Category: UW-Madison Related

Faculty members accused or convicted of serious crimes could be suspended without pay and fired more quickly under a plan being hammered out by a special committee of the UW Board of Regents.

In his brilliant book about his participation in the American political experiment, “Time Present, Time Past,” former New Jersey senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley offered this telling observation about the need for heroes in a democracy:

“…it is in our local communities that the real heroes live. They are individuals like Dorothy Bradley, Deborah Floyd, Ada Deer and Reverend Watley, whose humanity calls out to us….”

Wisconsinites will note the name of Ada Deer on that list of heroes whom Bradley identified during his travels around the country. Deer is the first woman chair of the Menominee Nation who went on to serve as assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the U.S. Interior Department and as director of American Indian studies at UW-Madison.

Only 10 percent of all teachers nationwide are black, Latino, Asian or American Indian. This is because fewer minorities go to college, and fewer still choose education over more lucrative fields, says Gloria Ladson-Billings, a UW-Madison education professor.

Regent Tom Loftus wants the University of Wisconsin System to take a hard look at the stock it owns in tobacco-related companies, as well as any research that System campuses do that is funded by tobacco companies.

Fresh from a seven-year stint with the World Health Organization — the public health arm of the United Nations — Loftus said his work as special adviser to the organization’s director general included an emphasis on “big tobacco” companies.

Gov. Jim Doyle’s office says Doyle will sign a measure approved by the Legislature to add a second student regent to the UW Board of Regents.

“It is something he supports,” Doyle spokeswoman Melanie Fonder said.

There is no merit to a lawsuit filed by an African-American dean who wants to block release of an audit of his spending on the grounds that it would harm the public’s interest in diversity on campus, a top administrator at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater said Wednesday.

This is one legal fight Atty. Gen. Peg Lautenschlager will sit out.

She has used her office to go after oil companies, hospitals and even other government agencies, but she is declining to step into a debate over a University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire policy banning resident assistants from holding Bible studies in their dorms.

It’s been a struggle for Wisconsin to keep tuition affordable at UW System campuses. So when it turns out that tuition is not the only battleground that student fees are adding as much as $1,148 a year to the cost of going to college it’s time for policy makers to examine what’s going on.
The Board of Regents should pursue a full-scale review of student fees in the UW System.

GREEN BAY, Wis. – The Minnesota Vikings’ animosity for the Green Bay Packers apparently doesn’t spill over to the Wisconsin Badgers.

One of the Vikings’ owners, David Mandelbaum, is donating $2.5 million to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Eye Research Institute. It’s to support a joint research initiative with University of Minnesota scientists.

I make no comment about the following facts, save to note that they are piquant:

Martin Cadwallader, chief research officer at UW-Madison, is concerned about possible federal restrictions on foreigners getting research information. He said recently, “We’re sensitive to the needs of national security. On the other hand, universities are cultures that rely on passing ideas back and forth.”

When I was a school child we celebrated America as a nation of immigrants. We admired Andrew Carnegie and Igor Sikorsky, who were born elsewhere yet made huge contributions to our country. In America, anything was possible.

Now, under proposed federal rules to limit access to research, Sikorsky wouldn’t have been allowed to invent the helicopter. In the interest of preventing terrorist attack, our federal government plans to hobble the army of immigrant scientists laboring to stop the next pandemic, or cancer or even obesity all far bigger threats to our lives.

But why pass regulations to further restrict foreign-born students and teachers? They’re already disappearing. Foreign student applications to the UW were down over 30 percent last year. They’re going to places like Germany to create hotbeds of research there, and the brightest Americans will follow them.

The sycophantic adulation of the UW- Madison football coach is disappointing.

First, the average annual expenditure for each UW athlete is more than $50,000, an outrageous expenditure. Second, the football coach has been made a multi-millionaire, wholly inappropriate for any public employee.

Finally, the various laudatory farewells directed at the coach are a bit much, especially given that he isn’t going anywhere except to a different office.

– Daniel R. Bohrod, Madison

EAU CLAIRE – The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Foundation is creating a fund that will invest in Chippewa Valley companies founded by recent graduates.

During a visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in October, Bill Gates – yes, that Bill Gates – said in an interview that the Xbox 360 is among Microsoft’s most important products in the pipeline, behind only its flagship Windows operating system and Office suite of software.

The ordeal of innocent prisoners doesn’t end when they’re released.

Starting a career decades later than one’s peers, finding jobs and housing before criminal records have been expunged, getting reacquainted with family or trying to start one at a later age – those are some of the challenges illuminated by “After Innocence,” a documentary the Wisconsin Innocence Project brought to the Wisconsin Historical Society on Thursday night.

I am a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Wisconsin native who grew up in Mukwonago. Before coming to this university, I knew there would be “Coasties” and there would be differences, but not to this degree.

Some University of Wisconsin-Madison departments do a poor job accounting for how they spend private donations intended for specific projects, an internal report warns.

Instead of creating separate accounts, some departments deposit the gifts into general department accounts, UW-Madison’s internal auditor said. That makes it difficult to monitor whether the departments spend the money as the donors request.

Madison – Some University of Wisconsin-Madison departments do a poor job accounting for how they spend private donations intended for specific projects, an internal report warns.

Instead of creating separate accounts, some departments deposit the gifts into general department accounts, UW-Madison’s internal auditor said. That makes it difficult to monitor whether the departments spend the money as the donors reque

Edwin N. Lightfoot, a professor emeritus in the department of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Mr. Lightfoot is being recognized for helping to develop the field of biomedical engineering.

Former presidential candidate George McGovern spoke Monday on the need for a new Democratic platform based on solid liberal ideals and ending the war in Iraq.

McGovern, in a speech at the Union Theater on Monday, compared the current war in Iraq to the Vietnam War when he asked, “Does any reasonable person in the United States think that the war in Vietnam was worth the lives of 58,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese?”

Although his family could not believe the hurt he had caused by his terrible mistake of driving while drunk, the story of Kurt Jensen is an all too common one in the Dane County Court system, said Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Nicks as she sent a former Bucky Badger to jail for four months.

Jensen, 24, was one of six students to fill the role of Bucky Badger as team mascot and all-around campus notable for the University of Wisconsin and its athletic teams in the 2002-2003 school year. He was also put on probation for 24 months, ordered to pay a $300 fine and ordered to perform 196 hours of community service.

In a speech here Monday night George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee for president, laid out a seven-point plan for how he’d reform the country. Each and every item was met with thunderous cheers as if the 83-year-old former senator from South Dakota were a current political contender.

Near the end of his UW-Madison lecture, “The Iraq War: Lessons From the Past,” McGovern called for the United States to get out of Iraq and for President Bush and his advisers to admit that Iraq was never a threat to the U.S.

Johnson-Sirleaf moved to the United States and waited tables while earning an accounting degree at Madison School of Business at the University of Wisconsin.

In the first exercise of its new oversight powers, a business committee of the UW Board of Regents agreed this week to seek information for a possible staff audit of student fees in the University of Wisconsin System, focused on how the fees work, what they are used for and why they have risen sharply in recent years.

Santa Claus was not immune from pepper spray, an inflatable doll was no match for police horses and some revelers at last month’s State Street Halloween gathering appeared to want a confrontation with police.
Those were some of the images captured with a roof- top video camera and released Friday by Madison police.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett Friday invited members of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents to the ribbon-cutting of a school of public health in Milwaukee, adding, “I hope it would happen before you leave the board.”

….I have to admit that most e-mails pushing products get deleted fast. But the “UW Holiday Cards” slug line piqued my curiosity just enough for me to stop trolling and start viewing.

One look and I was sold. The six cards — five contemporary photos in color and one archival shot in black and white — are classic campus images.

A group of UW-Madison civil engineers has received a Popular Science magazine “Best of What’s New” award in engineering for a technology designed to lengthen the life of bridges without raising construction costs.

The technology, which is highlighted in the magazine’s December issue, was developed by civil and environmental engineering professors Larry Bank and Mike Oliva, along with former graduate students David Jacobson and Mack Conachen.

MADISON – The University of Wisconsin System would not grant future academic administrators backup jobs, a controversial perk in which administrators gotlower-level jobs if fired, under a proposal a regents’ committee approved Thursday.

The paper was launched using funds largely from two sources, as Motel explained. “Because some of us were students,” she says, “we were able to get a grant from the Morgridge Center for Public Service,” a service-oriented program at UW-Madison.

UW-Madison students studying amid the unrest in France are “all safe,” according to interim Director of International Academic Programs Catherine Meschievitz.
Only three UW-Madison students currently reside in Paris, while 13 live around Aix-en-Provence. This stretch of land sits 30 to 60 miles from Marseilles — one of the French cities and towns ridden with the nation’s worst civil unrest in decades.

George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee for president, will speak at the Wisconsin Union Theater on Monday at 7:30 p.m.

McGovern, a former U.S. senator from South Dakota, will deliver this year’s Robert W. Kastenmeier Lecture. His lecture will be entitled “The Iraq War: Lessons From the Past.”

A newspaper in Madison deserves community support for giving the homeless a voice and a way to earn some money.
The Homeless Cooperative recently published its first edition, featuring writing by those who are or may become homeless. Vendors can buy the paper for 25 cents, sell it for $1 and keep the profit.

Donations including a UW-Madison grant paid for the first issue. With enough advertising, future issues will hit the streets every two months.

A yearlong audit of the University of Colorado Foundation, released on Tuesday, found some evidence of overspending, a failure to follow donors’ wishes, and a lack of accountability. But the problems, which the university swiftly pledged to remedy, appear not to add up to a major scandal, as some critics had expected.

River Falls Student Voice Editor Eric Ebert noticed the explanation in the police report.

The victim of an on-campus sexual assault in late September did not want to come forward, her resident adviser said, because she was afraid her name would end up in the newspaper.

There’s a reason that no serious injuries and virtually no property damage occurred during last weekend’s Halloween bash in Downtown Madison:

The city, UW-Madison, area law enforcement agencies and Downtown businesses spent a year developing a plan to manage the risks of the often-unruly celebration, and the plan was as successful as anyone could have expected.

Members of a local service organization have created a newspaper that they hope will provide income for the homeless and promote awareness of the problem of homelessness.

The Homeless Cooperative, formed by volunteers at the Madison Warming Center Campaign and some of Madison’s homeless people, released the first issue of its monthly newspaper at the end of October. About half of the content, which includes reporting, opinion pieces and poetry, is written by the paper’s distributors, who are homeless or in danger of becoming homeless.

“It’s a proactive means to empower homeless folks in the Madison community,” said Mel Motel, a UW- Madison student and co-editor of the paper.

Felony and misdemeanor charges against five Halloween revelers are the first charges from the weekend to filter through the Dane County Circuit Court.

Two out-of-town men were charged Tuesday with battering officers, a felony. And two men affiliated with UW-Madison were charged Thursday for hitting a police horse, a misdemeanor.

Three lawmakers are asking the UW Board of Regents to reinvestigate the Paul Barrows matter and sanction University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly for not mentioning his role in it until last week.

Madison police have named the former UW-Madison student who died early Sunday.

And the young man who fell at a campus-area apartment early Saturday is still in critical condition and hasn’t regained consciousness, said his mother.

Over the next 20 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus will be, literally, growing up.

To alleviate cramped spaces in research areas and residence halls, the university will replace many of its surface parking lots with new six- and seven-story buildings and grassy spaces. The university plans to add 6.8 million gross square feet of building space in that time.

It is safe to say that, in most communities in Wisconsin, Halloween is a time of fun and celebration, of ghosts and goblins and scary movies and trick-or-treating. That is how it is in Madison, too. But it has also become something else, something uglier. Madison police took prompt, strong action over the weekend in an attempt to prevent trouble. Unfortunately, they caused some trouble of their own. And efforts to anticipate problems and keep them from happening were not as vigorous as they could have been.

It’s not the pepper spray but the alcohol on State Street this weekend that Madison should consider when looking at whether to continue hosting a Halloween celebration, Police Chief Noble Wray said.
The largely peaceful event that drew 70,000 to 80,000 to State Street by midnight Saturday – police revised earlier estimates of 100,000 – ended at 2 a.m. Sunday with police using pepper spray to repel a small, yet persistent, crowd on the 500 block.

As state support for higher education diminishes in Wisconsin, public universities are turning to students to make up the difference. And not just through tuition.

The mayor urged him to stay away. So did police and UW- Madison officials. Even his dad told him not to go.
Undeterred, Tyler Swanson, 19, a freshman at the University of Minnesota, stepped off a Gofer Bus from St. Paul Friday night to participate in a notorious Halloween weekend on Madison’s State Street.

Halloween started out with a dull roar on State Street Friday night, with stadium lights ablaze and cops canvassing the area in masses.

University women and state leaders including Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton are questioning the University of Wisconsin System’s commitment to gender equity after the System’s top women’s issues coordinator quit in protest last month.

Halloween celebrations drew about 20,000 people to State Street as of 2 a.m. with police carting off at least 125 in plastic handcuffs.

Music educators took over Monona Terrace for a conference last week, and they did not come quietly. The music conference is one of hundreds of events that will take place at Monona Terrace this year. Hundreds more will be held at the Alliant Center and the Kohl Center. A decade after some officials worried that Madison wasn’t big enough to support all three facilities, each has found its own market niche.

Quoted: James Hartwick, a UW- Whitewater professor who studied the topic for his doctoral dissertation at UW- Madison.

tate Street was filled with pirates, witches, vampires, cats, and, of course, police officers Saturday night as a crowd of roughly 100,000 celebrated Halloween.

After Halloween revelry ended early Sunday in a cloud of eye- stinging spray for the fourth year in a row, Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz is asking whether the annual costumed crush on State Street should continue.

Halloween 2005 ended early Sunday the same way it did a year ago – with repeated bursts of pepper spray.
At 2 a.m. Madison police declared the rowdy gathering an “unlawful assembly,” herded the chanting and beverage- tossing revelers off State Street using police horses and then backed that up with the irritating chemical.

City engineering and planning staff members informed the State Street Design Project Oversight Committee of possible funding problems and plans for posting kiosks on the 300 and 400 blocks of State Street at a meeting Thursday.

For the past year Madison has been engaged in sober reflection about how to keep this weekend’s Halloween bash on State Street from turning ugly. But the key to keeping the Halloween party free of violence is for revelers to still be in condition for sober reflection in the wee hours of the morning.
In other words, the drunks are the problem.

A former Rio volunteer firefighter convicted of stoking a State Street bonfire last Halloween while costumed in his firefighting gear said Thursday he’ll probably never spend another Halloween on State Street.
“You can’t even sneeze on the street without getting arrested,” Jared R. Sunde, 21, said. “It was dumb. I was just a kid having fun.”

Minnesotan Angela Douglas, a St. Cloud State University sophomore, isn’t coming back to Madison for Halloween this year.
“I hear they’re cracking down even more on out-of-staters this year,” said Douglas, 19, arrested last Halloween. “My friends are trying to get me to go again, but I’ve experienced it once. I told my friends I’m not going back until I can at least legally drink.”

Jakob Bierbaum, 23, a senior at the University of Minnesota still smarting from his arrest last year, won’t be back either.

Madison, Wis. – Kurt Squire, an assistant professor at the UW-Madison School of Education, hopes to bring a new dimension to education and learning with “augmented reality” games, which combine aspects of physical activity, traditional reading and math problems, and video-game simulations.

Halloween revelers on State Street shouldn’t be scared when a cheerful, disembodied voice loudly proclaims an end to festivities this weekend.

“Thank you for attending the Halloween event,” the voice will nicely, but authoritatively, say via loudspeakers. “The city of Madison thanks you for your patronage of the State Street area and wishes you safe travel to your next destination. Please begin moving out of the State Street area so cleanup crews can prepare the area for tomorrow’s business day.”

College students in Rock County will no longer have to leave the area to receive a bachelor’s degree in engineering.

A special ceremony marked the beginning of a collaboration between UW Rock County and UW Plateville Wednesday.