Category: UW-Madison Related

he UW System announced Friday that System President Kevin Reilly appointed Donald Mash, the current chancellor of UW-Eau Claire, to be the UW System executive vice president.

The Iowa State University Foundation must open its records to the public, the state’s Supreme Court ruled on Friday, but the court left room to interpret which records will be subject to public scrutiny.

University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly announced Friday the restructuring of four vice president positions into two in order to decrease costs and boost efficiency.

Effective interest rates for Wisconsin Retirement System participants for 2004 are 8.5 percent for the fixed fund and 12 percent for the variable fund, state pension officials announced today.

Those rates affect the accounts of more than 264,000 actively employed state and local workers, according to the Department of Employee Trust Funds.

The students of Chadbourne Residential College, while happy about their community, are mostly unaware of the rich history their dormitory has, or of the drastic changes it will go through in upcoming years.

The two ideas floated so far for merging higher education systems in Wisconsin represent a starting point for an important discussion about how Wisconsin should restructure public education to meet future educational and economic challenges.

The construction of a new campus axis, the East Campus Mall, is on a fast track, a top University of Wisconsin-Madison official told a crowd at the first of three town hall meetings on UW’s new 20-year master plan.

Associate Vice Chancellor Alan Fish said Wednesday night that most of the blocks from Regent Street to the Library Mall could be redeveloped within the next five to six years.

University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly is telling legislative leaders that the UW System could save $21.6 million annually if the state gave it more freedom, including the power to join discount buying organizations.

Reilly also defended the university’s current operation, saying it has the lowest administrative costs among its 18 peer institutions “and we want to build on that record of efficiency.”

University of Wisconsin System President Kevin P. Reilly announced yesterday to the state�s Joint Legislative Audit Committee an estimated $15 million could be saved annually through the aid of more than 250 cost-saving measures.

OK, you’re taking a year to write a 20-year master plan for the UW-Madison campus and you need to hear from everyone. That means a lot of meetings.

…Who schedules all these meetings? Who finds the meeting halls and gets the word out? Calling Gwen Drury.

Here is the list of recent, current and near-future building projects on the UW-Madison campus.

Although universities struggle with the issue of increasing diversity on their campuses, Texas A&M University (TAMU) challenged itself to recreate its student population through several initiatives not driven by race-based-only practices.

Van Hise Hall, the tallest building in Madison, could be demolished under the long-range campus master plan now being crafted for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gary Brown, the director of UW’s Office of Planning and Landscape Architecture, told The Capital Times that Van Hise – along with many other buildings that date from the 1960s and 1970s – has such basic problems that it would be cheaper to tear it down than to try to fix it.

This spring, the University of Wisconsin�s new West Campus Cogeneration Facility plans to launch a gas-can-exchange program to reduce pollutants in Dane County. The initiative is part of an agreement with several West Side neighborhood associations to offset emissions from the power facility.

MEDFORD – The University of Wisconsin-Madison Varsity Band put on a show beyond music.

The investigation of former University of Wisconsin student Meng-Ju ââ?¬Å?Markââ?¬Â Wuââ?¬â?¢s suicide in the Dane County Jail continues as the families of the triple-homicide victims and the investigation team continue to search for answers to an occurrence that is not uncommon throughout the Wisconsin jail system.

University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly recently announced the finalists for the chancellor�s position at UW-River Falls.

For Mary Rouse, the fact tht UW-Madison was again at the top of its game in producing Peace Corps volunteers in 2004 proves something she has felt for years: The Peace Corps here is much bigger than any individual.

Skycable/AOL, SBC, and InSite Wireless, three internet service providers, submitted proposals Tuesday to construct Madison’s Downtown Internet hotspot.

Hotspots already exist at UW-Madison and some area businesses, restaurants and residences.

Nearly a decade ago, Marcella Darvin was a doctor working at a public health clinic in Santiago, Chile.

Her sister was attending UW- Madison in an exchange program with Catholic University of Santiago. When Darvin arrived in Madison to visit her sister, she met her future husband, Shae. They returned to Santiago but came back to Madison 6 years ago to live permanently.

A gift of almost $500,000 worth of stock in Cisco Systems, a giant high-tech company based in California, will allow students from Milwaukee’s Bradley Technical and Trade High School to attend the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on scholarships covering all of their tuition.

Republicans and Democrats of the Wisconsin State Assembly clashed on the viability of this yearââ?¬â?¢s agenda a week following Gov. Jim Doyleââ?¬â?¢s promise to return ââ?¬Å?fiscal sanity to state government.ââ?¬Â

Perry Karp, will perform Friday as part of the UW Faculty Concert Series at 8 p.m. Mills Hall.

UW must take cuts like rest of state I was disappointed that the Wisconsin State Journal would publish a guest column earlier this month suggesting the university be protected from budget cuts. At the very least you owe it to the readers to point out that the university employs more than half of all those state employees which your paper and the politicians complain about.

Can the UW System offer enough money to get the kind of chancellor it wants at UW-Whitewater?

UW Regent Roger Axtell of Janesville, who will help pick the replacement for UW-W Chancellor Jack Miller, said chancellor pay levels have become a concern.

Today $10 will not even fill the gas tank on the smallest of cars. In 1917, when Irene Newman graduated from UW-Madison, that now-paltry amount paid for an entire semester of college.

An aide in the UW-Madison chancellor’s office has been charged with felony child abuse after allegedly stabbing her 5-year-old son in the hand with a pen.

University of Wisconsin faculty members earn, on average, lower salaries compared to other peer universities, which could be a disadvantage in recruiting qualified staff, according to Vice Chancellor of Administration Darrell Bazzell.

State Assembly Speaker John Gard wants to subject state contracting to more sunshine, and the plan should help make sure state officials can’t cut backroom deals to funnel state tax money to politically connected private firms.

A man charged with second-degree sexual assault after being caught by a citizen shortly after allegedly assaulting a young woman on Bassett Street on New Year’s Day has been charged with similar assaults on four other women in the downtown area.

Hotel Downtown is going upscale, switching to Hilton’s DoubleTree brand and carrying out a $3 million renovation.

MADISON, Wis. — A liquor license shortage has some city leaders nervous about future new business in Madison.

(MADISON) — Some might say Madison’s liquor licensing is on the rocks.

The city has a handful of certain licenses left for new taverns. Madison could run out of these licenses early this year.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison, $1.322-billion as of December 7 (increase of $14-million in the last month); the goal is $1.5-billion by 2007

The state’s Historical Society holds papers belonging to a one-time University of Wisconsin-Madison student from New York who was beaten and fatally shot 40 years ago for helping register black voters.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will celebrate the “Year of Languages” by offering a series of programs throughout the year aimed at promoting multilingualism. The “Year of Languages” is a nationwide observance of the use of foreign language education to build ties to other cultures.

One of the most controversial and colorful members of the City Council is not seeking re-election. Ald. Steve Holtzman, the District 19 alderman since 1995, did not submit nomination papers to the City Clerk’s Office by Tuesday’s 5 p.m. deadline.

Had Holtzman decided to stay in the race, he would have faced political newcomer Noel Radomski, who already has the endorsement of City Council President Brenda Konkel and is widely perceived to be a favorite of Mayor Dave Cieslewicz.

I find it troubling that some college students today seem to want to decide for themselves what they should or should not read or study.

With the death toll still rising in the aftermath of Sunday’s earthquake and tsunami in southeast Asia, the Madison area received good news Thursday with word that all students from UW-Madison studying abroad in the area of devastation were unharmed.

Madison’s annual celebration of the life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. will feature some changes this year. Residents will gather at a new location for the 20th annual City-County King Recognition Day on Jan. 17. And a new event is being added to the weekend of commemorative events, to provide a forum for anti-war advocates to link their issues to the legacy of King.

Since the former Oscar Mayer Theatre is undergoing renovation, the City-County King Recognition Day program will be held this year at the Wisconsin Union Theater….

A former University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and his wife were among those killed Sunday when the tsunami that killed thousands struck Sri Lanka, a relative says.

Five years ago, the end of the world did not happen. Our contemporary god, the computer, was ready to smite us, or so we thought.

A former UW-Madison biochemistry professor Muttaiya Sundaralingam, and his wife, Indirani were among the thousands killed when a tsunami struck the island nation of Sri Lanka on Sunday.

In its Dec. 31 issue, Entertainment Weekly has named Afro-American studies professor Tim Tyson’s “Blood Done Sign My Name” the third best nonfiction book of 2004. The magazine praises Tyson for injecting new life into writing about the civil rights movement.

Doug Moe’s column also mentions Chicago utility executive and UW-Madison alumnus John W. Rowe.

Paul J. Cleary, age 76, passed away on Saturday, Dec. 18, 2004. Paul was the first male to enroll in the home economics department at UW-Madison, earning a B.S. in food administration and experimental foods in 1955. Paul spent the next 25 years in food service management at the Memorial Union, Madison campus, ending his service there as food director. In 1970, he became the food director for the entire University of Wisconsin system. He was a guest lecturer and an instructor for the food administration for the University of Wisconsin.

The Madison woman detained in Israel for more than a week is headed back toward American soil. Bornshlegel, a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a native of Juneau, Wis., was arrested Dec. 14 in the village of Bil’in, west of Ramallah. A judge had ordered that she be deported.

The marketplace has spoken. It’s time for the state Legislature to make it possible for UW System campuses to offer health insurance to the domestic partners of employees.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has dropped a PeopleSoft database for tracking alumni in favor of a system the Wisconsin Alumni Association has used for 12 years.

Schools and colleges can access alumni information through the association�s database, a custom software system based on a database from 4D, Inc.

UW-Madison is considering eliminating all of its roughly 1,800 state-owned cell phones issued to employees. University leaders – as well as state auditors – want to be sure that anyone with a state phone is using it only for official business they couldn’t do with a land line.

A Madison woman is being detained in an Israeli prison awaiting a judge-ordered deportation. Kelly Bornshlegel, who has an Israeli visa, was arrested last week in the village of Bil’in, west of Ramallah.

Reached by cell phone Friday at the Hadera Deportation Prison, Bornshlegel said she was arrested while filming a protest against construction of the separation wall between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

The ground remained barren Monday afternoon as snowstorms continued to miss Madison after pasting cities to the north, south, east and west.

But inside, there was a blizzard of white-coated floors and tables as about 30 children made paper snowflakes and enjoyed snow stories at the Madison School District’s Allied Learning Center.

“We could put them on the window so it looks like it’s snowing outside,” JoAnn Savoy, head of the UW- Madison Water Resources Library, suggested to the children.

They happily obliged.

Monday’s event was part of a monthly reading program created by UW-Madison librarians to bring books and learning excitement to Allied Drive, on Madison’s southwest border with Fitchburg, where students post the lowest average state reading test scores in Dane County.

Last week, Google announced an ambitious new plan to start converting millions of books into digital files in partnership with several major libraries, including the New York Public Library and the libraries at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. This is a logical step for Google, which says its mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The idea of making books available online is not new, but this plan represents an enormous shift in scale, so enormous that if it is carried out successfully, it may redefine the nature of the Internet and the university.

National Peace Corps director Gaddi Vasquez congratulated graduates Sunday and encouraged them to celebrate the diversity of America.

“I urge you to dedicate some time to eradicate racism and discrimination in our nation,” he told more than 1,000 students who received University of Wisconsin-Madison degrees in two winter commencement ceremonies at the Kohl Center on a frigid December day.

Elected on a platform of consensus building, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz now finds himself branded a spoiler. Cieslewicz is being roundly rebuked for pushing an inner-city streetcar system that critics say is on a collision course with a longstanding countywide proposal for regional rail.

In a departure from its regular practice, Madison Area Technical College will not hold graduation ceremonies this month. December graduation will go ahead as scheduled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Edgewood College on Sunday.

MATC spokeswoman Janet Kelly said all of this academic year’s graduates will be eligible to participate in the May ceremonies. It was primarily a cost-saving, more efficient measure, she said.

(MADISON) — It may be close to Christmas, but Madison officials are already focusing their efforts on eliminating Halloween problems.

MADISON, Wis. — Gating off State Street is just one idea Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and the University of Wisconsin student leaders have discussed to prevent a repeat of this year’s Halloween mayhem.

Reversing her position from the day before, Edgewood College Dean of Students Maggie Balistreri-Clarke acknowledged Thursday that federal law doesn’t prevent her from releasing the results of college investigations into two recent sexual assults on campus.

Options ranging from the “ridiculous” — closing down the Isthmus — to the “sublime” — putting gates around the 500 block of State Street.

WHEN JEREMY Hinzman walked into the Toronto law office of Jeffry House, he, Hinzman, was not yet the most famous deserter from the U.S. military over the war in Iraq. It was earlier this year, and prominent stories about Hinzman in the Washington Post and on “60 Minutes” were still months off. House, 57, had yet to be called “a dopey lawyer” by Bill O’Reilly.