Category: UW-Madison Related

UW-Madison officials participate in panhandling task force.

A UW-Madison professor arrested last week while allegedly trying to meet a 14-year-old Greendale boy for sex admitted sending the boy nude pictures of himself over the Internet, but maintained he didn’t intend to have sex with the boy.

Lewis Keith Cohen, a 59-year-old professor of comparative literature, was formally charged Tuesday with using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime and child enticement. Both counts carry maximum sentences of 25 years in prison.

University of Wisconsin-Madison financial aid director Steve Van Ess says he will retire on Sept. 1.

….UW officials also credit him for speeding up the financial aid application process, and for shining a light on the challenges facing students with low-income backgrounds.

Arlie Mucks, the indefatigable promoter of UW-Madison, a retired fighter pilot who wore Bucky Badger pajamas even on road trips and who was a hard- nosed star football player before the days of face-masks on helmets, died Saturday at the age of 85.

It would surprise only those who met him at back-slapping alumni sports outings with his buddy Elroy Hirsch to discover Mucks was a successful bank director, organizational wonder-worker and an adjutant general.

College administrators make decisions every day, so dealing with the consequences of unpopular ones is nothing new. Often those decisions are private, and even if their consequences are large, their visibility is relatively limited. But once in awhile, a decision has to be made on an issue that has tremendous public visibility and broad consequences. I recently had to make just such a decision.

As of 6 p.m. on February 1, I had never heard the name Ward Churchill. That evening, returning on a plane from Atlanta after several alumni visits, I read a news article about a scheduled presentation by Churchill at Hamilton College in New York. As my eyes briefly glanced over the page, I remember feeling compassion for Joan Hinde Stewart, Hamilton’s president, and the agony she must have felt over canceling his lecture there. I noted the threats, the security issues, the alumni concerns, and I remember thinking to myself, That is a no-win situation.

University of Wisconsin-Parkside has the highest percentage of minorities of any UW campus and in recent years has won state awards for its diversity efforts. But in the past 20 months, two minority faculty members have filed discrimination complaints against the school and others complain there is a negative atmosphere on campus that promotes discrimination.

An ambitious plan is unfolding to reduce stormwater runoff into Lake Wingra while mitigating the environmental impact of the new power plant on the UW-Madison campus.

It also might make it easier to find an errant tee shot at the Odana Hills Golf Course.

Milwaukee Police officials said a 59 year old UW-Madison faculty member was arrested March 15 in Greendale on the tentative felony charge of using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime.

Property tax relief and higher education tuition waivers were proposed Wednesday to help veterans injured in the line of duty.

ââ?¬Å?Invest in your creativity,ââ?¬Â a high school teacher told Milwaukee native Tai Words as she was going about the painful yet exhilarating task of applying to colleges during her senior year in high school.

Isn’t it amazing how the University of Wisconsin System can charge each student $600 to fund speakers like Michael Moore and Ward Churchill, justifying it with the need for the students to hear diverse views and exercise “public freedom” and at the same time be trying to control what students do off-campus in the privacy of their own homes (alcohol consumption).
â��� Jerry Johnson, Sun Prairie

Developer Curt Brink is proposing the most ambitious building project in Madison history.

A California native and UW-Madison graduate who played some football for the Badgers, Brink has spent most of his professional career as a real estate consultant and landlord.

….Samuel G. Freedman, who will be in Madison Tuesday, speaking at the Memorial Union at 7 p.m., does not exactly tell his own story in his new book, “Who She Was.” It is rather a search for his mother, dead from cancer in 1974 at only 50, when the son was in college at UW-Madison, writing for the Daily Cardinal and pretending not to know his mother (in front of classmates) when she visited him on campus.

Public broadcasting is worth saving George Will, in his column on Thursday, offered damaging proof that PBS is “a preposterous relic” in today’s TV world. We live in a market-driven society that needs continual feeding of public need for action and excitement. This must be paid for by endless parades of commercial “breaks” encouraging viewers to buy more and think less.

Kevin Reilly, president of the University of Wisconsin System, hasn’t taken a formal stance for or against a legislator’s proposal that the 13 two-year campuses in the system become satellites of the 13 four-year campuses.

MADISON, Wis. — The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents is talking about pricing tuition differently for lower-income students.

The Democrats incurred such large losses in the 2004 election because voters were more concerned about terrorism than the economy, said New Yorker columnist Hendrik Hertzberg in Madison on Tuesday.

Hertzberg was here as part of the first day of The New Yorker magazine’s College Tour. New Yorker writers and cartoonists will be on campus today and Thursday. His appearance, entitled “The Next Four Years,” came before more than 1,000 people in the packed Great Hall of the Memorial Union.

A student who claimed she was sexually assaulted Thursday on the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay campus is now admitting it never happened.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison, $1.464-billion as of February 14 (increase of $8-million in the last month); the goal is $1.5-billion by 2007

The Rev. Al Sharpton compared George W. Bush’s re-election a few months ago to a shell game in New York’s Times Square where con artists separate tourists from their money.

“George Bush and Karl Rove engaged the public in a three-card political monte game last year,” Sharpton told a revved-up crowd in a near-capacity Union Theater Monday night during his Distinguished Lecture Series “sermon.”

Addressing issues of tuition increases, faculty and staff salary gaps and federal financial aid cuts, UW System President Kevin Reilly met with student reporters from around the state Monday.

University of Wisconsin System President Kevin P. Reilly discussed recent budget proposals that could affect Wisconsin higher education in a press conference Monday.

Angela Rose is a promoting a CD-ROM called “Sexual Violence: It Can Happen to You” for a good reason: It happened to her.

In 2001, as a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Rose started a non-profit called PAVE, short for Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment (www.pavingtheway.net). (Login required.)

Lawmakers and members of the state�s administrative units met with University of Wisconsin System officials Wednesday to discuss various ideas to refine the affairs of higher education.

UW-Madison police found a man dead in a men’s restroom in Van Vleck Hall Friday morning. Police said the call came in at 9:48 a.m. They responded and found the 66-year-old man had no pulse and was not breathing.

BOULDER, Colo. – University of Colorado President Betsy Hoffman said a professor who compared Sept. 11 victims to Nazis will not be fired if a review turns up only inflammatory comments, not misconduct.

Next week, the contents of the New Yorker magazine will burst off the page and onto the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

The “New Yorker College Tour,” running Tuesday through Thursday both on and off campus, will bring some of the magazine’s well-known reporters, columnists, critics and cartoonists to town with a schedule that reads like the octogenarian magazine’s table of contents page.

It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes just one person at a time to make a difference in a community. Multiply that by six, and you’ve got the concept behind the YWCA’s annual Women of Distinction Awards.

Among the honorees are: Shiva Bidar-Sielaff, manager of interpreter services and minority community relations at UW Hospital & Clinics; Martha “Meg” Gaines, clinical associate professor of law and director of the university’s Center for Patient Partnerships; and Jeanan Yasiri, a senior lecturer in the Department of Consumer Science.

Ward Churchill, the controversial University of Colorado professor who has been the target of so much right-wing wrath, spoke Tuesday night at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. And his talk drew far more attention than it would have, thanks to the screeching of media windbags like Bill O’Reilly and politicians who have grown a bit too comfortable in the bully pulpit, such as Wisconsin’s own state Rep. Steve Nass.

… Unfortunately, the Churchill controversy has brought to Wisconsin an example of the worst sort of academic witch hunting, as Nass and his allies have attempted to advance the notion that the University of Wisconsin System should get into the business of censoring ideas.

The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents has adopted a series of guidelines to regulate the $330 million UW trust fund.

WHITEWATER, Wis.-Amid fervent demonstrations both supporting and condemning UW-Whitewater’s decision to allow Ward Churchill to speak Tuesday, the University of Colorado-Boulder professor of ethnic studies vigorously defended his controversial paper that compared some of the victims of Sept. 11 to Nazis.

Peering out before a packed auditorium Tuesday night, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Chancellor Jack Miller admitted this would not be a typical Native Pride Week lecture.

WHITEWATER, Wis. — The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater was the latest stage for a controversial Colorado professor Tuesday night

UW-Whitewater spokesperson Brian Mattmiller says the campus is prepared to head into uncharted territory Tuesday as the Ward Churchill controversy comes to campus.

he University of Wisconsin-Whitewater will welcome controversial Colorado University-Boulder professor Ward Churchill today. Churchill will be speaking to students as part of Whitewater�s Native Pride week.

The life and works of author, scientist and conservationist Aldo Leopold are being celebrated Friday through March 6 in Wisconsin.

A month ago, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s Native Pride Week was expected to be a mostly low-key affair with a series of speakers, including a little-known Colorado college professor.

On Tuesday, it is expected to be the latest stage for the controversy over Ward Churchill’s essay comparing some of the “technocrats” killed in the World Trade Center to Nazis.

State Rep. Steve Nass, R-Palmyra, got his Assembly resolution passed last week recommending that the UW-Whitewater cancel a scheduled address by controversial University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill. In so doing, he proved that, while the State Capitol does not sit upon much of a rise, there are many fools on the hill.

…University of Wisconsin political science professor Donald Downs, who has raised legitimate concerns about Churchill’s record as a defender of free speech, may have put it best….

The first Laurie Carlson Progressive Ideas Forum will celebrate the 10th anniversary of South Africa’s constitution by featuring South African Ambassador Barbara Masekela, U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold and UW-Madison constitutional expert John Kaminski in a conversational discussion on the UW campus (on Friday, March 11).

The pressure is growing on President Bush to change the limits he set four years ago on human embryonic stem-cell research.

Robin Douthitt, dean of the School of Human Ecology, is among this year’s 12 nominees.

Jacqui Sakowski, owner of Sakowski Consulting and an adviser for the Women in Business Council at the UW School of Business, has also been nominated.

If Madison is not yet the most progressive city in America, it is well on its way. That was Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s message to UW-Madison students Wednesday night during a State of the City event in Science Hall.

….Madison’s high-quality schools are a direct result of UW-Madison’s highly regarded School of Education, he said.

About 60 people congregated in the Memorial Union’s Rathskeller Wednesday to binge on Adult Swim, a late-night Cartoon Network programming block geared toward grown-ups that has acquired a cult following.

An electrical contractor working on state-owned equipment caused power failures that twice darkended Downtown on Monday afternoon and evening. Madison Gas and Electric representatives said Thursday.

More than 15,000 books will go on sale during Wisconsin’s largest used book sale Wednesday through March 5 in Room 116 of Memorial Library, 728 State Street.

Madison Gas and Electric officials have traced the cause of two underground fires Monday to a campus area substation.

….The problems were set off by a contractor hired by the university, who was working on university equipment at the station.

Dear Editor: A master’s program in feminist studies is being proposed for the University of Wisconsin. This seems rather redundant. For over 20 years the current program has successfully taught that it has the total truth about gender issues.

No support for the idea of merging two-year University of Wisconsin Colleges with regional four-year campuses can be found among Marshfield Common Council members.

Madison Gas and Electric determined Tuesday the cause of the Monday-evening blackout that left most of the State Street and Langdon Street areas powerless.

Equipment failures at the east-campus substation near the Kohl Center caused both the downtown afternoon and evening power outages Monday.

Life was back to normal for State Street merchants a day after underground electrical cables overloaded, caught fire and cut power to much of Downtown.

The city of Madison might not be as close to running out of combination liquor and beer licenses as officials previously thought.

Although the city still has only a handful of “reserve” licenses left, the City Attorney’s Office has now determined there are 57 additional Class B licenses that can be granted to new applicants.

Things were back to normal this morning on State Street after two underground fires Monday blew off a manhole cover, snarled traffic and knocked out electricity for thousands.

All of the nearly 400 free tickets available for the Ward Churchill lecture next Tuesday at UW-Whitewater are gone.

Tickets to see the controversial University of Colorado-Boulder professor were claimed by 3 p.m. Friday, the first day of availability.

Much of Downtown Madison and the UW-Madison campus were left in the dark for about 95 minutes Monday night when – for the second time in six hours – an underground electrical cable caught fire, sending flames and smoke up through State Street manholes.

Nobody’s lit up the fireworks yet or popped open the Veuve. But maybe someone should. The central city is booming in a way unimaginable only a decade or so ago.

Did I mention that the UW has almost $700 million in new construction in mind through 2011? “It’s the complete rejuvenation of big chunks of the campus,” notes Al Fish, UW Madison’s associate vice chancellor.

You might think I’d be happy: Gov. Doyle and the Republican-controlled state Legislature were in a bidding war to see who could cut my taxes the most.

“The Church and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic,” an unprecedented conference with speakers from as far away as Nigeria and Kenya, will be held Saturday at High Point Church, 7702 Old Sauk Road.

This is a multidimensional event whose participants will range from Roman Catholic to Pentecostal. The organizer is New College Madison, a 1-year-old “experiment in stimulating prophetic inquiry.” It is associated with the University of Wisconsin but not an official part of it.

It is good to hear that the Gaylord Nelson Institute is paving the way for “green” building in Madison (Page 3, “UW lays plans for area’s first ‘green building’,” Feb. 14). We can only hope their success will set a precedent that will influence building practices all over campus.

The University of Wisconsin student organization Al-Awda (Palestine Right to Return Coalition) began a campaign to convince faculty senates across the UW System to pass resolutions calling for divestment of funds from organizations selling arms and equipment to the Israeli military.