Campus News - Dispatches

Wiley has overseen tremendous change during his tenure as chancellor.

When John D. Wiley MS’65, PhD’68 interviewed in 2000 for the position of UW-Madison’s chancellor, he told the search committee members that, if they were looking for someone to bring about big change, he was the wrong person for the job.

But seven years later, as Wiley plans to leave his post as the university’s chief executive, a look around campus finds him at the forefront of major change, leading UW-Madison through a period of unprecedented growth in areas ranging from infrastructure to research to fund raising.

Wiley is stepping down in September after spending more than thirty years at the UW as a student, researcher, professor, and administrator. He announced his plans in December 2007, noting that the timing would allow a new leader to participate in the university’s reaccreditation process and the next two-year state budget cycle.

“It has been both a challenge and a privilege to lead this university during an important time in its history,” Wiley says. “The university has never been better poised to improve the lives of Wisconsin residents and take a leading role in reshaping the state’s economy.”

Since Wiley took the helm in 2001, UW-Madison has become one of the most prolific research universities in the world, winning significant grants and private funding to foster landmark scientific achievements in stem cell research. The UW has also become a focal point for bio-energy research after receiving a $125 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to support the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.

Fund raising also soared during Wiley’s tenure. The university, through the UW Foundation, raised more money during the past six years than during its entire history up to that point. Those gifts fueled a campuswide infrastructure boom that has included new research labs, classrooms, and residence halls, and completion of Microbial Sciences, the largest academic building on campus. A unique state and private partnership is now developing the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, which will serve as a hub for interdisciplinary research.

Wiley has also focused on keeping the university accessible and affordable for students, by pushing for more need-based financial aid and providing more paths to a UW-Madison degree.

Governor Jim Doyle ’67 says Wiley’s work made UW-Madison the envy of the nation. “A world-leading research institution that drives our economic growth, highly educated graduates ready for the jobs of the future — this is John Wiley’s legacy,” he says.

But while Wiley worked to make the UW a leading research institution, he also clashed with state legislators over the university’s share of the state budget, resulting in some strained relationships. “It’s been a period of cut after cut, as the state faced difficult fiscal problems,” Wiley says. “To the extent that we were able to do that with minimal adverse effect on academic programs, I’m very proud of that,” he adds. “Our faculty and staff have worked through some difficult times because of those fiscal constraints, and that’s a tribute to their dedication to
our mission.”

In his final months as chancellor, Wiley is devoting special attention to raising money for the East Campus redevelopment project. The plan includes an expanded Chazen Museum of Art, a music performance center, and replacing the Humanities Building with two new classroom buildings along a pedestrian corridor stretching from the Memorial Union Terrace to just north of Regent Street.

UW officials plan to move swiftly on a national search to appoint Wiley’s successor. A search committee with faculty, staff, student, and community representation — appointed in January — will recommend finalists to a five-member UW System board of regents selection committee. In conjunction with UW System President Kevin Reilly, that group will make a final recommendation to the full board, which votes to appoint the new chancellor. Wiley says the university’s new leader will face challenges, particularly with declining state support for higher education.

“As a public university, we have a mission to serve the state and serve the public,” he says. “We have to figure out how we can continue to be focused on the public mission of providing research and high-quality teaching and outreach to the public when the public — directly through the taxpayers — is providing less and less of the base budget that keeps it all going.”

— Jenny Price ’96

$175 million gift offers college access to low-income students.

With a sweeping gift of $175 million, John ’55 and Tashia ’55 Morgridge have endowed one of the largest scholarship programs in Wisconsin history. The Fund for Wisconsin Scholars will pay need-based grants to Wisconsin students who attend one of the state’s public institutions of higher education.

Announced in December 2007, the fund will give its first scholarships in the 2008–09 academic year, with as many as two thousand students receiving between $1,000 and $5,000. In subsequent years, the fund will pay out more than three thousand scholarships annually.

“We really want these scholarships to make a difference in students’ lives,” says Mary Gulbrandsen MS’74, MS’98, who serves as the fund’s executive director. “We want to make college possible for people who couldn’t otherwise afford to go.”

The fund is expected to provide approximately $7.5 million each year. All graduates of Wisconsin public schools will be eligible to apply, providing they attend one of the two- or four-year UW System institutions or any of the Wisconsin Technical College System schools.

“The Fund for Wisconsin Scholars will provide access for low-income Wisconsin residents to a higher education in a meaningful and solid way,” says Susan Fischer ’73, ’79, UW-Madison’s director of financial aid. “As an alumna and staff member at UW-Madison, I hope we can encourage as many students as possible to access this grant and attend our university.”

John Morgridge is a former chair of Cisco Systems, and Tashia is a former teacher. Both grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, though they currently live in the Palo Alto, California, area. In announcing the creation of the fund, they said they were inspired in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s education initiatives and by Governor Jim Doyle’s Wisconsin Covenant program, which promises to provide a place in one of the state’s colleges, universities, or technical schools for every Wisconsin high school graduate who meets certain standards for achievement and behavior.

“We believe that the fund will grow substantially as others are inspired to join us in this effort,” John Morgridge says.

UW officials responded enthusiastically to the gift, which Chancellor John Wiley called “nothing short of magnificent.

“Supporting need-based scholarships at this level will make the dream of a college degree a solid reality for thousands of Wisconsin families, while also sending a powerful message that access to higher education is a statewide priority,” he said.

— John Allen

Kirk Douglas wasn’t just a force on the big screen. He also was a major behind-the-scenes player in Hollywood who started his own independent production company. Douglas made eighteen films and worked with heavyweights such as Laurence Olivier, Stanley Kubrick, and John Huston.

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research has mined the actor and producer’s personal letters, photos, and documents — from sixty boxes he donated to the UW in the 1960s — to tell the story of his career via a new Web site.

UW-Madison “is the first university, as far as I know, to see the significance of such collections in tracing the historical development of filmmaking as one of the most important modern art forms,” Douglas wrote in a letter explaining his reasons for choosing Wisconsin to house his papers. “I am relieved that there will be a proper home for this part of my life.”

The center put the Douglas collection online as its first effort to digitize some of the key pieces of its vast collection. Stephen Jarchow ’74, MS’76, JD’76, chair of the board of Regent Entertainment and founder and CEO of Here! Networks, donated $20,000 to help the center post other collections on the Web.

To see the Kirk Douglas collection, visit www.wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu.

— J.P.

As though he’s dealing cards for a quick hand of gin rummy, James Huberty ’71, MS’74 spreads history on a conference room table.

In a multicolored jumble of names, places, and events, he shares posters from one of UW-Madison’s most storied eras — the Vietnam War years of the late sixties and early seventies. The three dozen or so posters, once tacked to campus kiosks and hallway bulletin boards, are original copies in pristine condition, and they represent just a sliver of Huberty’s full collection of anti-war materials. A sampling of posters, along with leaflets, photographs, alternative newspapers, and other memorabilia, have been part of an exhibit, Revolution’s Wallpaper, on display at Memorial Union in recent weeks.

In a time long before e-mail and cell phones, the sometimes hastily drawn and printed announcements offered the best way to promote events on a campus that was considered the Midwest epicenter for protests against the war.

“It’s been very challenging for me to select the pieces,” Huberty said in December as he prepared for the show, noting that each carries a memory and the power to instantly transport him back some forty years. “I don’t think a time like that will ever be repeated. The black power movement, civil rights, free speech, the women’s movement, American Indian rights, the anti-war movement, government repression, and police brutality — all of these things were bubbling up at once,” he says.

Although Huberty actively participated in the protests, as a political science major, he took a broader view and knew that what was going on all around him held special significance. And something compelled him to carefully save what most others tossed into the trash bin without a second thought. He describes a love of current events that started when he had a paper route as a boy growing up in small-town eastern Wisconsin, became more focused during the Cuban missile crisis, and was first articulated during his high school debate and forensics activities.

“When Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were killed, I wondered, what’s next?” he recalls. “They were very turbulent years, and it was right in our faces at the UW. At the time of the Vietnam War, 42 percent of students thought there was a revolution coming — and I believed that.”

Campus appearances by some of the most famous activists — Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, the Black Panthers, Jerry Rubin, Benjamin Spock, and more — along with posters urging attendance at demonstrations and marches are preserved forever in the collection.

In recent years, Huberty has taken both samples and a heartfelt message to Madison area high schools. He typically spends part of a day displaying the materials, then two or three talking to students and trying to breathe life into the pages of their history textbooks. “I try to get students to connect — reading about it in books just isn’t the same,” he says.

He’s careful to take a balanced stance when discussing the war, the draft, and other issues, guiding the discussion to “issues of dissent, decision-making, and the role of critical thinking. I tell them about the draft, then ask, ‘What would you do if you were drafted?’ I respect those who served [during the Vietnam War]. I’m not there to criticize or judge — just to make them think. It’s history, and history is meant to provoke awareness and discussion.”

Huberty knows, of course, that many of the students have additional sources for information about this intense time in America’s — and the university’s — past. “I tell them to talk to their parents,” he says. “That’s how history lives on, and I am drawn to oral histories as an important part of the learning.”

A slideshow featuring parts of the collection can be viewed at www.news.wisc.edu/huberty.

— Cindy Foss

Mike Knetter found people willing to give him millions of dollars almost everywhere he turned for a few crazy days last October. Last-minute offers came in phone calls, an unexpected two-line e-mail, and even at a Badger football game.

After initially discussing a conventional naming gift with several prospects, the dean of the Wisconsin School of Business adopted an unprecedented approach — one that could set a national trend. Instead of naming the school for an individual donor in perpetuity, Knetter thought, why not build a team of supporters to preserve the school’s name for the next twenty years?

His reasoning was compelling: If the school sold naming rights in perpetuity, it would forfeit the option of selling those rights later, for a better price. And a renaming of the school for a single individual would send the school scrambling to build a new brand.

His results were impressive: All told, thirteen generous gifts came in, totaling $85 million. Of that amount, $70 million is unrestricted in its use, an unusual feature in a gift to a public university and a crucial feature in times of declining state support.

“It became apparent that a naming gift could actually destroy value … and promote egoism over teamwork,” Knetter says. “Three of the most important concepts we teach our students in business are option value, brand equity, and teamwork. It’s nice to practice what you teach.”

One of the donors, Albert Nicholas ’52, MBA’55, says the donor partnership was impressed with business students’ earlier support for differential tuition to help support the school. “They have shown that they are willing to pay for quality. And so are we,” he says. “We hope this naming gift inspires an even broader group of alumni to give back.”

Just hours after announcing an $80 million gift on Homecoming morning, Knetter ran into Milwaukee businessman Sheldon Lubar ’51, LLB’53 in a suite at Camp Randall Stadium. Lubar said he wanted to add a $5 million contribution.

“There are moments when a school can make a major leap forward in terms of quality, scale, and national visibility,” Knetter says. “We believe that time has arrived.”

— Dennis Chaptman ’80

It didn’t look good at first.

The marathon state budget process kicked off with some out-there proposals — cutting off funding to the Law School, for one — and it appeared that UW-Madison might fare even worse in this year’s state budget than in past go-rounds. But in the end, the UW emerged as one of the winners from the final compromise that legislators and Governor Jim Doyle negotiated last fall, which reverses a six-year trend of significant reductions in state support. The 2007–09 biennial budget has more money for student financial aid, faculty recruitment and retention, and the university’s capital budget, including replacing Union South.

It also provides tuition assistance to veterans and creates a new program guaranteeing some financial assistance for higher education to Wisconsin students who graduate from high school with a B average.

But the budget might be as notable for what didn’t make it in as for what did. Gone was the much-maligned Law School idea, along with Doyle’s proposal to provide domestic-partner benefits to state employees. And a member of the UW System board of regents resigned over another omission: Jesus Salas MA’85 was upset that there was no provision to allow illegal immigrants who graduate from Wisconsin high schools to pay in-state tuition.

— Jenny Price ’96

Babies and the beginnings of academic careers are now a better mix in the UW chemistry department.

A policy approved in 2007 provides a twelve-week paid maternity leave, with the hope that more women will complete their PhD or postdoctoral research and advance to the faculty level.

“There’s a perception among graduate students that the professoriate is not a friendly place for women,” says department chair Robert Hamers ’80, who oversees a forty-member faculty that includes just four women. The under-
representation of female faculty in the physical sciences is a nationwide issue.

Several years ago, a graduate student working with Hamers became pregnant. “Obviously, she needed some time off, but all of my research funding was from federal grants,” he says. “It put me in a compromised position — I felt morally obligated to help this student get through the pregnancy and her PhD. This policy alleviates that concern and levels the playing field.”

Chemistry labs aren’t the safest place for a pregnant woman and her unborn child, who risk unnecessary exposure to chemicals that could adversely affect their health. A maternity leave option gives a pregnant student and her research adviser some flexibility in looking for safe and healthy ways to continue a chemistry education during pregnancy — for example, considering alternatives to lab work or taking the paid leave on a part-time basis. Grant guidelines may prohibit paying research assistants if they are out of the lab for a few months, so the new policy must be funded entirely from unrestricted gifts to the chemistry department.

Wisconsin joins only a handful of universities with similar policies, including Stanford and the University of California-Berkeley. Since establishing the policy, the UW chemistry department has not yet had a graduate student become pregnant.

“If you really want to change the number of women at the assistant professor level, they need to feel supported as graduate students,” says research associate Emily English PhD’07. “If this was universally accepted, it could have a big impact on my plans.”

— Karen Roach ’82

For students who are about to graduate, the digital revolution has changed more than how they will keep in touch with friends. It’s revamped the way they find jobs.

Gone are the days when a prospective employee would march into an office, resume in hand, ready to meet a potential boss. Instead, students can upload their resumes online and prospective employers can browse for the best candidates.

“Everything is electronic now, so students can sit at their desks, or in their apartments, or at home over break, and they can be applying for jobs,” says Steve Schroeder ’98, MS’99, assistant dean and director of the Business Career Center. The center’s e-recruitment Web site is just one of hundreds of online job databases that students can tap into.

“I plan on moving to Denmark after I graduate, so if I couldn’t search for jobs online, I don’t know what I would do,” says Mary Sandberg x’08. “Also, because of the language barrier, it’s much easier to communicate by e-mail.”

The lengthy process of compiling a portfolio of recommendation letters, transcripts, clips, and so on has also been digitized. For a small fee, students can upload these documents into an online folder that can be accessed any time, and instantly send them to grad schools or potential employers.

Though job searching may increasingly be done online, the next step remains an in-person interview, and technology is helping students prepare for that, too. Along with attending traditional resume workshops and mock interviews, students can download podcasts that tackle
subjects such as what to wear to an interview.

“We do set up video conferencing here for recruiters,” says Schroeder. “But you can tell a lot about a person from their handshake. We still think it is important to be able to meet in person.”

— Vanessa de Bruijn x’08

Scientists drill deep to study earthquakes.

Clues to the world’s most powerful earthquakes — including those that trigger tsunamis — lie buried below the ocean floor in deep-sea faults. Thanks to the deep drilling capabilities of a new Japanese vessel, these remote faults may finally be accessible.

“Earthquakes don’t happen at the surface; they happen miles deep in the earth,” explains UW geophysicist Harold Tobin. “The drilling is unique because it allows us to access the deep faults, where the earthquakes actually originate.”

Last fall, Tobin and a team of scientists drilled four boreholes, each thousands of feet deep, into the seafloor near the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan, one of the most active earthquake zones on the planet. Using monitoring instruments embedded within the drill pipe, the researchers discovered unexpected differences in the physical stresses of the rock layers overlying active and inactive parts of the fault — early hints at quake production.

Additional expeditions will extend the holes even deeper into the fault zone. “The fundamental goal is to sample and monitor this major earthquake-generating zone in order to understand the basic mechanics of faulting,” Tobin says.

— Jill Sakai PhD’06

Most people think of kidney stones as a painful malady that afflicts men over age fifty. Bruce Slaughenhoupt, a pediatric urologist at the UW’s American Family Children’s Hospital, sees it a little differently. About every ten days, he and his colleagues treat a child suffering from a kidney stone. And about every ten days, they face the same reaction.

“Many parents are quite surprised,” says Slaughenhoupt, who recently co-founded the UW Health Pediatric Kidney Stone Clinic. “They tell me, ‘I didn’t know that kids could get kidney stones.’ ”

They can, and urologists and nephrologists across the country are noticing that children are getting them with increasing — and alarming — frequency. The culprit is believed to be the same as that fueling the national obesity epidemic: a diet high in processed foods and sodium. Most kidney stones consist of calcium oxalate, a substance that can form in the kidneys when the body consumes too much sodium. Common types of processed food — think French fries and soda — often contain high amounts of the substance.

In most adults, a kidney stone will pass in about forty days. With children, the waiting game doesn’t work as well. “Parents never give me the option of waiting forty days,” Slaughenhoupt says. “They want their child’s stone dealt with now.”

— Aaron Conklin MA’93