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S&W invites nominations for a new board of contributing editors.

Admin — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:06:23 +0000

For over four years, Sifting and Winnowing has served as a forum for the campus community to speak out on issues that cannot be adequately debated in the student dailies or the off-campus media alone. For most of those years, we have depended on sporadic contributions by around a dozen individuals who have written mainly when they felt inspired by current events.

Our resolution for 2012 is to increase the range of voices and the breadth of topics and opinions represented and to ensure a somewhat steadier supply of new and thought-provoking commentary. To that end, we are recruiting a volunteer board of Contributing Editors, each member of which will commit to writing (or soliciting) short but regular posts on topics of their choice.

If you know someone — faculty, staff, student, alum, or informed member of the public — whom you believe could write thoughtfully and knowledgeably about issues and events that matter (or should matter) to those who care about the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we invite you to submit your nominations to admin@siftingandwinnowing.org. We are especially interested in potential contributors who would bring a fresh, entertaining, and/or provocative perspective to issues and policies we seldom stop to think about. Self-nominations are encouraged.

Wrapping up a traumatic year for UW-Madison, and a challenge for 2012

Admin — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 07:02:06 +0000

Those who work and/or study at UW-Madison can be forgiven for feeling like pinatas. It’s hard to imagine more drama in one year. Like the sticks wielded by small children seeking easy loot, the blows came from many directions, sometimes seemingly all at once.

It’s also hard to imagine a clearer and more succinct summary of the year than that provided by Todd Finkelmeyer over at the Capital Times:

Campus Connection: UW-Madison’s 2011 Year in Review

There are some who still believe, despite the evidence, that the split from the UW System championed by both Chancellor Martin and Governor Walker would have been a good thing, on balance, for the University. But as Finkelmeyer put it,

Although UW-Madison’s Faculty Senate ultimately voted to back the plan, there were plenty of faculty, staff and students questioning whether a split from the system made sense. And even if it did, most agreed fast-tracking such a significant proposal in a state budget was ludicrous.

Exactly. Enough said on that topic.

Superficially unrelated to the NBP fiasco but at least as traumatic in terms of lasting consequences was the news that UW-Madison campus alone will take a total cut of $112M in the current biennium as a consequence of both the regular budget process and a subsequent budget lapse whose impact is being felt disproportionately by the UW System. Coming at the tail end of previous cuts of similar magnitude under Doyle, it is impossible to argue with a straight face that these cuts can be accommodated by “cutting waste.”

Topping it all off was the effective 8% average take-home pay cut taken by UW employees as a result of the new requirement that state employees pay a significant fraction of health coverage and retirement contributions. These had previously been a recognized part of employee’s total compensation package, not gratuitous “freebies” as often derided by the proponents of this new policy.

I have sometimes been asked, “Why should taxpayers pick up the cost of state employees’ benefits?” My answer: “Why should taxpayers pick up any part of a state employee’s compensation? Maybe because they’re state employees? ”

The essential point too often forgotten is that, in terms of tax dollars spent, there’s no fundamental distinction between compensation in the form of salary and compensation in the form of other benefits.

You think public employees are overpaid? Fine, make the case for that viewpoint, if you can. But don’t do it by making artificial distinctions. The new policy amounted to an 8% cut in total compensation, period. Face the facts, and accept the consequences of that cut for morale, productivity, and retention at one of the finest public universities in the world.

2011 wasn’t all gloom and doom, of course. If you dig hard enough, you’ll kind find a couple of morsels of good news in Finkelmeyer’s report as well. But even if we make a drinking game out of spotting them, we won’t need to worry about designated drivers.

In closing, a prediction and a challenge for 2012. First, the prediction:

The political excesses and overreaches of 2011 will fuel (and is already fueling) a backlash like never before seen in Wisconsin politics. Among other factors, consider that a lot of very smart and energetic university faculty, staff, and students who were previously focused almost exclusively on their own research, teaching, and/or coursework have now been awakened to the tangible risks of political complacency. They will be a political force to be reckoned with in the multiple elections coming up in 2012, you can bank on it.

Finally, the challenge:

The Occupy movement that dominated the news of the last few months originated, at least by some accounts, right here in Madison. That movement, and the sometimes violent reactions to that movement, have upset the peaceful insularity of some American public universities. But with rare exceptions, the front line troops have been students.

Now, Prof. Henry Giroux of McMaster University argues compellingly that the time has come for faculty to join Occupy movement protestors on college campuses. Read here and decide for yourself. Also read about the depressing trends in public support affecting flagship public universities just like ours.

Then make it your New Year’s Resolution to participate as fully and as knowledgeably as you can in the battles that are now being fought over the future of public higher education, among many other issues.

Defunct war strategy program may still overshadow University of Wisconsin-Madison’s history of dissent.

Admin — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 03:50:39 +0000

This article is part 2 of a two-part series on the military’s influence in academia and originally appeared here on Truthout. Part 1 ran previously on Truthout.

Once viewed by some as a “rising star” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, historian Jeremi Suri announced in early May that he was leaving Madison to pursue his fame and fortune at the University of Texas-Austin.

With him went the fortunes of the short-lived and now deceased UW-Madison Grand Strategy Program (GSP), which he founded and headed as one part of a broader network of strategic studies programs currently underway on select campuses elsewhere.

The UW GSP, formally launched two years ago, opened a new era of direct military and national security state involvement at Madison. Over a year’s in-depth look at the now-defunct project – including emails and other documents obtained via the Wisconsin Open Records Law – has provided a glimpse into the goings-on at one university in a network increasingly enmeshed in preparations for a “Long War” for US global power in the 21st century.

Back to the Future

The University of Wisconsin-Madison was once a storied center of opposition to war and militarism, especially during the Vietnam War era.

Wishing to bury that past, the now-dead homepage for the UW-Madison GSP stated that the project, while dedicated to instruction in the “grand strategy intellectual discipline,” the teaching of strategic thinking, also represented, ” … a new collaboration between the military and academic worlds and a means of overcoming the divisiveness and political polarization that have characterized the relationship since the Vietnam conflict….”

The UW Grand Strategy Program was initiated in 2008-2009. Never a standalone venture, the program under Suri, the now well situated and well connected foreign policy maven, was linked from the start to a nationally networked campus effort designed to train future generations of “academic warriors,” providing intellectual support, expertise and justification for the “Long War,” that project currently underway to secure and maintain US global supremacy well into the future.

Suri’s story stands as a case study of this new breed, and the network to which it belongs.

Suri From the Fringe to the Top?

Many were certainly surprised when the widely heralded UW “rising star” unexpectedly announced in mid-May 2011 that he was leaving Madison for Austin. He had regularly stated how committed he was to the UW and how much he loved Madison, that it had become his “home.”

Explaining his decision to leave, he mentioned as the reasons for his exodus the low morale at the university, divisive “attack politics” on and off campus, and his dismay over the ongoing fiscal assault on the University of Wisconsin system by Gov. Scott Walker. Ultimately, a salary-doubling appointment at UT-Austin proved to be an offer he could not refuse.

His decision to leave Madison also may have had more to do with a desire to make history rather than write it, and a drive to be close to power, inspired in part, perhaps, by a close identification with the subject of his second book, Henry Kissinger.

In the acknowledgements of his recently published book, “Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama,” he explained how, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, he was “no longer comfortable leaving the application of history to others; that he was no longer “satisfied to separate study of the past from policy making in the present.”

As the affable, photogenic public face and ambitious articulate promoter for the GSP and related undertakings, Suri became the media’s UW-Madison ”go-to guy” and “expert,” ever ready to offer up opinion and recommend policy suggestions on a full gambit of international concerns ranging from Russia, across the Middle East and Africa, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea and China.

He readily offered his thoughts on domestic issues, as well, and became a leading champion of the “New Badger Partnership,” the stalled plan forwarded by the now-departed UW chancellor Biddy Martin to sever the Madison campus from the rest of the state university system and further privatize it.

Certainly prolific, Suri penned a cascade of scholarly and popular articles, regular blog pieces and several books, including a well-regarded study on the global impact of the 1960s protest movements, a Kissinger biography and a recently released selective study of US “nation-building,” as a “uniquely American creed … part of American DNA.”

It was at Ohio University, where he earned his masters degree in history in 1996, that Suri first studied with the central figure among today’s grand strategist academics and key architect of Yale University’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, the conservative “dean of cold war historians,” John Lewis Gaddis.

Both Suri and Gaddis left for Yale at approximately the same time in 1996-97, where Suri began his doctoral studies under global historian Paul Kennedy, also a co-founder of Yale’s strategic studies program and its first director. Arriving shortly thereafter, Gaddis became an endowed professor of cold war history and grand strategy while continuing as a Suri mentor.

Gaddis established himself as the major rightward critic of the 1960s left “revisionist” foreign policy historians, the influential Wisconsin School of Diplomatic History headed by William Appleman Williams at UW-Madison.

Williams and his students examined “empire as a way of life” and challenged the then-ruling consensus on the benevolence of American globalism and interventionism abroad. With Suri’s arrival, the study of US foreign policy took an ironic rightward turn in a history department long known for its dissenting scholarship.

The JASONs

In April 2008, Suri began working to pull together a number of campus associates, including faculty and administrators and well-placed representatives from the university’s nonprofit funding giants, the University of Wisconsin Foundation and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).

The informal network became the “UW-Madison JASONs,” (PDF) named after the national consortium of campus-based scientists, still in existence, which has worked on various classified projects for the Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal agencies since 1960. (The name JASON is thought to be not an acronym, but a reference by the original JASON group to a character from Greek mythology.)

Setting about ” … [T]o tackle problems of significant societal importance at the state, national and/or international levels,” the group’s initiators organized a kickoff luncheon on October 7, 2008, to recruit additional members. At that meeting, Suri emphasized “the importance of creating and sustaining the right social and intellectual space” needed to forward the group’s ideas and overall objective to reshape the university.

The former UW chancellor John Wiley, certainly the older, more experienced hand, voiced some caution. “We should also consider the types of opposition we might see to our results …[W]here [hard] scientific results are usually accepted, policy proposals from humanities and social science [sic] may receive more pushback.”

Suri then introduced global strategy as a “potential area for JASON investigation” and described the strategic studies program already underway at Yale as an example to emulate. A general discussion of how such a program might look at Wisconsin ensued.

At that same meeting, Suri informed those present that he knew of a Milwaukee businessman by the name of Sheldon Lubar who could possibly serve as a funding source. Unmentioned, in the meeting notes, at least, was the fact that Lubar just happened to be a business associate of the Yale GSP’s major backers and a former associate of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Milwaukee-based funding source of numerous archconservative efforts.

The Captain

Suri had already begun assembling a strategic studies working group during the late summer of 2008. That team was headed by his new graduate student, the recently retired Navy captain, Scott Mobley.

Already in his early fifties when he enrolled as a Suri doctoral student in September 2008, Mobley officially began that same month as the coordinator for the UW-Madison JASONs and the GSP.

Mobley started out in the US Navy in 1974, graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1978, and earned an MA in national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, California, in 1987, upon completion of his thesis, “Beyond the Black Box: An Assessment of Strategic War Gaming.” Following years of duty abroad, in September 2005 he became commanding officer of UW Madison’s Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, where he taught naval science until April 2008.

Mobley began his unadvertised joint appointment with funds paid through WARF, by way of the Morgridge Institute for Research, the UW-based private, nonprofit biomedical research institute. His funding as a Morgridge research fellow received same-day approval after Suri sent off an email to his JASONs associate Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of WARF and chairman of the Institute.

Suri thanked Gulbrandsen for his assistance by promising that, “We will make certain this investment pays large returns around campus!!” He informed Mobley of the “great news,” declaring that, “I am … confident that we will have a lasting impact on the university and our nation as a whole.” He told his new aide, “Now we are going to change the world … For the better!”

Support From the Troops?

Funding remained an ongoing concern for the program before its formal launch. At the JASONs’ March 2009, meeting, Mobley presented a “vision” for the development of a certificate program in international strategic studies for “military officers and government officials” to be offered entirely online as a step toward the creation of a masters degree program.

He spoke of plans then underway for an online summer pilot grand strategy course “to test the waters, [to] see what kind of interest there is in the military.” Suri added that the hope was to make the online effort broad in scope, multidisciplinary, “not just a military topic” but “holistic,” since the “former dominance” of the United States was not what it had been and, therefore, there was a need to study different forms of power.

Suri then pointed out that an accredited degree program was important since military personnel would then be covered by the GI Bill, that otherwise funding would have to be found. The long-term viability of the GSP came to hinge on DoD money.

Together, the initial core group created an eight-week pilot course for the summer of 2009 which included on-campus, undergraduate-level lectures and an exclusive online option for “military, business and other adult students.” Mobley worked to redesign a noncredit online course already offered by Suri to mold it into something appealing to the military.

“In its earlier incarnations, the class was about foreign policy,” Mobley stated in an interview. “We altered its focus to center on strategy, in addition to policy – that is, to how the country exercises material, human, and cultural power to help achieve its long-term objectives.”

Suri’s “History of US Grand Strategy since 1901″ examined such topics as national power, territorial acquisition, market penetration, warfare, racial subjugation and class conflict, among others. That first online course had 29 enrolled, 22 of whom were reserve and active-duty military officers serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and were recruited with Mobley’s assistance.

As Suri explained it, “The idea of the [summer course] was to give military officers a firmer historical grounding in the kinds of issues they are confronting every day – cultural differences, counterinsurgency, nation-building.”

Encouraged by the response to their first attempt, the Grand Strategy planners added another course on “Problems in American Foreign Policy,” taught by the political science department’s Jon Pevehouse in the summer of 2010.

With three online courses planned for the following summer session, Suri and company pitched a proposal for an accredited online “Capstone Certificate in Strategic Studies” to the UW-Madison administration in late 2010.

Submitted at a time of deepening reductions in the amounts of state support for the university, the proposal primarily laid out an economic argument – the potential of bringing in a relatively untapped source of Pentagon revenues based upon perceived demands for grand strategy courses and projected dollars per credit, per enrollee. The proposal spoke of an untapped potential “market” of at least 9,000 officers (PDF).

Capstone and the Major

Mobley, Suri and company did more than create “distance learning” grad courses for junior officers. Through the late summer and early fall of 2009, an advisory team of UW JASONs began working with the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), the Army’s warfare planning center at Fort Monroe, Virginia. The interdepartmental group of “expert advisors” volunteered to assess the “Capstone Concept,” the project then underway to revise the Army’s longer-range warfare guidelines in light of lessons drawn from Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel’s 2006 experience in South Lebanon.

In addition to Suri and Mobley, that initial team included the JASONs’ co-founder, cyber security expert Paul Barford, the nuclear engineering professor Paul Wilson, and others such as Wiley, described to the TRADOC officers as a “frequent consultant for intelligence agencies and various military technology groups.”

The entire project took shape with the direct assistance of the history department’s newly hired military historian, recently retired Army Maj. John Hall, last stationed as a researcher at TRADOC’s Future Warfare Division.

Hall had worked under the command of highly acclaimed warrior intellectual and Iraq War strategist, then Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster. The idea for involving a UW-Madison team to review the capstone project came about when Hall sent an email invite to have McMaster come speak at Madison. Declining, McMaster asked if parties at the UW would be willing to conduct an informal review of the plan.

Initially recommended by a history department search committee headed by Suri, Hall had been hired the previous spring. A West Point graduate with 15 years’ experience as an infantry officer, three years’ teaching experience at the Military Academy and expertise in the study of counterinsurgency, he completed an Army-supported history PhD at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill while continuing in the service.

In his recommendation to the department, Suri stated that Hall “was going to help us think about the past and make it more relevant to the future,” and the new military man “was rethinking basic concepts like the American way of war, total war and counterinsurgency.” Suri found the major’s “background as a historian and his work in future warfare issues … completely complementary.”

The former Army Ranger hit the ground running. Acting above and beyond his first semester’s call to professorial duties, he served as the ongoing liaison for his TRADOC colleagues (PDF)and the JASONs capstone group. The Madison team met on four occasions to review and comment on a draft of the main document forwarded to Hall from Virginia and for which he provided the initial overview.

Then at the last minute, a Madison meeting scheduled for October 22, 2009, between officers from TRADOC and the UW-Madison participants had to be postponed as military higher-ups accelerated the timeline for the project. But that did not end the JASONs/TRADOC collaboration, (PDF) as parties on both ends looked toward future joint efforts.

Barely situated at Madison but clearly already a part of the JASONs/Grand Strategy team, Hall also wrote McMaster of “an interest in growing our grand strategy program in a number of directions.” He asked for the brigadier’s thoughts on how to develop something “akin to Harvard’s Strategist Program,” a joint Army-Kennedy School of Government masters degree program offering coursework in strategic planning to captains returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Major also asked his former commander’s thoughts on “creating an SSC-level fellowship opportunity” - the Army’s Senior Service College Fellowship Program through which the Pentagon funds courses at outside institutions otherwise unavailable or inaccessible to active-duty personnel.

It was Hall, and not Suri, who used his connections to bring the high-powered warrior intellectual and counterinsurgency expert Peter Mansoor to Madison in May 2011. The career army officer cum endowed military historian and imperial think-tanker at Ohio State University was the founding director of the USArmy and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center at Fort Leavenworth, and helped edit the highly touted Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24.

Mansoor also served as executive officer to Iraq occupation commander Gen. David Petraeus. Working with a team known as the “Petraeus Guys,” which included McMaster, he became a key architect of the Iraq counterinsurgency strategy known as the “surge.”

Emailing Mansoor on a familiar, first-name basis as “Pete” beginning in September 2010, Hall set the stage to have Mansoor speak in Madison before a public audience at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum and to a more exclusive GSP gathering. By that time clearly an important GSP asset, Hall’s name also appeared on the UW JASONs roster in 2010.

Grand Strategy With Strings

In September 2008, some 20 younger historians and political scientists from around the country gathered at an unpublicized location, a private club nearby Yale.

The participants, carefully chosen by the university’s GSP directors, had been invited to meet with the New York financial management mogul, “man of the right,” promoter and practitioner of “strategic” and “venture philanthropy,” and well-heeled patron of the neoconservative movement, Roger Hertog.

Hertog told the Yale gathering that he was willing to spend up to $10 million to fund scholars interested in inaugurating grand strategy programs at their respective campuses. Requesting short proposals from the professors-on-the-rise detailing how they would use his seed money, he urged them to think about how to connect their projects with others around the country to leverage their collective impact. The subsequent GSPs and allied programs, among them what would become the grand strategy program at Wisconsin, evolved with his assistance.

The Big Man on Campus

In late October 2009, Hertog flew aboard his private jet to Madison, a stopover on his way to the formal launching ceremony of the UW-Madison GSP, held at the Milwaukee Art Museum. He paid a visit to Suri’s Grand Strategy seminar and met with a “select JASONs group” including Mobley, Hall and others before being driven to Milwaukee.

Introducing the Milwaukee affair was University of Wisconsin Foundation board member Lubar. Lubar welcomed Martin, who was still chancellor at the time. Martin praised the new UW program and lauded its founder’s achievements, then brought up Suri, the man of the hour, to deliver the evening’s keynote “Lubar Lecture.”

How Hertog’s Money Was Spent

Hertog provided an initial two-year $200,000 “start-up” fund for the Madison program. That seed money assisted officers taking the following summer’s online courses “especially suited for the needs and interests of US military personnel.”

Since the online pilots were not part of an accredited degree or certificate program, those participating in them could not receive support from the Pentagon. As Mobley would put it later, “Without Roger Hertog’s support, we would not have been able to bring in … military officers.” He went on to inform potential military applicants that some “limited financial aid” was available, and so-called “Hertog Fellowships” allowed service members to take selected GSP courses at no cost during the 2010 summer session.

Prior to the establishment of the first online pilot and starting before the formal launch of the UW GSP, Hertog funds also were used to bring a number of national security warrior academics to Madison as part of a Hertog Distinguished Visitor’s Series. Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, who have been described as the “foremost writers on counter-insurgency in the Middle East today,” appeared in March, 2009 as Hertog Visitors at a University Club luncheon.

Suri associate and fellow grand strategist Francis Gavin gave a Hertog talk to a select audience at another luncheon in September of the same year. Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Suri’s future destination at Texas, Gavin spoke on a list of national security concerns.

Another Hertog speaker, William J. Olson, professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, spoke on intelligence reform, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and drug-control issues.

The Simulations

Hertog’s money also went toward an “emergent international crisis” simulation modeled after the exercises being held as part of Yale’s GSP.

UW-Madison’s first “Grand Strategy Workshop” took place November 6-7, 2009, under the auspices of the JASONs ISS (its name for the program before the formal launch) and the GSP. It brought together some three dozen graduate and advanced undergraduate students, a number of UW-Madison faculty and outside guests, including six military officers recruited by Mobley from the participants in Suri’s earlier online summer course.

Undergrad teams role-playing as staff members to the National Security Council (NSC) were asked to prepare two sets of policy recommendations based upon hypothetical “strategic situation briefs” – one on possible national responses following the attacks of 9/11, and a second on foreign policy options to be presented to president-elect Obama’s transition team.

The planning and actual content for the workshop was carried out by Mobley and Hall, with input from others.

To kick off the event, Suri arranged an appearance and talk by the high-powered strategic planner and former adviser to the NSC, Peter Feaver, head of the American Grand Strategy Program at Duke University and director of the prestigious Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS). Feaver spoke to the group on “Bridging the Gap Between Scholarship and International Policy-Making.”

Each undergrad team was assigned “mentors,” some brought in with expenses covered by Hertog money, to guide them in their tasks.

Among the advisers was Marc Belson, already on board as a UW-Madison history graduate student. His LinkedIn page lists him as a “Permanent Military Professor Fellow at [the] University of Wisconsin-Madison,” a former Naval Flight Officer, and a Graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School (“Topgun”).

Another “mentor” and summer online GSP student, George Dryden, worked as a civilian security adviser for the DoD and as “Senior Strategist at HQ Department of the Army” at the Pentagon. He went to Afghanistan in 2010 as part of a senior advisory team assisting the Afghan Ministry of Defense and subsequently recommended other candidates for the GSP’s online courses.

From 2002-2005, Dryden worked as a senior manager at Decisive Analytics Corporation of Arlington, Virginia, an employee-owned engineering company with contracts to the US intelligence community, the Missile Defense Agency, and the DoD. He and Belson subsequently appeared on the JASONs roster, with their affiliation listed simply as “Department of the Army.”

Perhaps the most interesting of the workshop “mentors,” at least for those about whom some details are known, was Eric Rotzoll, a military man with intelligence community connections.

As a deputy commander of a “provincial reconstruction team” (PRT) in Zabul Province, Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005, he planned and led civil affairs operations in support of counterinsurgency in the region. From 2006 to 2010, he worked as an “all source analyst” for Defense Department intelligence subcontractor Northrop Grumman. Still with the military at that time, he also served from July 2008 to July 2009 as a Human Terrain Team (HTT) leader in Afghanistan.

The HTTs, ostensibly comprising privately contracted civilian anthropologists and other social scientists, have been assigned to each Army brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan since late 2005. Armed on patrol, such “academic embeds” have worked to provide cultural and social “human intelligence,” or “Humint,” on various “locals” as part of the counterinsurgency effort in both countries.

In January, 2009, an embedded journalist moving with an HTT unit on the ground in Afghanistan identified Rotzoll as “the man in charge” and “a former analyst for the CIA….” No mere enlisted man, but an academically trained intelligence warrior, Rotzoll apparently brought a particular added expertise to the “Grand Strategy Workshop.” His name also subsequently appeared on the UW JASONs roster for 2009-2010, his affiliation listed simply as “US Army.”

A second Grand Strategy “strategic workshop” took place April 1-3, 2011, not long before Suri’s announced departure and the subsequent demise of the Madison venture. The featured guest at the exercise was Suri’s former Yale strategic studies classmate, Jeffrey “Jeb” Nadaner.

Finishing his history PhD program at Yale in 2002, Nadaner became a senior speechwriter for then-secretary of state Colin Powell and a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff. In 2004, he worked on the “war on terrorism strategy” as a special assistant to Donald Rumsfeld’s undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith.

A strategic planning specialist, Nadaner then went on to become deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations. Switching to the private sector in 2008, he became director of strategy at the nation’s top defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, where he now sits as director of national security innovation.

The strategic workshops in some ways came to exemplify the UW GSP. The military mentors used in the exercises typified the kind of student that the JASONs “strategic studies collaborative” and Suri’s team were hoping to attract in the future.

But plans for an expanded interdepartmental distance education program offering a “Capstone Certificate in Strategic Studies,” and resultant Pentagon-paid tuitions, seemed to stall just as Roger Hertog’s two-year funding period for the GSP drew to a close.

Grandiose Strategy?

The now-defunct GSP at Wisconsin provided but a glimpse into the workings of an increasingly militarized research university, which is but one of many similar programs wedded to the national security state and its imperial projects. That broader matrix of power will continue to evolve and proliferate despite the demise of a particular initiative or the exit of any individual player.

What remained certain, regardless of Suri’s exit and the demise of the UW GSP, was the reality that the University would continue to pin its future on remaining a major research institution, a decreasingly public and increasingly corporatized international player wedded to the national security state and its imperial projects.

Underlying the UW-Madison GSP venture and left unstated was a deep concern that the campus might once again become a center of opposition to war and intervention and university complicity in such. The concern of those who inaugurated the effort at Madison is that the specter of “divisiveness” and “polarization” haunting Madison since the 1970s could rise again, engendering real pushback against such military influence at this former home to dissent and antiwar efforts.

Because some of the primary source material gathered in this article was obtained via the Wisconsin Open Records Law, the materials are available upon request.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Steve Horn
Steve Horn is a researcher and writer at DeSmogBlog. He is also a freelance investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter at @Steve_Horn1022.

Allen Ruff
Allen Ruff is a US historian and an independent writer on foreign policy issues. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

UW System may soon trail Department of Corrections in share of state funding.

Admin — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:44:50 +0000

For many years there has been an interest in the ever-increasing state funding of corrections (aka “prisons”) and the simultaneous decline in the proportion of state funding of higher education. While there is reasonable debate about whether the state contribution has in fact increased in real dollars or the inestimable value of “stopping crime”, there remains enormous symbolic value in the primacy of being the state function that receives the most money. Its the old, “we’re number one!”

With the announcement of the new round of budget cuts ($65 million for the System, $13 million for Corrections), I reviewed LFB publications to see if indeed the UW is still #1 in the purse, if not the hearts, of Wisconsin.

I found (see table below) that although UWS funding will be $48M greater than that of Corrections (after the cuts), they are not only in the same ballpark, they are almost on the same base. UWS receives 7% of the total share of state funding while Corrections receives 6.8%. The budgetary trend lines of the two agencies have nearly merged because the budget reduction of UW is four times greater (as a percent of their budget) than that imposed on Corrections.

With additional inequitable budget reductions probable due to inflated revenue estimates, will Badger fans yell, “We’re Number Two! We’re Number Two!”

	UW System
	Budget	% of Total State Budget	% of Agency Budget
Before Cut	$2,095,251,600	7.2%
Cut	$65,769,847		3.1%
After Cut	$2,029,481,753	7.0%

	Department of Corrections
	Budget	% of Total State Budget	% of agency budget
Before Cut	$1,994,614,400	6.9%
Cut	$13,400,479		0.7%
After Cut	$1,981,213,921	6.8%

DMA

Connecting Engaged Scholarship with the Wisconsin Idea

Admin — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 04:33:30 +0000

Presentation and Panel Discussion

October 25, 2011

A Year of the Wisconsin Idea Event

Over the last quarter century, a national conversation about the societal relevance of higher education has gained considerable momentum. At the core of this dialogue lie the concepts of engagement and engaged scholarship, which call for universities to partner with their communities in addressing societal ills and creating positive change. A growing demand has emerged on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus for a public discussion of these issues, as symbolized by the ongoing Year of the Wisconsin Idea.

To contribute to this dialogue, three national engagement experts and a panel of UW–Madison scholars will lead a conversation surrounding the following question: “How can engaged scholarship help advance the Wisconsin Idea by reconciling UW–Madison’s competing obligations as both a land-grant and research intensive university?”

This public session is part of three-day series of events, entitled Reinvigorating the Wisconsin Idea: Engaged Scholarship for the 21st Century, designed to jump start a campus conversation about engaged scholarship at UW–Madison. Holding true to the principles of engagement, this program is intended to first capture the attention and focus of the campus community and thereby pave the way for future discussions with the public about community-campus collaboration.

DETAILS
Download a complete Program Agenda

Download Speaker Bios

This event is free, but please register online by October 18, 2011

The above announcement was posted on behalf of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE)

Oct. 13 forum: “The National Attack on Public Higher Education: Effective Strategies for Fighting Back.”

Admin — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 20:14:30 +0000

Title: “The National Attack on Public Higher Education: Effective Strategies for Fighting Back.”

Featured Speaker:

Cary Nelson, President,
American Association of University Professors.
Prof. U. Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

Panel:

Sara Goldrick-Rab, Assoc. Prof. Educ. Policy
John Wiley, Former Chancellor, UW-Madison

Time and place: Thursday, October 13, 4 PM Memorial Union (TITU)

Download/view printable publicity flyer here.

UW-Madison’s primary mission is football.

Admin — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:39:31 +0000

I have heard a lot of bitter grumbling today concerning the parking and traffic problems associated with today’s Badger football game. The biggest gripers are those employees with paid parking permits who are being forcibly evicted from their assigned lots to make way for fans.

So as a public service, I’d like to remind everyone of these two oft-overlooked facts:

The primary mission of UW-Madison is to field a truly awesome football team, and to do so in a time slot that is convenient for the commercial cable channel ESPN.
The primary responsibility of UW-Madison faculty and staff is to ensure that their work schedule and parking habits don’t interfere with the above mission.

Unlike most of my colleagues, I have my priorities straight.

For example, when I belatedly realized that our department’s graduate student orientation, scheduled weeks ago for 3-4pm today and involving introductions and presentations from many of our faculty and staff, might prevent them from vacating their parking lots and clearing out before the fans start arriving en masse to break out their boom boxes and beer coolers, I did the right thing and postponed the orientation until the middle of next week. I’m sure our secretary will be able to find an unused room for it — that’s her job!

And when I realized that I would not have time to finish preparing handouts for tomorrow’s 8:50am class before the tow trucks came for my own car in Lot 81, I made the difficult — but in hindsight obvious — decision to finish them after dinner tonight and set the alarm a half-hour earlier tomorrow morning to leave time for photocopying before class. Anything in the service of Badger football!

As for the colleague who complained that he had already paid for his parking spot and now the University was charging someone else to use the same spot, all I can say is, get with the program, buddy! What he apparently doesn’t understand is that we are all doing our part to subsidize the cost of those parking spots so that visiting Badger fans can afford them. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need – it’s the Madison way!

Thank you, Sifting and Winnowing, for letting me shed some much-needed light on this very simple issue.

Invitation to planning discussion: Building an effective organization for faculty and staff.

Admin — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:59:21 +0000

The following event is likely to be of interest to S&W readers – Ed.

Save the date!

Saturday, Sept 24 — 10 AM- 3 PM

Building an Effective Organization for Faculty and Staff

If you read Sifting and Winnowing then you recognize that the events of last semester underscore the need for a viable organization of University staff and faculty. The Wisconsin University Union (WUU) invites you to a planning discussion about what that might look like. We’d like to hear from campus employees what they’d like that organization to focus on and do.

What issues should this organization prioritize?

Improve compensation?
Protect academic freedoms?
Secure employee protections on layoffs, promotion, etc?
Re-gain right to collectively bargain?
Retain rights of self-governing institutions?
Other?

What function/activity should this organization prioritize?

Provide accurate and timely information on issues affecting employees?
Advocate for individual employees in workplace disputes?
Conduit information to decision-makers at state and campus level?
Develop political capacity to advocate for campus interests such as lobbying or organizing a PAC?
Work with similar grassroots groups on other UW campuses?
Other?

We intend this to be a wide-open/no-preconceptions meeting — a frank (and fun) discussion of what’s really needed and how best to organize getting it. Please join other individual and organizational activists to discuss and plan an effective organization designed to meet our real challenges.

On-campus location
Ample food and drink available throughout!
(More precise agenda to follow shortly)
RSVP: dmahrens@wisc.edu / 334-1156

Can we really trust the outcomes of the recall elections?

Admin — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:57:24 +0000

If there’s anything we’ve learned over the past six months, it’s that the University of Wisconsin-Madison cannot ignore or escape the political storm that has been buffeting Wisconsin. Regardless of one’s political leanings, one cannot fail to recognize that the outcomes of the November 2010 elections and the recall elections last Tuesday (with two more next Tuesday) all have groundshaking consequences for this campus and, of course, for the entire state.

Many will be surprised and disappointed by last Tuesday’s results; many others will be encouraged by them. But too few will ask the question, “Can we even trust the reported outcomes?”

“Sifting and winnowing” is partly about challenging comfortable assumptions in the search for truth and insight. With that goal in mind, I urge you to read this October 2010 interview with Jonathan Simon, a leading expert on election integrity.

I cannot ethically quote the entire interview here, so here is a short excerpt that, I hope, will be sufficient to compel you to read the entire interview:

OEN: You did some investigation into the critical Coakley-Brown Senate race in Massachusetts. What did you find and how did you find it?

JS: The Coakley-Brown election in January—which we analyzed in the paper Believe It Or Not –was critical not only because Scott Brown’s unexpected victory gave the GOP the seat necessary to sustain filibusters and effectively block legislation and appointments, but because it was seen in all quarters as the dramatic harbinger of a GOP sweep in November. It was also the political baptism of the Tea Party movement, a clear indication of virulent anti-incumbent fervor, and it set the stage for a string of shocking far-right primary election wins, such as Christine O’Donnell’s in Delaware and Joe Miller’s in Alaska.

There was every incentive in the world to rig Coakley-Brown and every opportunity in the world to get away with it. There were no audits, no spot checks, no exit polls, and no recounts. No actual ballots were ever excavated from their bins at the bottom of the optical scanners which were programmed to read (or misread) and tabulate (or mistabulate) them; so much for optical scanners and a supposed “paper trail.” In fact all that we had to assure us that the votecounts were accurate and Brown’s victory legitimate was pure 100% unadulterated blind faith that the numbers showing up when the memory cards were downloaded at the end of the night were a true recording of the votes cast. Because if, in fact, the vendor corporations, or any insiders with access to the programming and distribution processes, had chosen to serve a private political agenda rather than the public trust, there would be nothing in the official processes of voting, vote counting, and election certification to indicate that such a breach had occurred.

So we had a huge and shocking result with no actual evidence to support it. It could have been legitimate and it could equally well have been a cheap trick conjured in the darkness of cyberspace. So we looked at the only evidence available—the votes of the 71 jurisdictions that counted their ballots in public by hand. We found that Coakley won in these jurisdictions by a margin of 3%, while Brown won by 5% where the opscans did the counting in secret. The chance of this 8% total disparity occurring if the handcounts had been distributed randomly around the state was infinitesimal, one in hundreds of billions. But we knew that the handcounts were not randomly distributed and that handcount and opscan jurisdictions represented discrete constituencies. Perhaps the handcount communities where Coakley won were more Democratic or had a more Democratic voting history, or perhaps they were clustered in a part of the state where Coakley was more popular.

We looked at each of these “benign” explanations in turn and found that none of them was true. The handcount jurisdictions were more Republican; they had voted in exact congruence with the opscan jurisdictions in the previous two (noncompetitive, and therefore not targets for rigging) US Senate races; and they had given Coakley a lower percentage than the opscan communities in her only previous statewide race. Granted Coakley, thinking she was a shoo-in, ran a very lackluster campaign; granted there was a surge of enthusiasm and a big influx of money from the right, making a tight (and riggable) race out of a blowout. But those factors do not explain why some 65,000 handcount voters, seen to be to the right of a random sample and not geographically disposed towards Coakley, came in so differently from the opscan voters. That remains entirely unexplained, unless one is willing to consider electronic vote manipulation, which we know the experts from Princeton to Johns Hopkins to NYU’s Brennan Center to the US Government Accountability Office all have concluded is child’s play.

If you find the questions raised by this excerpt troubling, I urge you to read the entire article from the beginning here.

After that, you would do well to view the Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy.

Finally, if you’re willing to spend a couple bucks to download and view Dan Rather Reports: Das Vote via iTunes (scrolled down to find the episode Das Vote), you can do so here. If not, then here is a transcript (PDF).

It’s all too easy to dismiss the concerns raised by the above commentators and documentaries as paranoid conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, I have found that it is far harder to actually debunk them. To my knowledge at least, no one has come even close.

Whether you believe our elections are actually rigged or not, democracy and civil discourse cannot thrive where there is suspicion and distrust. That’s why we urgently need new safeguards, starting with routine independent audits of vote totals reported by optical scanners — something that, shockingly, is not even permitted under current rules in WIsconsin.

- GP

Hacking the recalls: Why we must have hand-counted paper ballots and citizen exit polls.

Admin — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 06:56:34 +0000

It goes without saying that the outcomes of the nine Senate recall elections scheduled in Wisconsin will be of intense interest to most of the UW-Madison community. Forecasting the outcome of elections weeks in advance is always a risky business; nevertheless, we offer the following bold prediction:

In at least some cases, the candidate receiving the lesser of the actual votes cast — perhaps, in fact, the candidate you passionately opposed — will be declared the official victor.

Chances are, you either think we are nuts or you are already upset with the dismal state of elections in Wisconsin, if not the country. Either way, we hope this article will change your view of both (a) the security of the elections and (b) the ability of ordinary citizens like you to improve that security.

Here’s a second prediction which gets to the heart of the real problem:

No one — not the Government Accountability Board, not the media, not any elected official, and most certainly not you – has the slightest hope of ever disproving our first prediction in light of current election procedures and practices.

While our first prediction is open to debate, the second is rock solid. Why? Because our appallingly compromised election procedures in this state are simply incapable of detecting or preventing election fraud, due to a combination of wholly inadequate statutory safeguards and criminally negligent enforcement.

(Note by the way, that we are not talking about voter fraud, which was ostensibly the reason behind the recently enacted voter ID law. Both the prevalence and practical significance of voter fraud is a discredited myth. If you want your candidate to win an election dishonestly, it is far easier and more effective to rig the counting of the ballots on the electronic voting machines. We find it interesting and significant that those in the Wisconsin Legislature who rammed through the voter ID law have so little to say about the far greater threat of election fraud. )

Election fraud is not just a hypothetical concern. In addition to strong circumstantial evidence in countless other cases, instances of clear fraud have been uncovered that led to actual indictments in Cuyahoga County , Ohio, and Clay County , Kentucky. Echoes of Cuyahoga can be heard (by those inclined to hear them) in the recent Waukesha recount.

Experts on election integrity have been sounding two main alarms for at least ten years: (1) it’s far too easy to rig elections in ways that are difficult to detect, and (2) there is considerable circumstantial evidence that it is regularly occurring.

Consider this: Approximately 1.48 million votes were cast in the Prosser v. Kloppenburg election. The final published difference between them was a mere 7,004 votes, so flipping only 3,502 of them could have given the election back to Kloppenburg. That’s only a single vote flipped (or, alternatively, two Prosser votes simply discarded) per 422 cast!

Now consider this: Electronic voting machines use proprietary software to tabulate votes. Not even election officials are allowed to view or test the integrity of the software or the memory cards. The counting of votes simply cannot be observed or verified by the voting public or the election officials. It is impossible to know whether it is being done correctly and honestly. We are being told to take it on faith that the voting machine vendors, and those who have access to the machines, are honest. This is not merely risky, it is fundamentally antithetical to democracy.

The Emmy-nominated documentary Hacking Democracy (free viewing online, 81 min.) presents a shocking demonstration of how easily electronic votes can be hacked, and it also offers troubling evidence that election rigging is actually occurring. Even if you don’t read beyond this point, please view Hacking Democracy and urge family, friends, and acquaintances to watch it as well. You will never view our elections or electronic voting machines the same way again.

We’re accustomed to hearing the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” applied to suspects being tried for crimes, and that’s as it should be. But we in the United States, more so than in many other developed countries, inappropriately apply the same standard of evidence to our elections. Our naive assumption is that unless unambiguous evidence of fraud or gross error is actually uncovered, it most likely didn’t occur. If you can’t see it, it must not exist. This is what those who corrupt the election process count on.

Election fraud, like any crime, requires both motive and opportunity. And ample motive can already be found on either side of the current ideological divide in our country.

Imagine the zealous conservative who sincerely believes that abortion is murder and that liberal politicians are therefore condoning murder on a large scale. Or imagine the zealous liberal who sincerely believes that conservative policies will condemn the earth to perish, and soon, from runaway greenhouse warming. Either of these individuals might be persuaded that it’s morally justified and urgently necessary to commit election fraud in defense of humankind.

Would anyone who cares about honest elections deliberately put either person in charge of actually overseeing and enforcing election procedures? But that’s exactly what we do with our partisan elections for county clerks!

As we saw in the last recount, many judgment calls were made as to which ballots would be declared valid and which discarded. And whenever judgment is in play, so is bias. If you are unfortunate enough to live in a county or municipality where your election officials oppose the party or candidate you support, you should be very, very concerned about whether your vote will be fairly counted.

But it doesn’t stop at the county level. Consider further the wealthy industrialist who quite plausibly believes that if a certain pro-regulation candidate for Congress loses, s/he and their allies stand to make millions of dollars more per year. Might s/he not be tempted to invest considerable political and financial capital in getting voting machines adopted that can be easily and undetectably hacked? Would they perhaps even get into the business of building them?

We may never be able to eliminate the motive, but we can, and we must, identify and eliminate the opportunities to undetectably rig our elections. Until we do, we cannot rationally assume that elections are clean and fair. And we therefore cannot rationally trust the official outcomes of elections.

Here, in summary, are the major weak links in Wisconsin elections:

Vote tabulation. Can we be certain votes are being honestly and correctly tabulated by electronic devices? No. Unfortunately, current procedures and the electronic voting machines themselves provide absolutely no way to independently verify the accuracy of electronic vote counts short of a full hand recount of paper ballots. And by Wisconsin law, most of the recount must be done on the same electronic voting machines that could have been hacked in the first place. Be aware that the memory and printouts can be made to differ from the real voter intent and that the pre-election testing is useless for detecting fraudulent programming!

Also, although required by Wisconsin law, touch-screen machines used in some districts were found to provide no paper record and thus no voter-verifiable (or recountable) record of the vote!

Chain of custody. For the purposes of a recount, are we ensuring that ballots can’t be added or subtracted between the time they are cast by the voter and the time they are recounted? As we clearly saw in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court recount, the mandated procedures for our elections are not always followed. Citizen observers witnessed a stunning range of abnormalities in the labeling/sealing of ballot bags and even discovered a poll tape dated March 30, days before the election. The poll tape in question, with its time stamp of 1:40 AM, was sworn to as actual votes. This claim was later retracted only when persistently questioned.

We have sampled just some of the evidence suggesting that the upcoming recall elections in Wisconsin cannot, and should not, simply be trusted to be honest. Now we come to the most important part: What can still be done to restore confidence in the outcomes?

There are in fact a number of effective steps that can still be taken. All of them require citizen engagement.

Wisconsin Citizens for Election Protection are urging hand-counts for the recalls. They have sent letters to all the clerks asking that they hand-count the recalls. You can contact them at protectwi@gmail.com.
Contact your county and municipal clerks, the election inspectors and the mayor and councilpersons or the town chair and the supervisors. They can authorize the little extra money that it would take to hand-count paper ballots (HCPB) for the recalls in your municipality. Talk to them about the many jurisdictions in Wisconsin and elsewhere that already count their ballots by hand. Acton, Maine (with seven races and two initiatives, six teams of two people each — a Republican and a Democrat — were able to hand-count, twice, 944 ballots in four hours) and Lyndeborough, New Hampshire are potential models for the rest of the country.
Volunteer to serve in non-partisan citizen exit polls being organized by the Election Defense Alliance to rigorously and independently verify vote tabulations and chain-of-custody of ballots.

Our final prediction: Unless the Wisconsin recalls are hand-counted in every race, with secure hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB) elections, at least some of them will be rigged, with major implications for the balance of power in the Statehouse.

Alarmist? Perhaps. But the only way to be certain is to act immediately to close the massive security holes in our elections. Please use social media to share the information and links in this article, and help educate those who naively think that outcome of the recall elections depends solely on getting out the vote, who votes and how they vote.

Protecting election integrity is not ‘left’ or ‘right.’ If any commentator or political leader actively objects to making our elections more secure, please ask yourself what their real stake is in the current deeply flawed system.

“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.” – Josef Stalin

Grant W. Petty
Professor of Atmospheric Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Sheila Parks
Founder, Center for Hand -Counted Paper Ballots

This article may be reproduced in whole or part with attribution of authorship and a link to this article. Copyright July 2011, Grant Petty and Sheila Parks.