Unconventional Work

By John Allen

The inner workings - and inner workers - of UW-Madison reveal that it takes a lot more to make a university than teaching and research.

Supporting a total population of 60,083 - 41,219 students, 2,175 faculty, and 16,689 staff - UW-Madison isn't just one of the nation's largest universities. It's a whopping big community. When class is in session, the 933 acres of central campus pack in a higher population density than does New York City.

Just about everyone knows the main industries of our quasi-city on the shore of Lake Mendota - minting new university graduates and extending the boundaries of knowledge. But though instruction and research get all the glory, they're only a small part of the work going on at UW-Madison. Within the following pages, you'll meet people whose jobs may, on the surface, seem far removed from the business of education. They virtually never coordinate a syllabus or publish a research paper, but their work ensures that the UW's teachers can teach, its researchers can investigate, and its students can learn.

This list of hidden professions isn't exhaustive - not by a long stretch. With our limited space, we couldn't fit, for instance, Doug Thiessen '77. Known as the Critter Catcher, Mouse Man, or Batman, he's UW-Madison's sole pest control specialist, and he's climbed through just about every nook, cranny, passage, and crawlspace on central campus. The same goes for the cheesemakers at the Babcock Dairy, the person who oils the Union's bowling lanes, the School of Music's instrument tuner - the list goes on. Consider this only the beginning.

If the Rathskeller is a UW-Madison institution, you can say John Peek '84 has been institutionalized. On any given weekday during the lunch rush you'll find him by the Rathskeller's grill. He's easy to recognize - he's the guy who serves up a stand-up comedy act along with the Paul Bunyan burgers, and he's been at the Rat, off and on, for eighteen years.

Peek first came to work at the Rathskeller in 1984, when he was an undergraduate studying agricultural economics. Since then, he's left the grill behind several times - to supervise at the Stiftskeller, to run the sandwich deli, and, for a four-year stretch in the early 1990s, to give up salaried work altogether and be "Mr. Mom" to his young child. But he's always been drawn back. Counting pre-college experience, he's been in food service for more than a quarter of a century - he's done more kitchen time than just about anyone else on campus. Today, he's the Rathskeller's assistant manager, but climbing the corporate ladder has brought him no escape.

"I'm a firm believer that, as a manager, I need to be out on the line, doing the same kind of work as the staff," he says. "But I also like serving and being in the public eye. The best thing about working in the Rathskeller is being able to interact with the customers."

So he faces fifteen hours of splattering grease every week. But the shifts allow him time to be with his family, and besides, management has its perks. Among Peek's duties is the responsibility for making sure the restaurant's pantry is stocked. This gives him the opportunity not only to keep the Rathskeller's food fresh, but to keep its menu fresh, as well. And Peek enjoys introducing Rathskeller diners to new specials. If not for him, there would be no Messy Veggie sandwich today. Nor would there be a Jackhammer. Or a Deutschland Delight.

"Since 1995," he says, "I've created or introduced more than a hundred new recipes here. I enjoy experimenting in the kitchen."

Many of Peek's creations grow as much out of necessity as inspiration. Sometimes he'll find that the Rathskeller has far more than it needs of one food item or another. Then Peek will feel the urge to create a new special to see if he can work through some of the back inventory.

"That's how the Jackhammer came about," he says. "Jack is one of our less popular cheeses - I don't know why, exactly. Once we were stuck with a lot of it, and I had to come up with a way to get it moving, so I thought, hey, ham and cheese - people like that."

Not all of Peek's experiments have been such hits, however. His Vegetarian Chilito - vegetarian chili in a burrito with a side of Spanish rice - flopped. So did the Valley Burger, his attempt to bring a vegetarian patty to carnivorous UW-Madison. And every fall, after the Union's brat stand closes, he tries to find something to do with all the left over hotdogs. So far, the answer has eluded him.

But for all his experimentation, he doesn't partake in too many of the specials himself. "I usually bring in a lunch I've made at home. What I make is basically a deli sandwich anyway."

Once upon a time, it was almost a cliché: "I'm not going to be buried," people would say; "I'm leaving my body to science."

Well, in Wisconsin, science has the face of Bob Schlotthauer. He's the senior mortician with UW-Madison's body donation program, and he and his partner, Phil Schadler, are responsible for keeping the medical school's cadavers as healthy as corpses can be. "Some people get a little queasy about the idea of body donation," says Schlotthauer. "But it's important that medical students learn from real bodies. To be honest, if I'm going to see a doctor, I'd much rather see one who's actually practiced on the real thing than one who's only dealt with plastic models."

Body donation works much like any organ donor program. Wisconsinites who wish to leave their bodies to science fill out a donation form, and when they die, their physician calls Schlotthauer and Schadler. The morticians then decide, based on the physician's verbal description, whether the body is one that they can accept. "We can't accept a body if the person died of an infectious disease," says Schlotthauer. "Nor can we take one if the person died in an accident, was autopsied, or has unhealed surgery." Such conditions render a cadaver useless for dissection. Jaundiced or obese bodies must also be rejected, as they embalm poorly. All told, Schlotthauer and Schadler turn down nearly a quarter of all donated bodies.

Those they accept, however, are enough to keep the university's morticians running. They log more than 30,000 miles every year, fetching bodies back to Madison, and they must take those miles at a rigorous pace. If they're too slow and a body begins to decompose, it's no good to medical science. Though a local mortician could preserve it, Schlotthauer and Schadler prefer to do their own embalming. They work carefully, spending two days on the preservation process. When they're done, they can store a cadaver for months at room temperature.

"Our material is superior to what others use," says Schlotthauer. "Once we seal a body in its plastic bag, it'll mummify before it goes bad."

And the cadavers have to last a long time. About sixty of the hundred or so bodies will be dissected during a semester in UW School of Medicine gross anatomy classes. Others may go to hospital residency programs so surgeons can train on them, or they may be used in other body-related classes, such as kinesiology or physical and occupational therapy.

Schlotthauer has been a UW mortician since 1980, and his priority is taking care of the donated bodies, giving all due consideration to the donors and their families. In his twenty-two years here, he's never misplaced a body - or even part of one. But in 1996, he managed to lose his own heart in the embalming room. While on the job, he met medical student Barbara Knox xMD'02. She had stuck around after anatomy class, and struck up a conversation with Schlotthauer. Eventually they went out for a beer, and dating led to marriage in 2001. "After all these years," he says, "I finally got something lively out of this job."

If you need a compact muon solenoid, Farshid Feyzi '80, MS'82 is the man to see. He and his colleagues at UW-Madison's Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL) are some of the few people in the world who know what the device is - and how to build one.

And there will be only one - when it's finished, that is. The solenoid, a subatomic-particle detector that scientists will use to seek evidence of a certain kind of particle known as a Higgs boson, will be assembled in Geneva, Switzerland, in a couple of years. Currently its components are under construction at many labs and factories around the world.

PSL is one of those labs, and Feyzi's concern lies in the engineering problem of building a working compact muon solenoid - which, as it turns out, isn't all that compact. The instrument's two endcaps - which are PSL's responsibility - each weigh about 3,000 tons.

"This is a big project," says Feyzi, referring not only to the solenoid's size and importance, but also to the administrative complexity of international construction. Feyzi must travel three or four times a year to Geneva and labs in China and Japan to confer on the solenoid's progress. "At first I did quite a bit of engineering on this project myself," he says, "but now most of my work requires diplomacy and tact."

In its cavernous, aluminum building north of Stoughton, PSL designs and builds unusual - often unique - scientific instruments for researchers at the UW and elsewhere. Since 1996, Feyzi has been the lab's associate director, supervising the thirty members of the PSL's technical staff - the engineers who design such instruments, the machinists who build them, and the specialists who calibrate them.

The PSL exists, essentially, to help researchers overcome one problem: the gulf that separates scientific hypothesis from real-world conditions. Feyzi's team has constructed speech therapy monitors for the Waisman Center, vacuum chambers for the physics department, and rainfall runoff samplers for the Wisconsin State Department of Natural Resources. They're currently aiding the UW with a project called AMANDA, the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array, which requires several hundred neutrino detectors - basketball-size devices that allow physicists to observe some of the most elusive of subatomic particles. PSL is not only building the detectors, but also a hydraulic drill that will allow scientists to place those detectors two miles deep in the Antarctic ice.

"In the years PSL has been here," Feyzi says, "we've done more than six thousand projects, and each one is different. But overcoming unique problems - that's what we're good at."

No one knows better than Chris Ott '99 that the keys to the future lie buried in the past. But then, for Ott, the present lies buried in the past, too - under plaster dust and the dirt of millennia. His workspace, an overgrown closet crammed with tools on the ground floor of Weeks Hall, is covered in clumps and lumps and specks and motes that are older than ancient.

Ott is in charge of specimen preparation at UW-Madison's Geology Museum, a job he's been doing since 1998, when he was an undergraduate. More than five hundred tours pass through the Geology Museum every year, making it the second most popular museum on campus, after the Elvehjem. Ott's duties include not only creating eye-catching displays, but also cleaning and classifying new additions to the museum's collection and even going into the field to collect specimens of his own.

For the last several summers, he's been digging at the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, "an amazing site" where Ott has identified at least fourteen different dinosaur skeletons. But in spite of such opportunities, the museum has little money to spend on expanding its fossil collection. "Most of the digging is done by students and volunteers," Ott says. "We have a fieldwork budget of $500 and a van."

Specimens that arrive at the museum go first to the preparation lab, where Ott directs a team of undergraduates as they clean and identify the materials and prepare them for possible display - an exacting job that can take months with a large fossil. Some of the museum's new additions are quite large, including skull bones from a Triceratops and one of its distant relatives, a Leptoceratops.

When not cleaning or preparing displays, Ott is busy cataloging materials in the museum's collections, which include not only the items on display, but thousands of specimens stored below Weeks Hall. "Invariably," he says, "they were collected by one professor or another way back when. I'd like to get an inventory of it all." This will be no simple task. Some drawers, crammed full of specimens collected decades ago, are simply labeled "rocks."

The Geology Museum is expanding by more than a thousand square feet and improving its preparation lab. While the new space is under construction, much of the museum's collection will have to go into storage. The efficiency with which the collections are stored - and the ease of their return to display - will depend largely on the way they are cataloged.

Ott hopes eventually to pursue a doctorate in paleontology with an emphasis in dinosaurs. Since dinos aren't UW-Madison's specialty, he'll have to head to another university to get the training he wants. His legacy at the museum will most likely be embodied in the undergraduates he works with now. "I want them to be ready when it's time to pass the baton," he says.

Not many UW-Madison staff have their own trading card. But then, not many UW employees have four legs, either. McAllister is gifted with both - he's the horse that puts the mount in the UW-Madison Mounted Police (UWMP).

That, says his companion, Sergeant Edie Brogan, makes McAllister something of a celebrity. "Kids love to see him and pet him. They're who the cards are for."

McAllister, a black-bay half-Arabian gelding, is the second horse Brogan has used for police duties. Kiddo, her first, retired in 1996, and soon McAllister, too, will be put out to pasture. He'll go into semi-retirement before the 2002 football season begins, and a three-year-old colt named HotShot will take his place under Brogan's saddle.

Brogan has been around horses almost all her life. "I was into all the normal horse stuff," she says. "I did 4-H showings, that kind of thing, and I always enjoyed training. Horses are flight animals - in the wild, they're prey. They don't naturally like being around people. But getting an animal to cooperate because it wants to is an amazing feeling. If you train a horse right, you gain a willing partner who wants to work with you."

Brogan joined the UW Police Department in 1983, but at the time there was no mounted unit on the force. It wasn't until 1989 that she could incorporate her passion for horses into her work. At the beginning of the '89 football season, she and Kiddo established the UWMP, and the unit showed its worth almost immediately.

"During the second home game that year, our captain and another officer were arresting a suspect, and he took off," says Brogan. "Kiddo and I gave chase, and by the time the other officers caught up with us, we had the suspect pinned against a tree and cuffed."

Brogan will occasionally patrol in areas like the Arboretum or Picnic Point, where vehicles can't go, but the unit's most important duty is crowd control. For special events, the UWMP can expand, with Brogan bringing in a freelance force of five other mounties from around the state. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, she even tapped the City of Milwaukee Mounted Unit for two Badger football games.

"Mostly what I need them for is football games," she says, though the UW also likes to have a mounted presence at other times, including Homecoming and student move-in day. "In a crowd situation, the most important things for an officer to do are to see and to be seen. Horses are perfect for this, because they get you up above crowd level, and they attract attention."

When McAllister isn't on duty, he stays at Brogan's farm east of Madison. He belongs to her, not to the UW, and the university essentially rents him (for free) whenever it needs to call out the cavalry. Brogan, who in 1996 became the first certified mounted police instructor in Wisconsin, coordinates training for mounted officers across the state.

"Horses present a dichotomy," Brogan says. "They're great for moving crowds. Even when people won't get out of the way of emergency vehicles, they'll still move for horses. Their presence is intimidating. But horses are also excellent PR - those who aren't intimidated by horses are attracted to them, which makes them wonderful for community policing."

Quick, what tool has done the most to improve efficiency at UW-Madison over the last thirty years? Is it the Internet? E-mail? The personal computer?

What about the number two pencil?

If you ask Char Tortorice '72, MS'75, associate director of the Office of Testing and Evaluation Services, she'll choose the pencil. She can tell you all about the low-tech number two, just a soft graphite rod jacketed in pine. When used properly, it makes a dark, even dot on a bubble sheet. "A number two works perfectly - especially if the pencil isn't too sharp."

Bubble sheets - those fill-in-the-dot forms - have become ubiquitous as answer pages for almost all the multiple-choice exams the university administers. More than a million of them pass through UW-Madison every year, an average of nearly twenty-five per student, and all of them go to Tortorice and her colleagues. They possess Madison's only NCS 5000i optical scanner - the bubble-sheet reading machine.

Of course, no student takes twenty-five multiple-choice exams a year (though some come close). But then, bubble sheets have more uses than for midterms and finals. The university employs them for surveys, applications, course evaluations, and a host of other functions. "Any data than can be collected on a sheet will be," says Tortorice. "And all those sheets come to us."

But Testing and Evaluation's work doesn't end when the sheets go into the scanner. The office is a repository of expertise, not only on how to test students but also on how to examine tests. Every time the office scores an exam, it creates a detailed analysis of how every student answered every question so that faculty can evaluate their own work as well as their students'. "We collect all sorts of statistics on a test," Tortorice says. "We can show instructors more than just whether their students' overall grades fall into a bell curve, but how answers line up on each individual question."

Successful test questions, Tortorice explains, will follow a certain statistical pattern: the students at the top of the test's overall curve should get each question right more often than those at the bottom of the curve. If this isn't the case - if, for instance, A students and D students are equally likely to give a wrong answer - then the instructor may conclude that the question was misleading or that he or she covered the material ineffectively in class. Tortorice says that some professors have changed their tests based on her office's analyses.

In the twenty-four years Tortorice has spent at UW-Madison, she's seen the university grow increasingly dependent on its bubble sheets. "In just the last five years, there's been a 23 percent increase in the number of sheets that pass through our office," she says. But in spite of the spread of the bubble sheet, there are still students and faculty members who fail to remember the importance of the number two pencil. "Just last term we had a student call us up because he'd failed his final," says Tortorice. "He wanted to know how he could've gotten a zero. We looked at our records and saw that the machine had read his sheet as blank, and I knew, this kid did his final in pen. The machine isn't calibrated to read ink. It's got to be graphite."

With a name like his, Timothy Sell was destined to work in sales. And as business manager for UW-Madison's SWAP Shop, he faces an unusual sales challenge: to perfect the theory that one office's trash is another's treasure.

SWAP is the university's surplus program. Its name is an acronym for Surplus with a Purpose, though that wasn't always the case. When graduate students Dan Einstein MS'95 and Neil Michaud MBA'99 conceived the plan for the shop in 1994, its main purpose was keeping unwanted UW supplies from ending up in a landfill. Then SWAP stood for the Solid Waste Alternatives Program. "But ‘solid waste' makes people think of sewage," says Sell. "It created a problem, especially on our Web site. Surfers would just see the name and send us ideas for things to do with human excrement."

The change in name Ð and a growing reputation for providing good deals Ð has made SWAP an effective program, not just for reducing the material sent to Wisconsin's junkyards, but also for making money. It now handles more than just university surplus, taking in items from state and municipal offices as well. Last year, the SWAP shop did more than $1 million in sales and recirculated nearly 700 tons of stuff that otherwise would have gone to the dump.

Sell, who's been with SWAP for five years, says the variety of that stuff runs from the mundane Ð "We've got old computers, office supplies, chairs, beakers, and athletic shoes" Ð to items you won't find at the local mall. Some of the things that have passed through SWAP's sales register include horses, chairs that belonged to the UW System board of regents, glass globes from the Capitol, and a $400,000 laser that could cut through six to eight inches of steel. "Of course," says Sell, "you've got to go through a background check if you want to buy that one."

The shop itself works like an enormous consignment store. University and state offices send old equipment to SWAP and receive a share of the sale price. Most offices then use their earnings to purchase other surplus items from the SWAP inventory. Anything that doesn't sell within four weeks is sent to a recycler if possible. Only as a last resort will SWAP send merchandise to a landfill. "We get anywhere from two to seven semitrailers full of merchandise every week," says Sell. "Most of it is gone within a week or a week and a half, and we've got to make room for new inventory."

Government agencies get the first crack at buying surplus Ð the sales floor is open to UW departments, state and municipal agencies, and non-profit organizations every Thursday; the general public gets its opportunity every Friday.

Public sale days can get hectic, Sell says, and he's given up being amazed when people buy stuff that seems to him completely useless. "Nothing seems odd to me anymore," he says. "We're like a giant garage sale."