission to declare the old Rennebohm’s building at University Avenue and Randall Street a landmark. This would complicate UW- Madison’s plans to build a $375 million Institute of Discovery there. The city Landmarks Commission will consider it June 20. UW-Madison finds the idea as appealing as a day-old Danish.

The state needs the University of Wisconsin System to increase the number of college graduates it produces, to help create high-paying jobs that will keep our graduates in Wisconsin, and to attract other degree holders from out of state to build their careers here. Unfortunately, states that do not use their public universities as this kind of galvanizing force will be the backwaters of the 21st Century.

This may just be as close as Madison will get to a Prince Charles and Lady Di moment. Call it our Wedding of the Decade.

Guests are dodging Farmers’ Market customers, heading towards streams of bubbles emanating from machines outside the doors of Grace Episcopal Church early Saturday afternoon. A guy in a black T- shirt labeled “SECURITY” is standing by the door.

Inside, Badger basketball star Mike Wilkinson is preparing to wed the gorgeous, anthem- belting UW-band’s Alexis Schrubbe.

The right of pharmacists choosing not to dispense certain prescription drugs that they morally object to providing has received considerable public attention recently. This issue of Spectrum covered a variety of background and reader views on the topic.

If you cheer for, write checks for, lose sleep over and/or generally obsess about University of Wisconsin athletics, then you might want to pay attention here.

According to a study by two British anthropologists, published today in the journal Nature, wearing red is consistently associated with a higher probability of winning in sports.

Go Big Red, indeed.

and the UW Band’s anthem-singing Alexis Schrubbe, you’ll have to excuse the Mother of the Bride if she cries.

Janet Dettlaff (who kept her maiden name, as her daughter Alexis also plans to do) has even better reasons for her tears than most moms in her shoes.

At an unusual garage sale this week, the musty smell of old wood and sight of truly ugly plaid upholstery took me right back to my student apartment days.

Five old homes that have housed generations of students are going the way of horses and buggies. So Sonya Newenhouse and her Madison Environmental Group were hired by Great Dane Development to hold a “deconstruction sale” in the 400 block of West Gorham Street.

Over in the UW-Madison’s botany department, staff are watching, waiting and hoping for blooms. On Newton’s Apple Tree.

The tree, a sprig grafted from the tree that dropped an apple on Sir Isaac Newton and inspired his deep thoughts on gravity, was planted in the Botanical Garden near Chamberlin Hall in 2001.

It was a gift from congressman James Sensenbrenner, a UW-Madison Law School graduate. The National Institute of Standards and Technology gave it to Sensenbrenner for his service as chairman of the House Committee on Science.

Two years ago, a few blooms became apples, but some students snatched the forbidden fruit before it could be officially harvested, says Mo Fayyez, garden director. (Check out his amazing planting database at www.botany.wisc.edu.)

“We were planning to make a Newton Apple Pie and give it to the chancellor or the congressman,” says Fayyez. Last year’s bad weather meant no pollination. This year, the warm streak in April might have done the trick. He’s crossing his fingers.

Imagine what that pie might fetch on eBay.

Tuesday’s hearing on the “conscience bill,” designed to protect pharmacists from birth control pills, featured a Catholic UW-Madison pharmacy student who had “sleepless nights” trying to decide whether to continue in pharmacy school after he learned – on the Internet, no less – that birth control pills can destroy fertilized eggs. He wants the government to protect his religious right to refuse to give out drugs that doctors prescribe for patients.

I find all of this concern for my eggs touching; it makes me want to break out into the old Monty Python song, “Every Sperm Is Sacred.”

As I see President Bush traveling about the country telling us of Social Security’s impending bankruptcy and describing, although not precisely, what he wants to do about it, I wonder what my teacher, Wisconsin’s own Ed Witte, would have to say….

(David B. Johnson, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studied under Edwin E. Witte as a graduate student.)

Madison is an easy sell in May when white sails glide across Lake Mendota and the air is heavy with apple blossoms.

But there are those who sell Madison when it’s tough: during the melting mud season of March, while being panhandled and heckled and propositioned by pimply adolescents.

I write shortly after the Mifflin Street block party. About 20,000 revelers enjoyed tradition, as hundreds of thousands have before them. Many say “let them play,” while others would “make them pay.” This annual, open-air beer bash regularly results in student riots, burning and looting, with multiple arrests and individuals incapacitated from alcohol. This year students defied the city and other officials, and some will bear the burden. It was an “orderly” event; “only” 225 arrests were made (more than 1 percent of attendees). Chilly, overcast weather kept crowds, and hence, ambulance calls, down.

Mentions a University of Wisconsin-Madison study that shows that energy efficiency and cleaner fuels and cars can create a brighter future in Wisconsin.

Editor’s note: John Geddes, managing editor of the New York Times, was the scheduled keynote speaker Saturday night at the 100th anniversary celebration of the founding of the UW-Madison School of Journalism of Mass Communication. Here are excerpts from his prepared remarks.

The mood of the moment seems to be that the world of journalism is deteriorating before our eyes.

Two weeks ago media magnate Rupert Murdoch told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that the end of newspapers as we know them is nigh. My colleague Nick Kristof soon opined that the climate of press freedom is more ominous in the United States than at any time in the past century. Six weeks ago Jeffrey Rosen of New York University somewhat jocularly called for the commissioning of a new book titled “Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die.” And everywhere online, there’s some correspondent taking a whack at MSMs, the acronym of the day for most of us in the mainstream media.

Susan Lampert Smith’s column on Thursday, “Mifflin block party may get a visitor to remember,” about the young man who fell off a Mifflin Street balcony after having too much to drink was illuminating. One of the things that struck me most was the young man’s mother’s comments about the patient population at the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Center: “Half the people are in there because of alcohol-related accidents. Maybe three-fourths of them, if you count accidents where someone else was drinking and driving.”

Students drinking beer at Saturday’s Mifflin Street block party might see a young man in a wheelchair rolling down the 400 block of Mifflin Street.

If it’s a slight young man with reddish hair, it will be the new Jason Gratzl. He won’t be looking for a beer. He’ll be looking for the Mifflin Street balcony where, last August, the old Jason Gratzl disappeared, probably forever.

Just in case any of you have a lingering suspicion that I am sophisticated, this is going to end it: I saw the Madison Opera production of “The End of the Affair” last week and I hated it.

I didn’t like the music. I didn’t like the characters. I didn’t like the story.