Category: Opinion

….The girls state basketball tournament will be played at the Coliseum on the Alliant Energy Center grounds each season through 2008.

…The move allows the UW men’s hockey program to keep its priority status for scheduling in the Kohl Center. But it also gives the girls tournament a consistent home through 2008.

MADISON, Wis. — A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor convicted of stalking remains in jail after being denied the chance to go back to work.

Medical school professor Steven Clark pleaded guilty to stalking an ex-girlfriend in March, and two weeks ago he was sentenced to one year in jail with work release.

CLEAR LAKE – Up here in Polk County, where the chain of lakes that spreads across northern Wisconsin begins, and where folks take seriously the notion that nature really is a resource to be cherished and preserved, sits a tiny village that goes by the name of Clear Lake.

Author: Ann Althouse, the Robert W. and Irma M. Arthur-Bascom professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She maintains a blog at althouse.blogspot.com.

Late Tuesday morning there’s a whole lot of pacing on a Bascom Hill. Every time someone shouts “background!” people start moving in well- orchestrated lines around a couple that includes a blond woman in a long ivory jacket.

The woman in question is Blythe Danner, the Tony Award-winning stage actress also known for “Meet the Fockers.” The man she’s filming the scene with is Harold Ramis, of “Stripes” and “Ghostbusters” fame.

So forgive lawmakers, especially the Republicans who dominate the Legislature, if they tend to feel a little undervalued. And understand that when they look at the University of Wisconsin System, they tend to see cushy jobs with fat salaries two, three, four and five times as big as their own.

If that’s a lawmaker’s perspective, imagine how news of the latest UW flap sounds: a vice chancellor earning $191,000 spent seven months on a paid leave of absence in part because of a failed relationship with a grad student. Yet the vice chancellor was well enough to apply for a top job at another university while UW was paying him for not working in a job UW eliminated.

Paul Barrows is a UW- Madison administrator who, until recently, was paid $191,749 to be vice chancellor for student affairs.

You might think that if you are getting paid $191,749 a year to be in charge of student affairs you might think twice about having a “relationship” with a student.

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.”