Campus News - Dispatches

New chancellor calls the campus ‘a place I know and love.’

Football, in an unexpected way, helped chart a career trajectory that led Carolyn “Biddy” Martin PhD’85 to become UW-Madison’s new chancellor.

“I come from a family of football coaches, and I’ve always liked teams and teamwork,” she says. “The idea of being a team leader or head coach attaches me to a part of my personality that takes me back to my roots.”

During the past eight years as provost at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and for four years as senior associate dean of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences before that, Martin discovered new skills. Those talents transcended her scholarly work as a professor of German literature and women’s studies.

“I loved getting to know what was going on in a full range of fields across the university,” says Martin, who earned her UW doctorate in German literature, an interest that began during study abroad as an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary. “I like helping to integrate various directions and programs and facilitating other peoples’ success.”

Martin, who began her new position in September, talked with writer Dennis Chaptman ’80 for On Wisconsin.

What led you to seek the chancellorship at UW-Madison?
I think of UW-Madison as one of the best research universities in the country, indeed, in the world. It means a lot to me to be able to assume a leadership position at a place I know and love. Wisconsin is a great educational and research institution with a strong commitment to public service, affordability, and economic diversity. Those things matter to me and are worth all of the effort and intelligence we can bring to bear.

What were some of your favorite places as a student?
I learned to cross-country ski while I was at Madison, so I spent a lot of time at the Arboretum in the winters. I also took sailing lessons on Lake Mendota and I loved the lake. And one of my favorite places, not surprisingly, is the Union Terrace. I also loved Wisconsin Avenue, where I lived for a while. It offered a view of the Capitol and a short walk to the lake. I loved the Farmers’ Market and Concerts on the Square.

How do you view the role of alumni?
They are the outcomes of a university education. They are among our best and most important ambassadors, and among the university’s biggest supporters. The fact that there are over 340,000 living alumni whose successes owe at least something to their education at UW-Madison says the university has an extraordinary impact, all the more so when you take the multiplier effects of their many contributions into account. They also help us conserve much of what is important about the history of the university, while pushing us at times to move forward.

What’s your approach to fundraising— another important aspect of your new job?
Fundraising is a joy. It entails helping people understand the extraordinary things that are going on at the university, and the excellent work our students, faculty, and staff are doing and the potential they have to make a difference. A chancellor has to be a translator of the aspirations of the university to a wider public and seek their support for what higher education can do for individuals —and for the world.

What are your priorities as you begin this job?
In the short term, I want to get to know the people and renew my familiarity with the place. I will find as many opportunities as I can to interact with students, faculty, staff, and alumni. I want to make it a point to get to know the leadership of the city and the state, building collaborative relationships for the hard work ahead. The most important long-term goal is to enhance the already outstanding quality of the research, teaching, and outreach missions of the university. Some very immediate challenges that require attention involve faculty recruitment and retention in a very competitive environment, affordability and student access, and diversity. One of my top priorities will be fundraising for financial aid and faculty support, which is key to dealing with affordability, recruitment, and retention issues. I’m also looking forward to working with the people who have responsibility for various diversity initiatives to see what kinds of things we might do, or do differently, or what we can add and how I can be a champion for those initiatives. In the case of undergraduate education, I’m interested in the students’ overall experience, doing what we can to enhance education inside and outside the classroom, how the advances in research get translated into the undergraduate curriculum, and ensuring that students benefit from the extraordinary discoveries made on the campus every day.

Wisconsin Advertising Project pulls curtain back on campaigns.

Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have declared their intentions to be competitive in states their respective parties haven’t won in years — but if they don’t really mean it, the Wisconsin Advertising Project can call their bluff.

“Advertising is reality,” says political science Professor Ken Goldstein, the project’s director. “If [the candidates are] not advertising, they’re not serious.” The project produces a comprehensive database detailing the content, timing, volume, and targeting of political ads, which it releases during the course of the election season to reporters who are hungry for information about the inner workings of campaigns.

“I don’t have to be in the Obama strategy room or the McCain strategy room to know which states they’re targeting. I’ll know when I see the [advertising] buys,” Goldstein says. “I don’t need to sit in on their focus groups to know what issues are working for them. I can tell that from the ads they’re running.”
This year, Goldstein and his research team, working out of a small office in campus’s North Hall, are immersed in what will be an unprecedented presidential election when it comes to the amount of political advertising that airs, as well as its reach.

“In 2004 … 95 percent of the advertisements were in forty-four media markets — 25 percent of the country,” he says. “This is going to be a year where we see advertising in places where we have not seen advertising before in presidential elections.”

Goldstein, a self-proclaimed political junkie who made the jump to graduate school after working as a researcher for CBS News, started studying advertising somewhat by accident. In 1996, as he was finishing up his studies at the University of Michigan, he missed a flight and was stuck at a Washington, D.C., airport for several hours. While he waited, Goldstein read an article about a new company that was tracking political ads and decided to track down its founder, Evan Tracey.

“It was one of those things where — before I knew it — I had turned over everything I had to him, and the Wisconsin Advertising Project was born,” Tracey says. TNS Media Intelligence/ CMAG, Tracey’s company, provides the project with detailed, real-time tracking information about ads.

E very political ad has a unique digital fingerprint, and its profile is coded after one airing, making it possible to detect the ad and track it when it airs again. The advertising project — funded by a grant from the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation — then analyzes the data to build a database that shows who is airing the ads, the content and tone of the ads, the issues covered, and where the ads are being aired.

Goldstein and his team of about ten undergraduate researchers — he calls them the project’s “engine” — have coded virtually every significant political advertisement broadcast in the top seventy-five media markets in 2000 and in the top one hundred markets from 2001 to 2004.

Stephanie Nielsen x’09, a political science major who is working on Capitol Hill and considering law school, became involved with the advertising project in fall 2006, after taking Goldstein’s introductory political science course. Nielsen says it’s “interesting to see in a very hands-on way the link between how much these campaigns spend on advertising and getting a certain message out there, and what impact that has in a practical sense on how people view that candidate.”

And Ben Tabielson ’06, now in his second year at Yale Law School, says working on the project with Goldstein “had a huge impact on my capacity for and inclination toward rigorous analytical thinking.”

Goldstein’s work is used for teaching, for what he calls “geeky research,” and for helping both reporters and the public to better understand the political process. On days when the project releases its latest poll or study, he works from home, clearing voicemail on one phone and making calls on another to keep up with the volume of media inquiries.

Tracey says that intense interest demonstrates that Goldstein’s work is both insightful and useful. “He’s really done a very good job of detecting strategic decisions — both good and bad — and putting them out there in a format and in a forum that goes beyond just a bunch of academic review types and really gets out there into the mainstream press and the mainstream media,” Tracey says.

— Jenny Price ’96

A surprising approach to substance abuse gets powerful results.

As any Wisconsinite knows, our love of beer and other booze often gets the better of us — with some extremely sobering consequences. The state regularly tops national rankings in high-risk and heavy drinking; binge drinking among young people is widespread and rising; and diseases and accidents related to alcohol and drug abuse are Wisconsin’s fourth leading cause of death and fourth among reasons for hospitalizations. The economic toll is estimated at some $5 billion a year paid by health care, criminal justice, and social service systems.

But a program at the School of Medicine and Public Health is taking a new approach to tackling these challenges. Called the Wisconsin Initiative to Promote Healthy Lifestyles (WIPHL), the federally funded initiative uses SBIRT — which stands for screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment. The method is now being used at twenty-four primary health clinics around the state, and will be expanded to others in coming years.

Among alcohol and drug abuse programs, SBIRT is a revolution. “Whereas traditional treatment focuses largely on alcoholic and addicted individuals, [this] focuses on the whole range of risky and problem substance use,” says Richard Brown, the initiative’s clinical director and an associate professor of family medicine. “Since non-alcoholic and non-addicted risky and problem substance users by far outnumber alcoholics and addicts ... they, as a group, cause greater harm to families and communities.”

The idea is to catch problem users before they do harm or their conditions get worse. Four key questions about alcohol and drug use, and additional questions about other health behaviors, help identify drinking and drug problems at an early stage.

The screening is done with all adult patients as a routine part of their health care visits. Patients identified with problems talk with health educators one to three times and agree upon changes. For many patients, these steps are enough to significantly reduce the patients’ alcohol and drug use. If the health educator and patient agree that more intensive care is needed, the patient may be referred for further treatment, and costs may be covered by WIPHL.

While the mainstream notion of an intervention involves family and friends confronting the user, SBIRT uses “motivational interviewing,” a nonjudgmental way to help a patient identify reasons for a problem and reinforce a readiness to change.

“When people discover that a behavior conflicts with their own goals, they find motivation to change,” says Brown. “Self-motivated people are more likely to succeed at the difficult task of changing behaviors than those who agree to change for other people’s reasons.”

The program’s staff has seen it work countless times. Christina Lightbourn ’96, a health educator at UW Health Northeast Family Medical Center in Madison, recalls a patient who drank as many as forty-eight beers during a weekend — yet didn’t acknowledge a problem and said she was tired of being lectured to stop by her mother.

Lightbourn didn’t lecture, instead offering information about potential health risks. She wasn’t sure the fifteen-minute session had had much impact — until the following month, when the patient told her physician that she had reduced her consumption to three or four beers on three occasions. The patient, who said she was concerned about her health, has stuck with the changes for nearly a year.

“Motivational interviewing works because it allows the practitioner to meet the patient where they are in the change process. … It can help them move forward and empower them to make changes,” says Lightbourn.

A study has found that Wisconsin saves nearly $1,000 in health care and criminal justice costs for each patient who goes through SBIRT — savings the federal government can embrace in an era of belt-tightening.

— Joan Fischer MA’95

Do these media messages make me look fat?
It's a question that seems to come up time and again: do media images of stick-thin supermodels truly cause women to dislike their own bodies more? After poring over seventy-seven studies on the topic involving more than fifteen thousand research subjects, UW psychology researchers Shelly Grabe and Janet Hyde say the answer is definitely "yes."

"We've demonstrated that it doesn't matter what the exposure is, whether it’s general TV watching in the evening, or magazines, or ads showing on a computer," says Grabe, now an assistant professor of psychology at UC-Santa Cruz. "If the image is appearance focused and sends a clear message about a woman's body as an object, then it’s going to affect women."

While this may seem obvious, Grabe believes that many people still resist the idea that societal influences, such as the media, can have a real impact on how women view themselves. When individual studies have made this connection in the past, she explains, critics have often dismissed them for focusing on groups of especially body-conscious women, such as college students, or exposing test subjects to unusually racy photos.

To avoid these criticisms and settle the question once and for all, Grabe and Hyde pooled and analyzed data from every well-designed study they could find. These included controlled experiments, in which researchers tested the effects of media images directly, and investigations that correlated body concerns with women's self-reported consumption of TV, movies, and magazines.

The examination revealed that regardless of study design or specifics, exposure to images of ultra-thin actresses and models significantly increased women's concerns about their looks, including how dissatisfied they felt, and their likelihood of engaging in excessive dieting and other unhealthy eating behaviors. What’s more, studies conducted in the 2000s showed, on average, a larger impact from the media than did those from the 1990s.

"This suggests that despite all our efforts to teach women and girls to be savvy about the media and have healthy body practices, the media’s effect on how much they internalize the thin ideal is getting stronger," says Grabe. With body dissatisfaction now established as a major risk factor for low self-esteem, depression, and eating disorders, it's a troubling result.

Grabe hopes that wider recognition of the media’s influence will encourage people to see poor body image as a societal issue, rather than a problem of individual women -- or, worse, a matter of vanity -- as it's often viewed now.

"I want to stress that it’s totally normal for women to want to be attractive," she says. "But what's happening in our society is that many women are striving toward something that’s not very realistic or obtainable. And that leads to a lot of health consequences."
Madeline Fisher PhD'98

In June, Walton County, Florida, issued a rabies warning after several raccoons there turned up with the disease. Three days later, Hall County, Georgia, suffered its twenty-fourth rabies case this year. Later that month, rabies showed up in bats in Anderson County, South Carolina. If researchers want to keep track of the spread of rabies, they could subscribe to a dozen small-town newspapers, and still get just a fraction of the reports. Or they could check out the Global Wildlife Diseases News Map, which puts all the animal health news in one place.

Created by the UW's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the map provides an online resource about the health issues facing animals around the world. Pushpin-like icons connect to news reports of different health conditions, from rabies and anthrax to pesticide and lead poisoning. According to USGS librarian Cris Marsh ’89, MA’04, the tool has garnered interest in a wide variety of places. "We get public health officials, the U.S. [Department of Agriculture], wildlife biologists, as well as people in the university and wildlife rehabilitation realms," she says.

See the map online.
John Allen

The job is high stress and comes with a low salary, so it's no wonder that child welfare workers are most likely to leave the field within the first two years.

Since 2000, however, the UW School of Social work has been bucking that trend with help from a federally funded training program that pays for social-worker students to get a master’s degree in exchange for a one- or two-year commitment to working in Wisconsin’s public child welfare system.

The program admits twelve to fifteen students each year, and about three-fourths of its graduates still work in children's protective services, foster care, or special-needs adoption in twenty-seven counties and the Ho-Chunk and Oneida nations. Susan Michaud, the program's director, attributes that stability to a focus on specialized coursework and internships that prepare students for what they will experience, giving them the tools they need to succeed on the job.
Jenny Price ’96

The book conservation lab works to repair damaged tomes.
Very few people are as passionate about paper as Marta Gomez. She will rhapsodize about the quality and color of the many varieties that fill drawers in the Book Conservation Laboratory in the basement of Memorial Library.

"This is Japanese paper,” she says, holding up a stiff, translucent sheet. “People call it rice paper, but I don’t know why. It’s actually made from mulberry. It has very long fibers, which makes it very strong. And when we use it, we make sure we tear it rather than cutting it so that the fibers remain intact.”

Her pulp attraction is only natural. Gomez is the director of the lab, which is responsible for keeping the UW’s paper-based information available for those students, researchers, and faculty who need it. The conservation lab’s job is to repair the damage that time — or the libraries’ patrons — do to the millions of books the university owns. It’s a job that keeps her and her staff busy year-round.

The conservation lab is part of the libraries’ preservation department, which aims to keep UW data accessible. It includes not only the conservation lab, for delicate work, but also an assessment section, to designate the appropriate options for a damaged book; a bindery, to prepare books for commercial binding; and a microfilm lab, to transfer bulky paper pages into tiny photographed images.

The preservation lab is essentially the libraries’ hospital, taking in damaged books and finding a way to heal them. When a damaged book arrives in the lab, Gomez and her team of student workers and volunteers do their best to diagnose its problems and give it the surgery it needs. Typical repairs include replacing covers, repairing broken spines, and reattaching torn or removed pages. Simple repairs can take less than half an hour; more complicated jobs can run half a day. Because of the time necessary for such careful work, the lab’s backlog runs to some 1,200 volumes.

To some, the conservation lab may seem anachronistic. The UW Libraries are currently involved in an effort called the Google Project, which aims, ultimately, to transfer many of the libraries’ collections into a digital format so that the books can be searched and downloaded over the Internet. So why spend so much time repairing paper?

Some books, says preservation librarian Andrea Rolich MA’69, MA’70, PhD’81, MA’89, couldn’t -- or shouldn't -- be replaced. “Not only do some books have intrinsic value beyond the words they contain,” she says, “but users still prefer to read many materials in paper format. Even some of our younger, tech-savvy students have complained that they must go to the Internet for too many materials these days.”
John Allen

UW-Madison is a world leader in computer research, and now that expertise has attracted not one, but two technology giants to the city.

Internet firm Google opened a research and development office downtown this fall, with twenty “Googlers” focused on hardware and software systems design. The company was drawn by the strength of the College of Engineering’s computer architecture group, including the efforts of emeritus professor Jim Smith to reduce the power consumption of computers.

Software giant Microsoft is opening a development laboratory near campus, led by emeritus computer science Professor David DeWitt, who has done groundbreaking work in hooking together thousands of computers to perform data-intensive tasks. “More and more, the world is about data,” he says.

DeWitt says the lab has a half-dozen graduate students who get to “come in and work inside the Microsoft firewall and do projects that they just couldn’t do” in a university setting, collaborating with three other faculty members and six full-time employees. Large grants for core computer science research at universities have dried up, making it harder to do the type of work the department did twenty years ago.

"If we’re successful or Google is successful, and one of us grows, that will just benefit everybody else in town,” DeWitt says. “And hopefully, if we’re successful, there will be startups.”
Jenny Price ’96