As the new year approaches, I have our future students on my mind.
Today one of our core values is at stake—something that should concern all of us who are committed to the future of our college, UW–Madison and Wisconsin. I am talking about declining state support for postsecondary education and its devastating effect on our young people and their opportunities. (more…)
by Kristin R. Eschenfelder, Catherine Arnott Smith
School of Library and Information Studies
High speed access to the Internet is now an integral part of modern American life, yet proposed elimination of WiscNet, and through WiscNet Wisconsin public libraries’ low cost internet access, would hurt the most vulnerable citizens in our state: the unemployed, the underemployed and those struggling to make ends meet and better their situation in tough economic times. (more…)
Donna Shalala famously emphasized the importance of football to UW. Many of us are devoted to UW football with good reason. Our team has been successful. It is popular in the national media. The players and coaches are extremely talented and wonderful personalities. Nevertheless, the health hazards of five years of head bashing among elite student-athletes are becoming increasingly apparent. Indeed the index case for chronic traumatic encephalopathy was Mike Webster, UW’s all-American center in the early 1970s and a legend in the National Football League (NFL). There may be a time in the not too distant future when UW has to consider whether our football team should go the way of our boxing team. If we needed to drop football, could we and would we? Please consider the following: (more…)
My department in L&S, which isn’t large but nevertheless world-recognized for research and scholarship in its field, had a faculty meeting earlier this month to grapple with the assigned exercise of finding 8% that could plausibly be cut from our departmental budget.
The chair put up an overhead transparency itemizing all of the major components of our current annual budget. Our challenge was to assemble enough proposed cuts in specific areas to reach our target, and we were specifically asked to do this in a way that “wouldn’t hurt students.” The presumption apparently being that there must be 8% somewhere in our budget that has nothing to do with teaching or mentoring our undergraduate or graduate students and could be jettisoned without students ever noticing. (more…)
Sharon Dunwoody, Interim Associate Dean for Graduate Education, has just announced that the NRC assessment of research-doctorate programs at UW-Madison and 212 other institutions will be released in one week. Because the NRC assessments are likely to be of interest to a broader cross-section of the campus community, the announcement is reproduced here in its entirety for the convenience of S&W readers.
The following message was broadcast to the campus community by Chancellor “Biddy” Martin on Wednesday, May 5, 2010. It is reproduced (with minor reformatting) in its entirety here for reference and comment by S&W readers. The letter consists of several sections, each of which may be accessed directly via the links below.
A Year-End Letter: Opportunities, Challenges, Impressions
By Chancellor Biddy Martin
- Eds.
(more…)
Since our previous posting on the subject of the pending motion before the Faculty Senate, a revised motion has been released by the University Committee. The new version was disseminated via email by the chair of the University Committee, Prof. Bill Tracy. The following links contain
As before, we urge campus faculty and staff to carefully study all aspects of the motion and to post comments here prior to the Monday (May 3d) meeting of the Faculty Senate.
The following motion was presented at the April 12 Faculty Senate meeting concerning the proposed restructuring of UW-Madison’s research enterprise. It is reproduced here to encourage comments and discussion by the UW-Madison community prior to a vote at the next meeting of the Faculty Senate.
As reported here and elsewhere, the Academic Staff Executive Committee (ASEC) Ad Hoc Committee on the Research Enterprise already released its report back on January 22.
We had been waiting with bated breath for the counterpart committee appointed by the faculty’s University Committee (UC) to release its own findings on the same issue. This report was originally due by the end of 2009, but this deadline could not be met.
The following message has just now (2:50 pm today) been broadcast by the University Committee: (more…)
(Last updated Feb. 2, 2010)
Links to all relevant articles in the press, including some recent national coverage, are collected here in chronological order for the convenience of readers.