Category: UW-Madison Related

A noted Christian theologian suggested Monday in Madison that the Bush administration not only had prior knowledge of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11., 2001, but probably helped orchestrate them.

David Ray Griffin asks the tough questions about Sept. 11, contending U.S. officials had some knowledge of what was coming and possibly orchestrated the attacks.

Griffin, whose book, “The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11,” came out a year ago, drew an enthusiastic standing ovation from the majority of the 400 or so people who packed his lecture Monday night at Bascom Hall.

While Griffin noted that his books and talks have not received attention from the mainstream media, C-SPAN had a cameraman at the event and plans to air the lecture at a future date.

A retired University of Wisconsin economics professor has filed a complaint against the university, alleging that a minority grant program illegally discriminates on the basis of race.

W. Lee Hansen filed the complaint with the Education Department Office for Civil Rights on March 10. He says the Lawton Minority Undergraduate Grant Program violates federal civil rights law.

Twenty-eight students from Wisconsin and Michigan were evacuated from a Paris hotel adjacent to one that caught fire and killed at least 20 people early Friday.

More than 50 people were injured, 11 seriously, in the blaze at the one-star Paris Opera hotel in the capital’s 9th district, a popular tourist area, fire officials said.

“We heard a lot of screams,” said Stanislas Bricage, a Frenchman evacuated from an adjacent hotel along with some of the students, who were wrapped in golden survival blankets but appeared unharmed.

Perpetual student Johnny Lechner found out he has something in common with David Letterman.

“I don’t know exactly what it is I’m doing,” Lechner told a television audience in the “Late Show with David Letterman” that aired Friday night.

“I kind of feel the same way,” Letterman quipped back.

Lechner, the 11th-year senior at UW-Whitewater whose never-ending undergraduate career attracted media attention after an article about him ran in the Wisconsin State Journal last week, flew to New York City on CBS’ tab Sunday and taped the Letterman segment Monday.

Campus police pulled the plug on an electrical generator at a campus anti-war rally that attracted about 200 students late Thursday morning. The protesters did not have a permit to hold a rally with amplification in front of Bascom Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Capt. Brian Bridges. When he began speaking with organizers during the rally, protesters chanted “Free speech! Free speech!” and began to push forward toward the microphone.

But the tensions did not erupt into violence. The protesters held the rest of the rally with megaphones and by shouting.

A handful of students with no tickets for the event but plenty of questions and complaints were Kevin Reilly’s toughest critics Wednesday at a luncheon speech for UW- Madison faculty and staff.

Things threatened to get derailed early when an organizer of the event told the students they had to give up their seats at a table near the front of the room unless they bought a lunch and put on name tags like the other attendees.

Critics of the state’s plan to replace its decade-old video and data network, BadgerNet, were surprised to hear on Tuesday that a contract with an SBC-headed alliance had already been signed.

Incoming students may soon confront diversity issues in a way no current student has if Associated Students of Madison continues its work toward implementing Plan 2008.

In an effort to discourage practices of genocide in Sudan, Harvard University has decided to divest its holdings from PetroChina, an oil company with ties to the Sudanese government, according to an April 4th statement from the Harvard Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility.

UW-Madison alumnus and former The Daily Cardinal writer Walt Bogdanich received a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for his “Death on the Tracks,” a series he wrote for The New York Times on corporate cover-ups of responsibility for fatal accidents at railway crossings. Bogdanich spoke with The Cardinal Monday.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison, $1.464-billion as of February 15; the goal is $1.5-billion by 2007.

Chadbourne Residential College on the UW-Madison campus will host a weeklong series of lectures, films and roundtable discussions in recognition of the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Voting Rights Act. Veterans of the civil rights movement are scheduled to participate in the event, which will begin Sunday and run through Friday.

For more information, call 262-1971. A schedule and list of participants are available on the Chadbourne Web site: www.housing.wisc.edu/Student_Orgs/crc/

While Thursday�s University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents meeting was meant to pay honor to undergraduate researchers of the UW System, Friday�s paid honor to UW System non-faculty and athletes.

Some Mifflin St. residents woke up to an unpleasant surprise this morning: overnight vandalism.

Police are investigating the vandalism that happened this morning near the UW campus. Tenants say someone slashed the tires of 10-15 vehicles in a residential parking lot.

UW-Madison students re-entered Hiram Smith Hall today after a broken water main at the construction site next door caused the building to be shut down for several days.

Nevertheless, the building entrance closest to the construction site’s waterlogged retention wall will remain closed. To compensate, university crews are retrofitting a fire escape into an entrance, said Faramarz Vakili, associate director of the UW’s Physical Plant.

In a rare question-and- answer session with reporters, UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley on Thursday held forth on a half-dozen issues making waves on campus now, sharply parting ways with students on more than a few of them.

On sweatshop labor, for instance, Wiley said some of his student critics “wildly exaggerate” the pressure that UW- Madison or any one university can put on the worldwide apparel industry to curb widely acknowledged worker abuses.

“All the universities in the country don’t have the buying power of one Wal-Mart,” he said, adding later, “The only way we can make progress is to continue to work together.”

Iraq war veteran Robert Acosta, a 22-year-old Hispanic man from Santa Ana, Calif., lost his right hand and the use of his left leg when a grenade was tossed into his Humvee in Baghdad in July 2003. He received the Purple Heart for his injuries. This week, and for the rest of April, you can see his picture in Madison. Next week, you can see him here in person.

Next Wednesday, Apr. 13, Acosta and UW-Madison professors Joe Elder and Mary Layoun will participate in a panel discussion on “What is the human cost of war?”

Sponsors of a nonpartisan effort to buck up voter turnout for the spring elections say they’re going to rethink their strategies given Tuesday’s low turnout in Dane County. (UW Hospital and UW-Madison were among the employers participating in the effort.)

City and county officials said that just 18.7 percent of eligible county voters and 17 percent of eligible Madison voters made it to the polls, the lowest figure in eight years.

Wisconsin Public Radio has won a prestigious Peabody Award for “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” a weekly radio magazine started in 1990 about political and social trends.

The show airs here Sunday mornings on AM and FM stations, and is distributed nationwide to 128 stations by Public Radio International.

WHITEWATER – At the off-campus house Johnny Lechner shares with three other UW- Whitewater students, the stairway to his attic bedroom is lined with photos dating back to his freshman year.

Lechner has lost track of many of the buddies that posed with him at these long- ago fraternity parties and Homecoming parades. They have moved on to new lives – careers, wives, children, mortgages – and that’s just not Lechner’s scene.

At $2.27 a gallon, are you wondering whether to pay your rent or buy a tank of gasoline just to get around town? Are you taking classes this summer on campus and need cheap, temporary transportation?

A possible answer might be found at 930 Regent St., where free – with a modest, refundable deposit – transportation is now available as part of a unique Madison project.

A classroom building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus was evacuated on Tuesday after a water main broke at the construction site next door.

Construction workers identified the break at the site of the new microbiology building, being built where E.B. Fred Hall had been, mid-morning on Tuesday, said John Harrod, UW-Madison’s director of physical plant. University officials were worried the water would destabilize the soil and loosen the foundations of Hiram Smith Hall, 1545 Observatory Drive, Harrod said.

Once again partner benefits at UW are being opposed, this time by prominent state legislators. Wisconsin’s citizens are settling for leaders who do not lead but rather use their personal biases and prejudices to determine for all of us what a family is.

Sometimes, it’s all about perception.

Perceptions can be based on who you are.

If you’re a UW-Madison student, and you buy a keg of beer and charge your pals $5 for all they can drink, you better hope the cops don’t show up.

Just ask the seven UW students who live at 417 W. Mifflin St. They were smacked with 154 tickets and $73,500 in fines when their kegger got busted in January. Police have been cracking down on big house parties, saying they lead to unsafe drinking and crime.

….On Thursday, Madison police officials released the department’s annual crime statistics, which will be used to compile the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report later this year….one unsettling statistic stands out: a striking 52 percent increase in forcible rape, to 94 incidents from 62 the previous year.

….The incidence of rape and other violent crime was most prevalent in the central district’s university student-heavy and bar-saturated downtown area, where 228 violent crimes were reported. That’s more than twice as many as in the city’s north and east districts.

We asked readers to react to law schools, including the UW-Madison’s, that bar military recruiters because the military discriminates against gays and lesbians. Here is a sample of readers’ responses.

There were more violent crimes – particularly sexual assaults and aggravated assaults – in Madison last year than a decade earlier, police statistics released Thursday indicate.

Findings from a preliminary study concerning the possible firing of controversial University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill were released Monday by CU�s interim president Philip P. DiStefano.

The Wisconsin Union is guilty of worker exploitation. There are 150 new janitorial, food service and maintenance employees this year in a classification called “limited-term employees.”

Pell grant changes that will reduce aid to many Wisconsin college students are here to stay, but much else about the federal financial aid picture remains cloudy, UW-Madison officials said Wednesday.

Rhonda Norsetter, special assistant on federal relations, and Steve Van Ess, director of student financial services, briefed the campus community Wednesday at a seminar sponsored by WISCAPE.

The state doesn’t have enough money to pay for domestic partner benefits for University of Wisconsin employees, say two top members of a powerful Legislative panel.

The Board of Regents is asking the Legislature to let them provide that benefit, arguing that its absence hurts their ability to recruit and retain faculty and staff.

Cisco Systems Chairman John Morgridge this month cashed in $143.6 million of stock in the San Jose networking giant held by the charitable foundation created by him and his wife, Tashia.

Last year, John and Tashia Morgridge gave $31 million for the renovation and completion of an education building at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where the two earned bachelor’s degrees in 1955, according to media reports. In another donation, the Tosa Foundation provided equipment valued around $10.8 million in 2002 for upgrades of the school’s computer network.

In a three-year operation culminating in a difficult hunger strike, Georgetown University�s Living Wage Coalition helped finalize a living-wage policy with the university March 24.

Only one form of identification and a boarding pass are needed to get you past security and on to a flight from Madison to Chicago.

That may be easier than buying a keg of beer in Madison.

Increased identification requirements, sworn statements, even a demand to know where the beer will be consumed, are included in a proposed change to the city laws that currently regulate only sales of delivered kegs.

Mayor Dave Cieslewicz isn’t trained in architecture but he knows what he likes. Now he’d like to know what you like – and don’t like.

At the March 16 meeting of the Urban Design Commission, the mayor said the current building boom offers Madison “a chance to reshape and redefine the city.”
He said he would like to see citizens weigh in on their favorite and least favorite buildings as “a useful (and fun) exercise … to develop democratically a reflection of our tastes.”

(Among his favorites is the Memorial Union. His least favorites include the Mosse Humanities Building.)

Karen Ryker is a star theater professor who wins praise for her teaching of Shakespeare’s plays.

Larry Wu is a professor of sociology who generates millions of dollars in research funding. And Christine Saulnier is a talented academic administrator.

All three openly gay scholars left the University of Wisconsin for other schools in recent years, each citing the state’s policy to refuse health insurance coverage for domestic partners.

UW-Whitewater Chancellor Jack Miller says the university paid a price for allowing a controversial lecture to go forward, but he still believes in his decision.

In the March 25 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Miller outlined his thinking in allowing the Ward Churchill lecture on March 1 to take place.

The state Supreme Court will review a Madison man’s 2003 sexual assault conviction and decide whether he deserves a new trial.

Among other issues, Forest S. Shomberg, 41, contends that Dane County Circuit Judge Patrick Fiedler erred during the trial two years ago by not allowing his attorney to present expert testimony about the reliability of eyewitness identification. Shomberg was convicted for the March 9, 2002, assault of a UW-Madison sophomore near the Lower State Street Parking Ramp.

Madison Police Sgt. David McCaw is sensitive to situations where phony weapons appear real.

McCaw was not involved in the incident Wednesday in which five men were tentatively charged with disorderly conduct after filming a university project that involved a gun in a downtown parking ramp. He was, however, intimately involved in a similar event two weeks ago when police were called to the Atwood Community Center….

THE NEW issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, dated March 25, includes a lengthy and intriguing feature titled “My Favorite Building.” As the title indicates, prominent university educators around the country were asked to name the structure on campus they most admire.

…I think a case could made that one building on the UW-Madison campus, soon to be visited by the wrecking ball, bulldozers, and thousands of voices shouting “good riddance” in unison, is the worst building in the history of American universities.

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