This is the sort of question that intrigues only those who work for the Wisconsin Alumni Association, so we at Flamingle HQ are pretty sure we know who signs your paycheck. The Wisconsin Alumni Association (WAA) celebrates the day of the UW’s eighth commencement ceremony, June 26, 1861, as its birthday. After that year’s 13 grads picked up their degrees — the university’s largest graduating class to date — they joined the other 27 living alumni for a dinner conversation about the UW’s future. The Civil War had just started, and Wisconsinites were feeling financial pressure. The UW was deeply in debt, and its alumni worried that the state might look on a university as a dispensable luxury while it was busy outfitting soldiers to fight. Those alumni decided to form an association “to encourage friendly and social intercourse among its members and to promote by organized effort the best interests of the University of Wisconsin.” Eventually, WAA would fully realize that goal by creating this newsletter. The association has also achieved other things over the last the 16 and a half decades — warmups to Flamingle, essentially. It launched On Wisconsin and Badger Insider magazines and fostered the creation of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the UW Foundation, and the Wisconsin Union. Happy birthday, WAA!

Support future generations of Badgers with a gift to the WAA Scholarship Fund.