A conservative research group in Michigan has issued a far-reaching public records request to the labor studies departments at three public universities in the state, seeking any e-mails involving the Wisconsin labor turmoil.Enlarge This ImageNarayan Mahon for The New York TimesWilliam Cronon, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
History is a powerful thing ? just ask University of Wisconsin professor Bill Cronon. One of our own history professors, he recently received an open records request from the Republican Party for applying a bit of history to the current debates raging within Wisconsin.
Adding to the confusion around its publication Friday, the state?s Department of Justice said Monday morning the budget repair bill is in fact law and asked that the current court cases be dismissed, prompting a critical response from the Dane County district attorney later in the evening.
As in every other state budget cycle, University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly will appear this week before the Joint Finance Committee to defend state funding for the system. During more typical times, most of Reilly?s angst would be focused on the $250 million in cuts proposed in Gov. Scott Walker?s 2011-13 biennial budget, half of which will be absorbed by UW-Madison.
Professor William Cronon, one of the University of Wisconsin?s most eminent scholars, has recently authored several reasoned and thoughtful articles about the historical and contemporary context of the state?s on-going and extraordinary political turmoil.
Quoted: Howard Schweber, a UW-Madison law professor.
Quoted: John Witte, a UW-Madison political science professor working with the University of Arkansas on a five-year study of the Milwaukee voucher program.
Quoted: Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.
University groups continued to take sides last week on the prospect of UW-Madison splitting off from the rest of the University of Wisconsin System. While the Teaching Assistants? Association – which represents nearly 3,000 graduate employees at the university – voted to oppose the plan, a group of students started a new organization in support, called Students for the New Badger Partnership.
Facing big cuts in state aid under new Gov. Scott Walker, UW-Madison plans to pay a consultant some $1.5 million for the first phase of a study on how to run the university more efficiently. I can do it for a lot less than that. Here?s the sum of my recommendations: Fire people.
A new nonpartisan analysis of Gov. Scott Walker?s two-year budget plan shows that overall state spending would increase by a mere 1 percent over the life of the plan. The Legislature Fiscal Bureau report released Monday shows that spending would go up that much compared with the current two-year budget. That includes money transferred to quasi-public authorities created, most significantly the proposed breaking off of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Been quiet here on the western front. Some links and thoughts on the WIP as proposed by the UW System versus the New Badger Partnership, proposed by UW-Madison and Chancellor Biddy Martin. One fundamental difference: the WIP was a hastily put together document with no consultation happening between UW-Madison students and the UW System Regents. Alternatively, the New Badger Partnership is an extremely public document with thousands of hours of debate and analysis behind its name.
The financial stress on the flagship research universities in the Midwest were encapsulated in the two-hour visit to the Riverside Brewery in West Bend, Wisconsin this month by Biddy Martin, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Several university faculties in Wisconsin have voted overwhelmingly to join the American Federation of Teachers, a move the union says amounts to a backlash against Gov. Scott Walker?s bid to strip their collective bargaining powers.
More than a million people teach at colleges and universities in the United States, but only one faces a Republican demand for his e-mails: William Cronon, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison students got to voice their concerns about the New Badger Partnership at a campus forum Monday.
The legislature?s powerful joint finance committee will begin work this week on the governor?s budget proposal.This is the week when cabinet secretaries appear before the finance panel to brief lawmakers on the governor?s plans for state agencies. On Thursday, two of the most controversial pieces of the governor?s budget will get an airing as the University of Wisconsin and the Department of Public Instruction appear before the finance committee
In a public forum Monday, the University of Wisconsin dean of students and several deans of individual schools said university operation is hampered by a human resources structure that does not fit a world-class institution.
Both the American Association of University Professors and the American Historical Association are opposing efforts by the Republican Party of Wisconsin to obtain e-mails sent by William Cronon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, following his publication of a blog post critical of that state?s Republican governor, Scott Walker.
The Republican Party of Wisconsin filed an open records request to obtain UW-Madison history professor William Cronon?s e-mails, sparking a debate over academic freedom.
After a University of Wisconsin professor posted a blog article calling for further investigation of a conservative advocacy organization, the Republican Party of Wisconsin filed an open records request for his university emails, a move some say poses a threat to faculty members? academic freedom in research.
After the referral of a controversial bill to the state Supreme Court, experts said the upcoming Supreme Court election would intensify partisan battles that have the potential to politically charge the fundamentally non-partisan branch of government.
Faculty at a Madison area college ratified contract amendments cutting pay increases to prevent layoffs despite concerns on how the new contracts could negatively affect students.
The Legislative Reference Bureau published Gov. Scott Walker?s controversial budget repair bill online Friday afternoon, prompting discussions as to whether the publication meant the bill had become law.
The American Historical Association has jumped into the ring to defend William Cronon, the University of Wisconsin professor whose emails?some of them, anyway?had been requested by a top official with the Wisconsin Republican Party.
With great traditions that define us, why is our state government trying to blast Wisconsin?s tradition of political activism by ramming the voter ID bill through the Legislature? I am an out-of-state student, but I have lived here for almost two years, so I consider myself a Wisconsin resident and voter. This voter ID bill would eliminate student IDs as an acceptable form of voter identification. Our ID cards are secure enough to be used as debit cards, so why not for voter registration?
A thorough airing is needed before any legislative action is taken on a plan to keep the University of Wisconsin System united while still allowing the flexibilities sought in a proposal to split off its flagship campus.
The Republican Party of Wisconsin has launched an all-out attack on William Cronon, arguably one of the most prominent and respected academics not just on the University of Wisconsin campus but nationally.
Why the attack? Because Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Foundation fellow who has for decades been one of Wisconsin’s most beloved public intellectuals, dared to raise questions about whether national right-wing think tanks and interest groups might be influencing the choices made by Gov. Scott Walker’s administration to attack Wisconsin unions and initiate a power grab that even some Republicans worry will diminish democracy at the local level.
Once upon a time, professors led quiet lives, walking slowly from seminars to tea in panelled rooms. Nowadays they wake up in the middle of media storms. The latest scholar to whom this has happened is William Cronon, who teaches environmental and Western history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Quoted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden.
Monday?s New York Times features a column by Paul Krugman headlined “American Thought Police” about the matter of William Cronon, the UW-Madison history professor whose writing about the American Legislative Exchange Council ALEC, a right-wing think tank, has drawn the ire of the Wisconsin Republican Party. This follows an editorial by the same newspaper on the topic last Friday.
Here?s what we?ve never understood about the idea of cleaving the Madison campus from the rest of the University of Wisconsin System: Why shouldn?t all the campuses be freed from unnecessary state bureaucracy?
They should be, yet that?s not what will happen under Gov. Scott Walker?s proposal, which has the hearty endorsement of Carolyn Biddy Martin, chancellor of the Madison campus.
I support my fellow chancellors? call for forms of flexibility they believe would be appropriate on their campuses. I was not asked to sign the letter, presumably because of my support for the model proposed in the governor?s budget for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I could not, in good faith, have endorsed a plan that has, as yet, no details that would allow us to assess whether the benefits to UW-Madison are comparable.
I have been presenting the New Badger Partnership, UW-Madison?s integrated plan for a new business model, for more than a year. I also have consistently argued that all UW campuses need greater flexibility and local decision-making. [A column by Chancellor Biddy Martin].
Ray Cross, Wisconsin?s new chancellor overseeing the state?s 13 two-year colleges and the UW-Extension, could play an influential role in the growing debate over Gov. Scott Walker?s proposal to spin off UW-Madison as a public authority. Many students entering the colleges hope to later transfer to the flagship university ? a process that could become more difficult if UW-Madison leaves the UW System.
Gov. Scott Walker’s first budget is a spending plan that seems to uniformly favor Republican pets such as school vouchers, transportation and tax cuts while targeting nearly every Democratic sacred cow. Walker?s proposal, aimed at eliminating the state?s $3.6 billion shortfall, would cut more than $1 billion from education, knock more than 50,000 people off BadgerCare, roll back recycling and water purity requirements, and cut aid to the poor. Supporters say it is the first honest budget in a generation, since any real reform requires serious cuts to entitlements and education. Critics say Walker is turning Wisconsin into a laboratory for the GOP.Mark Bugher, director of University Research Park and a former administration secretary under Thompson, said the governor has rightly targeted the ?Big Five? of state budgeting: schools, Medicaid, local aid, corrections and the University of Wisconsin System. ?If you want to reform things, you start there,? he said.
When UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin says she wants her university to set sail from the constraints of the UW System, I say bon voyage! Respected public universities such as UW-Madison increasingly have sought status and brand-recognition as they prey on that bizarre middle-class American fetish for higher education that assumes a student?s choice of college is possibly the most important choice of his life. Despite Martin?s assurances to the contrary, a standalone UW-Madison would be more expensive and harder for state residents to get into, while benefiting from the hype among out-of-state and well-heeled students that expense and exclusivity confer.
As a retired UW System vice president, I?ve watched the debate over the proposal to give UW-Madison?s varied constituencies a greater role in guiding and supporting the institution through the next phase in its history. The reforms, advanced by UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin and endorsed in the governor?s budget, should be adopted.
Professor William Cronon, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is now in a serious tangle with none other than the state Republican Party, in yet another battle over Scott Walker?s new anti-public employee union law. After Cronon posted a piece on out-of-state think tanks and interest groups that would spur the law, the GOP has responded with an open-records request on Cronon?s own state account e-mails.
A branch of the US Republican Party has been accused of attacking academic freedom by using freedom of information laws to access emails sent by a University of Wisconsin-Madison academic who criticised its policies.
MADISON, Wis. ? Wisconsin Republicans insist that the anti-union law that sparked weeks of protests at the state Capitol and that is being challenged in court takes effect Saturday because a state office decided to post it online. The head of the office that posted it and a court order temporarily blocking the law?s implementation suggest otherwise.
The Republican Party of Wisconsin isn?t happy when uppity university professors criticize our governor.
A thorough airing is needed before any legislative action is taken on a plan to keep the University of Wisconsin System united while still allowing the flexibilities sought in a proposal to split off its flagship campus.
Governor Scott Walker says he?s open to a plan that would offer campuses in the UW-System more flexibility, similar to what he?s offering UW-Madison.
A plan to split UW Madison from the rest of the UW System has competition. The chancellors of UW extension and all the UW campuses ? with the exception of UW Madison?s Biddy Martin, have signed on to this Wisconsin Idea Partnership, a reaction toMartin?s New Badger Partnership which spins off the Madison campus.
A leading Republican lawmaker says the controversial budget repair bill now has the effect of law, but Wisconsin?s Secretary of State says otherwise.
Some confusion still exists over whether Friday?s publication of Wisconsin?s controversial collective bargaining bill by the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau makes it law.
The Republican Party of Wisconsin is seeking, under the state?s open-records law, to obtain e-mail sent by a Madison professor who has publicly criticized that state?s Republican governor, a move the professor is denouncing as an assault on his academic freedom.
Just when it seemed that the political conflict and intrigue over public higher education in Wisconsin could not get any more intense or convoluted, it did. Thrust into the tangled mix of controversy over employee union policies and potential governance restructuring that roiled the University of Wisconsin System this winter came word late Thursday of a Republican operative?s perceived attack on academic freedom and on one of the university?s most visible scholars, which promises to complicate an already combustible situation.
The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian who dared to criticize the state?s new union-busting law. These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.
Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state?s political turmoil. He started a blog, ?Scholar as Citizen,? devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin?s Republican governor has turned his back on the state?s long tradition of ?neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.?
Here?s what we?ve never understood about the idea of cleaving the Madison campus from the rest of the University of Wisconsin System: Why shouldn?t all the campuses be freed from unnecessary state bureaucracy?
They should be, yet that?s not what will happen under Gov. Scott Walker?s proposal, which has the hearty endorsement of Carolyn Biddy Martin, chancellor of the Madison campus.
MADISON, Wis. — The University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor said if her school is allowed to spin off from the rest of the UW System she won?t recommend a tuition increase of more than 8.5 percent next year. Biddy Martin said the in-state rate hike would match what Madison students absorbed in the past year. She said grants would cover students from lower-income families.
For decades the theory that farmers are getting old and there are no young people taking over has been a popular subject of discussion presented by so-called ag experts. However, the line of young people waiting to take over the home farm or set out on their own career in farming or agribusiness is long and enthusiastic.
The recent 15th Badger Invitational Holstein heifer sale hosted by the UW-Madison Badger Dairy Club is a showcase of good dairy cattle and the 75 or so students who put the event together.
The Wisconsin Republican Party, apparently stung by a blog post written by UW-Madison history professor William Cronon, has responded by asking the University of Wisconsin-Madison for copies of all of Cronon?s office e-mails that mention prominent Republicans or public employee unions. Cronon revealed the GOP?s Freedom of Information Act request in his Scholar as Citizen blog post late Thursday evening along with a lengthy, and typically scholarly, defense.
Chancellor Biddy Martin just can?t catch a break when it comes to the New Badger Partnership. After she attracted support from major student leaders across campus, Martin was left with the daunting task of capturing the heart of one of Wisconsin?s most intransigent politicians to date?Gov. Scott Walker. Fortunately for Martin, the idea of the partnership was established even before Walker came to office. And to Martin?s delight, Walker released a 2011- ?13 biennial budget containing all the statutory language needed to grant UW-Madison more autonomy under?much to the UW System?s surprise and dismay?a public authority model.
Budget cuts are flying around mercilessly these days. Madison is facing a 13-percent budget cut in Scott Walker?s proposed budget bill and needs to find ways to absorb those costs without just passing them on to students. Public authority status, included in the budget, is one proposal aiming to do just that, but Chancellor Biddy Martin is looking for other cost-reductions as well. This week, the administration announced a contract with Huron Consulting Group to look for ways to improve efficiency on campus and save the university money.
A Wisconsin appeals court referred the controversial ruling blocking publication of the collective bargaining bill to the state?s Supreme Court Thursday, whose decision to hear the case could be impacted by the upcoming judicial elections.
The Natural Resources Board honored the late Harold “Bud” Jordahl on Wednesday by unanimously approving a proposal to name a section of the Lower Wisconsin Riverway after the long-time conservation leader. Jordahl served on the Natural Resources Board from 1972 to 1976 and was instrumental in numerous landmark conservation efforts, including the creation of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and the creation of the state?s Outdoor Recreation Act Program in 1962, the forerunner of the popular land-buying Stewardship Program.
(Jordahl, who was a professor of urban and regional planning at UW-Madison, helped create conservation organizations such as the 1,000 Friends of Wisconsin and the Gathering Waters Conservancy.)
City Council candidates from four downtown districts worked to distinguish themselves on key neighborhood and city issues, from the city budget to the downtown entertainment district, at a forum Thursday night.
Full-time faculty and support staff at Madison Area Technical College voted to amend a three year contract so that they would get smaller raises and would begin paying into their pensions. In exchange, the unions representing the two groups asked the college to “make every effort to avoid layoffs caused by budget reductions.”
