Tom Hager ’10 of Green Bay, Wisconsin, has written 368 pages of madness: a book on the history of the NCAA tournament called The Ultimate Book of March Madness: The Players, Games, and Cinderellas that Captivated a Nation (MVP Books). It’s a year-by-year look at the stories behind each tournament, plus a section on the one hundred greatest games of all time. “For a [then] twenty-two-year-old — I graduated at twenty — to accomplish all of this [exhaustive research and a national book tour] reflects pretty well on the university,” he says.

From Frank Smoll MS’66, PhD’70 comes his thirteenth book, Parenting Young Athletes: Developing Champions in Sports and Life (Rowman & Littlefield). It explores both the joys and dangers of sports participation and translates the latest wisdom on the subject into a practical, how-to guide that helps parents to ensure that their children get the most out of the game. The author is a psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Steve Raymer ’67, MA’71 writes that he’s had “two long careers”: twenty-four years as a National Geographic staff photographer, working in more than one hundred countries; and the more recent, sixteen-year stint as a professor of journalism at Indiana University in Bloomington, and on the faculty of its East European Institute and India Studies Program. His fifth book since entering academia is the five-year photographic project Redeeming Calcutta: A Portrait of India’s Imperial Capital (Oxford University Press). Raymer’s compelling photos and detailed text create an “inclusive and nuanced portrait” of both decay and hope in the storied colonial metropolis and cultural capital that seeks to reclaim its past glory.

Have you ever wondered about the people who stand behind great people and help to make them great? Martin Drapkin MA’70 of Cross Plains, Wisconsin, explores such relationships in his second book, a work of historical fiction called Ten Nobodies (and their somebodies) (Dog Ear Publishing). In it, Drapkin creates first-person narratives by fictional “nobodies” such as Davy Crockett’s spiritual adviser, pirate Anne Bonny’s masseur, General Custer’s hair stylist, Marilyn Monroe’s fortune teller, Vince Lombardi’s spy, and more.

Seeing a need for a book that would provide businesspeople, managers, and students of business with proven, practical answers to common problems, Eric Bolland ’74, MA’78 compiled and co-edited the work of fifteen of his business-faculty colleagues at Midway [Kentucky] College to publish Solutions: Business Problem Solving (Gower Publishing). Bolland, chair of Midway’s business division, also authored several chapters.

Bill Hewitt ’76 says that his is “a story that has not previously been adequately told: the story of the developments, trends, and visionary people who are, in many ways, mitigating the climate crisis and turning sustainable development into reality, not just a grand concept.” He tells this story in A Newer World: Politics, Money, Technology, and What’s Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis (University of New Hampshire Press). Hewitt is an environmentalist, activist, the principal of Hewitt Communications, and an educator at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.

Tim Myers MA’76’s new e-book is Glad to Be Dad: A Call to Fatherhood (Familius). It’s a realistic, humorous, practical, and heartwarming look at the realities facing American families and the ways in which challenges and opportunities are evolving for men and women. Myers writes children’s literature, poetry, songs, fiction, nonfiction, and science fiction, and lectures at Santa Clara [California] University. He can also whistle and hum at the same time.

Surely it won’t be long before Jon Krampner MA’77’s third book joins the pantheon of pop-culture food histories, because Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food (Columbia University Press) is the first general-interest book on the subject. It’s been a long time in the making, but for those who live in one of the 75 percent of American households where this comfort-food icon resides, it’s been worth the wait. The book was the subject of a New Yorker blog post in November and a praise-filled Los Angeles Times review in December. The L.A.-based author guarantees that the book will not stick to the roof of your mouth.

Residents of and visitors to Wisconsin often seek out its “thumb,” the picturesque Door County peninsula. And when they do, Magill Weber JD’03’s Door County Outdoors: A Guide to the Best Hiking, Biking, Paddling, Beaches, and Natural Places (University of Wisconsin Press) will be there to help. Her resource helps visitors to make the most of the county’s 298 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, state parks, cozy inns, attractions, and “secret spots” with 125 detailed maps and suggestions of more than 150 scenic routes to explore. The author is a project director for the Nature Conservancy in Phoenix.

Reece Jones MS’04, PhD’08 seeks to demonstrate that the “exclusion and violence necessary to secure the borders of the modern state often undermine the very ideals of freedom and democracy they are meant to protect” in Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (Zed Books). Jones is an associate professor and the chair of graduate studies in the geography department of the University of Hawaii-Manoa in Honolulu.

In addition to hosting a weekly podcast with chef Andrew Zimmern of the Travel Channel series Bizarre Foods, Molly Mogren ’05 has also co-written three books with him. Their latest is Andrew Zimmern’s Field Guide to Exceptionally Weird, Wild, & Wonderful Foods (Feiwel & Friends), which is aimed at kids but will please grown-ups, too. Mogren is the director of communications at Food Works in St. Louis Park, Minnesota.

When Susan Stuntzner PhD’07 injured her spine at age nineteen, there was little information available to her on how to adapt. Now her first book, Living with a Disability: Finding Peace amidst the Storm (Counseling Association of India), fills that void so well that it’s being adopted as a textbook. Stuntzner is the program coordinator and an assistant professor for the rehabilitation counseling and human services program at the University of Idaho-Coeur d’Alene. Her second book is Reflections from the Past: Life Lessons for Better Living, and she’s at work on a third.

The transmission of the plague from marmots to humans in 1910 ultimately killed as many as sixty thousand people in less than a year. Now author William Summers ’61, PhD’67, MD’67 has examined the actions and interactions of the multinational physicians, politicians, and residents who responded to it — and the lessons they provide for our own age — in The Great Manchurian Plague of 1910–1911: The Geopolitics of an Epidemic Disease (Yale University Press). Summers is a professor of the history of science and medicine, molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and therapeutic radiology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He’s taught at Yale since 1968 and says he’s “still excited to be in the classroom and has no plans to retire.”

In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (University of North Carolina Press), Beth Tompkins Tiller Bates ’71 writes that in the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African-American men to fill jobs that initially seemed to offer them a chance at greater economic security. When the workers came to see that Ford’s anti-union stance did not allow them full access to the American Dream, however, their loyalty eroded; they sought empowerment through a broad activist agenda; and they played a pivotal role in the UAW’s challenge to Ford’s interests. Bates, a professor emerita at Wayne State University in the Motor City, concludes that Ford and his company helped to kindle the civil-rights movement in Detroit without intending to do so.

As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and collaborating with a group of elders, storytellers, and knowledge-keepers, Christopher Teuton MA’95, PhD’03 has recorded the first collection of interwoven stories, conversations, and teachings about Western Cherokee life, beliefs, and the art of sharing oral history in more than forty years: Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club (University of North Carolina Press). One reviewer called it “easily one of the most important books on the Cherokee worldview and tradition ever written.” Teuton is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Rehabilitating the lowly worm into a powerful aesthetic trope, Janelle Schwartz [MA’01, PhD’08] proposes a new framework for understanding such a strangely animate nature,” says the University of Minnesota Press about Schwartz’s new book, Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism. In short, it examines the worm as an archetypal figure in literature, natural history, and taxonomy. The author is a visiting assistant professor of comparative literature at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

Forever Young: The Rock and Roll Photography of Chuck Boyd (Santa Monica Press), edited by Jeffrey Schwartz ’02, showcases the work of one of the entertainment business’s most trusted and well-liked photographers, and captures the Zeitgeist of rock during the 1960s and ’70s. Boyd passed away in 1991, leaving behind nearly thirty thousand images; some of these have been discovered only recently and are included in the book. A lifelong musician, Schwartz is also a music historian and the archive director for the Chuck Boyd Photo Collection in Santa Monica, California. His first book was The Rock & Roll Alphabet.

Anyone who knows a family in which a child — and therefore his or her parents — are living with diabetes will relate to Linda Rupnow Buzogany ’88, MS’93’s The Superman Years: The Emotional Life of a Parent Caring for a Child with Type 1 Diabetes (CreateSpace). The Littleton, Colorado, author is a psychotherapist and psychology professor who recounts her family’s early experiences with this daunting disease and offers ways to cope with the long-term emotional and physical burdens. One reviewer writes, “Finally, a book about what happens for the parent who is trying to keep her child alive.”

Author William Kaiser ’49 says that his historical novel Hellebore: A Novel of Reconstruction (Canterbury House Publishing) is a “dramatic story about the fussing, fighting, and feuding that shaped the lives of Southern Appalachia folk after the American Civil War.” It’s a sequel to his book Bloodroot, about how the outbreak of the Civil War divided Appalachia. Kaiser, of Deep Gap, North Carolina, has spent sixty-three years as a journalist and writes a column for the Boone, North Carolina, Watauga Democrat.

Impossible Journey: The Story of the Victoria Land Traverse 1959–1960, Antarctica (Geological Society of America) is co-author Jack (John) Weihaupt, Jr. ’52, MS’53’s account of a four-month, 2,400-kilometer, scientific and historical adventure into an unexplored hinterland that was conducted as part of the International Geophysical Year/U.S. Antarctic Research Program. The journey nearly ended in catastrophe several times, but the team succeeded in making discoveries and gathering important data. Weihaupt is a professor emeritus of geography and environmental sciences at the University of Colorado-Denver.

In (Ethel) Janet Mossberg Kramer ’55’s The Sion Grail (Xlibris), a woman visiting Paris discovers a priceless grail that belongs to a secret society and is sought by a greedy collector. Her search for its origin brings romance, adventure, and life-altering challenges. Kramer is a former English and French teacher who has run for the Minnesota House of Representatives. She lives in Minnetonka.

The University of Chicago Press has published new works by three Badger authors: Extreme Measures: The Ecological Energetics of Birds and Mammals, by Brian McNab MS’58, PhD’62, a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Florida in Gainesville; Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science, by Mary Jo Mann Nye ’65, PhD’70, a professor emerita of the humanities and history at Oregon State University in Corvallis; and Social Knowledge in the Making, co-edited by Neil Gross MS’96, PhD’02, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Judy Radloff Shuler ’63 walked to Camp Randall Stadium to attend football games a century after John Muir x1863 passed through the original Camp Randall, then filled with the Civil War’s trainees, wounded, and incarcerated. Shuler’s life intersected with Muir’s many times afterward during her “forty-five-year odyssey in Alaska,” starting in 1965: inspired by his Travels in Alaska, she established a tour and travel-planning business in Juneau, which she ran with a colleague. Now living in Fredonia, New York, Shuler has written the philosophical Red & Blue: A Memoir of Two Alaskan Tour Guides (Ouzel Press).

Sorrel Doris Hays MMusic’68 is a pianist, composer, filmmaker, consultant, and international performer of contemporary music who has lectured at many universities (and is currently at the University of West Georgia). Her new book is Touching Sound: Living Lullabies (Kendall Hunt), which includes fifty-eight musical scores and two CDs of eighty-four original recordings. Starting with the simple lullaby form, Hays expands to more complex forms, explores the effect of sound on the body, and ultimately provides a refreshing approach to understanding music.

Bringing together researchers and practitioners to provide a broad set of perspectives and strategies, Robert Ludke ’68, MS’71, PhD’80 has co-edited Appalachian Health and Well-Being (University Press of Kentucky). Contributors propose recommendations for research, policy, and best-practices models to improve the quality of life and decrease inequities for both rural and urban Appalachians.

From Toronto, Herman Rosenfeld ’71 writes that he’s contributed a chapter called “American Social Democracy: Exceptional but Otherwise Familiar” to the newly published Social Democracy after the Cold War (Athabasca University Press). The work discusses “the demise of social democracy as a movement for social transformation and the rise of Third-Way forms of political movements on the left,” and offers case studies from several countries.

Congratulations to Rodney Wittwer ’81 of Medford, Massachusetts, on publishing his first book of poetry, Gone & Gone (Red Hen Press). The poet has also received a 2012 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Dickeyville (Starhaven) is “both allegory to Theseus’s myth and paean to the Midwest and state of Wisconsin,” says its author, Joe Abbott ’83. How so, exactly? When a self-satisfied Californian arrives in Dickeyville, Wisconsin, to meet his fiancée’s family, a cast of bizarre locals take the hesitant New-Ager to hunt for the Dickeyville Horror, a giant boar. He mocks these provincial villagers, but soon learns that “hubris has a price.” In 1980, Abbott somewhat reluctantly followed his then-girlfriend/now-wife from California to Madison, where his future in-laws were all involved with the UW. He now lives in Chico, California, and teaches language arts at Butte College.

If you can’t resist a good zombie story, why not try the paranormal suspense thriller Cocaine Zombies (Camel Press), by attorney and debut novelist Scott Lerner ’89 of Champaign, Illinois? In it, lawyer Samuel Roberts meets a prospective client who’s accused of selling cocaine and an exotic beauty who’s paying for his defense. Soon after, Roberts begins having nightmares that come true, and life becomes exceedingly disturbing. Together with his supernatural-minded friend, Bob, he must confront the forces of deepest evil.

Eric Lohr ’90 has drawn on untapped sources in the Russian police and foreign-affairs archives to craft Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Harvard University Press). He explains how the reform of citizenship laws in the 1860s encouraged foreigners to help modernize Russia by immigrating and conducting business there — until a severe reversal came during World War I. Lohr is the chair of Russian history and culture at American University in Washington, D.C.

This Ordinary Adventure: Settling Down without Settling (InterVarsity Press) juxtaposes Christine Sorensen ’99 and Adam ’00 Jeske’s experiences traveling the world for the better part of a decade doing missions and community-development work, with their lives years later: managing careers and a family back in the “land of malls and manicured lawns.” They seek to think and live differently because of their time abroad, and to retain the amazing parts of those experiences. Adam is the communications director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Madison, and Christine is earning her PhD in anthropology.

Brigham Young University assistant professor of history J. (John) Spencer Fluhman MA’00, PhD’06 provides a “comprehensive history of anti-Mormon thought and the associated passionate debates about religious authenticity” in his new work, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press). He documents how the denomination became a social enemy for a populace agitated by other forces, and how its transformations eventually sapped the worst of the vitriol, helping to trigger the acceptance of Utah as a state in 1896 and paving the way for further acceptance.

When the heroine in Irene Helenowski MS’01’s Order of the Dimensions (Lulu) began her graduate studies in physics at Madison State University in Wisconsin (notice any resemblance?), she couldn’t possibly imagine that her work would take her into a multitude of dimensions, all leading to different outcomes — with plenty of danger along the way. The Chicago author is a statistical analyst at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

Take a hop, skip, and jump back in time, and you’ll land in a period when, for Badgers, “Jump Around” meant something other than the start of a fourth quarter at Camp Randall. The golden age of campus hopscotch ran from 1927 until the early 1960s, with the male residents of Tripp Hall’s Frankenburger House battling the women of Liz Waters’s Unit IV in an annual contest for leaping supremacy.

The prize for winning the hopscotch tournament was an actual trophy — a silver loving cup — and winning it was a major point of pride. The residents of each house practiced through the fall to prepare for the event; the Frankenburgers did so on a hopscotch court painted in their house basement. Typically, the tournament festivities began with the men issuing a ritual challenge, marching by torchlight (okay, toilet paper torches) to Liz to deliver an inscribed invitation (written on toilet paper — evidently, resources were limited). The women of Liz IV answered with chants and jeers, and the battle was on.

The competition ran until at least 1964, but in time, its heat waned. Other houses tried to take up Franken-Liz’s mantel. In 1965, for example, the men of Kahlenberg House took on the women of Cool House. But the glory days of hopscotch had faded.

Fans cheer as the Badgers try to push the ball across the goal line. The Badgers came up short on this drive and in the game, losing 20-14. Photo: Jeff Miller.

WAA tour gives Badger fans that rosy feeling.

Loyal Badger fans made the trek to California to re-paint Pasadena red over New Year’s, as the UW football team won its third straight Big Ten title and became the first squad in UW history to reach the Rose Bowl for three years in a row. Many of those fans traveled on the Official Badger Bowl Tour, presented by WAA and Wisconsin Athletics.

Cumulatively, WAA has taken nearly 5,000 alumni and friends to Rose Bowl games since 2011. And though a rose by any other name might smell as sweet, a Rose Bowl victory would have been sweeter — but the 2013 team lost to Stanford, as the previous teams had lost to Texas Christian and Oregon in 2011 and 2012, respectively.

“Despite the game, I think this was the best of the Rose Bowl trips I’ve been on,” says traveler Jack Hinnendael ’80. “WAA did a wonderful job, and [its representatives] were great hosts.”

The football Badgers’ new coach, Gary Andersen, meets with alumni at a reception the night before the Rose Bowl game. Photo: Jeff Miller.

This year’s WAA travelers had a more immersive experience than in past bowl trips. In addition to the Tournament of Roses Parade and the game, participants in the official tour stayed at the team hotel, giving them the opportunity to mingle with players and coaches in the days leading up to the game. At a New Year’s Eve reception, attendees had a chance to meet incoming football coach Gary Andersen, who succeeds Bret Bielema.

It was enough to have fans California dreaming — and hoping a fourth time will be the charm.

A student’s answer on an organic chemistry worksheet: this is a depiction of a reaction mechanism (an SN1 reaction, for those in the know) with curved arrows showing how electrons “move” and change from one compound to another. Not every notation (e.g., “Hypersomething”) is correct.

The cruelest course on campus may not live up to its legend.

Harder than teaching a dog how to “Bucky,” more terrifying than losing Paul Bunyan’s axe, able to crush dreams in a single semester. The most infamous class on campus is now … not that bad?

For decades, generations of Badgers have lived in fear of one class in particular: organic chemistry (or “Evil O. Chem,” as it is not-so-fondly called).

Attending a fifty-minute lecture three days a week, UW students in introductory organic chemistry (Chemistry 341 and 343) learn the basics about carbon compounds. A pre-requisite for many majoring in a science or medical field, this course also coordinates with a lab and weekly discussion sections.

After hearing nothing positive about organic chemistry from fellow students, Alex Kelsey x’14, a psychology major at UW–Madison, believed the course’s infamous reputation. “I was absolutely terrified to enroll in organic chemistry,” he says. “I actually considered changing career plans to avoid taking the class.”

But some things aren’t as bad as rumored. Perhaps the hellish reputation this course has is outdated — rooted in ways of teaching that are now obsolete.

“Students have been afraid of organic chemistry for forever,” explains lecturer Matt Bowman. “Maybe it’s because of the way it used to be taught, where it was memorize this, memorize that; it’s not taught that way anymore.”

Bowman attributes this change in part to the addition of discussion sections led by teaching assistants (TAs). In the past, students had only one option for getting help outside of the regular lectures: attending professors’ office hours. The discussion sections allow students to meet with a TA and ask questions, review problems, or get tips on how to solve equations.

The online tool Learn@UW is another resource today’s students can use to understand organic chemistry. “I can post my TAs’ notes from my lecture and my own notes so students can see different examples,” explains Bowman.

“The truth is that, yes, it’s a difficult class, and some people are more adept at understanding the concepts than others. But there are plenty of resources available to help students,” says Alexandra Douglas x’13.

Bowman realizes that most students come to an organic chemistry class believing it is going to be awful, thanks to all the negative hype that surrounds it. And, despite added resources to help students succeed, most chemistry classes maintain a retention rate of only 80 percent — a fact that he attributes to the class’s bad rap.

“[Students] come in expecting to have a bad time,” explains Bowman. “And because of that, some of them are not surprised — they have a bad time.”

Perhaps the secret to success in organic chemistry is to not believe its reputation. “The class did not live up to the hype, and it is actually my favorite class to date,” says Kelsey. “My opinions of organic chemistry now are drastically different from what they were before I took the class.”

Taking part in a long-standing campus tradition, students from an Illinois high school rub a foot on the Abraham Lincoln statue on Bascom Hill.

In a unique arrangement, a high school’s entire freshman class sees a campus for the first time — and envisions what’s possible.

Most of the high school students trailing behind Alex Longo x’13 had never set foot on a college campus before, so she explained UW–Madison’s landmarks in terms she knew they would understand.

A student union is like a campus living room, Longo told the group, which began its walking tour on a sunny day last fall on the sprawling patio outside Union South. Camp Randall Stadium is where the Badgers play football, she continued, pointing to its massive concrete frame in the backdrop as they crossed University Avenue. It’s also where the entire student section jumps up and down on the bleachers during the song “Jump Around” by House of Pain, she added, bouncing her head cheerfully for a visual.

“You’re going to see a lot of things that are different,” said Longo before leading students through Henry Mall, past Agricultural Hall, up to Observatory Drive, and down Bascom Hill.

And that is exactly what administrators at Addison Trail High School in suburban Chicago have counted on since 2006, when they began sending their entire freshman class — some five hundred students — to the UW for a glimpse of what’s possible after graduation.

The giant class trip, spread over five visits in September, is the largest group tour conducted by Visitor & Information Programs each year, and it has become a campus tradition of its own. Students working as campus tour guides feel honored to be chosen to show the Illinois teens around for a day, says Jessica McCarty ’05, visitor relations coordinator. The guides see it as a unique chance to reach high school students long before the stress of taking the SAT and sending college applications begins.

“It’s always fun to see the energy that comes off the bus, “ McCarty says. “Not everybody rides two and a half hours on the interstate to get here.”

A second tour group, led by Alex Longo x’13, stops on the hill while learning more about life in college.

The partnership between Addison Trail and UW–Madison was formed when the high school’s administrators returned from a trip to Boston, where they had learned about the value of smaller learning communities and saw promise for their students. Once a predominantly white student body, today’s two thousand students are 55 percent Hispanic/Latino, 35 percent white, and 52 percent low income, says Adam Cibulka, Addison Trail’s principal. But the 2010 census statistic that really captured the attention of officials was this: only 21 percent of the school’s surrounding community aged twenty-five and above had a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Administrators in Addison, a middle-class community not far from O’Hare International Airport, knew that if they wanted their students to aspire to continue their education past high school, they needed to show them not only what college looks like, but also what it requires to get there.

“Many of our students are going to be the first in their families to go to college, so the importance of getting them on a college campus and understanding the requirements and the steps necessary to get into college is imperative,” Cibulka says.

It’s a conclusion that more and more of those working with young people have drawn in recent years, as college admissions offices have come to expect applicants to demonstrate tireless extracurricular involvement and volunteer work along with good grades and test scores.

Evidence of this, McCarty says, can be seen in the way requests for customized tours — coming from Boy Scout troops, day care centers, and other groups not immediately college bound — have spiked recently. Just six years ago, her office welcomed nearly nineteen thousand visitors annually. As the end of 2012 neared, she estimated that campus visitors participating in customized tours would surpass thirty thousand for the year.

Some of this growth can be traced to increased marketing, coupled with practical changes in the logistics of student tours, now launched from the expansive and newly opened Union South instead of smaller offices near Bascom Hill. But requests from those who want to give young people access to a college setting are also a primary driving force for the growth, McCarty says.

“A lot of schools and after-school clubs and community organizations are calling us and saying, ‘We want our schools exposed to higher education in some way,’ ” she says. “They’re kind of planting the seed that if this is a place where you want to come, then this is what you have to do.”

Addison Trail administrators originally tried to find a Chicago-area college or university to host its freshman class for a day, but local colleges repeatedly said they couldn’t accommodate such a large group. So when Kurt Haberl, a now-retired teacher at the high school, suggested that they try UW–Madison — where his daughter attended school and worked part time as a tour guide — they figured it was worth a try.

Each year, Addison Trail has sent a caravan of yellow school buses filled with one hundred freshmen at a time to UW–Madison for a ninety-minute custom tour, followed by lunch at the Memorial Union. Even in times of budget cutbacks, the visits remain a high priority for the school. While the tours are free, the bus fees are paid for with the school district’s foundation funds and a contribution of ten dollars from each student, Principal Cibulka says.

On the crisp fall morning when fourteen-year-old Alondra Estrada stepped off one such bus, she looked the part of a seasoned college student in her gray fleece zip-up jacket, jeans, and comfortable white tennis shoes. But her wide-eyed surveillance of her surroundings as she crunched through the leaves along campus paths gave away her true background.

The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Estrada had never visited a college campus before. Her father, who owns a cleaning service, didn’t attend college. Her mother, a clerk at a department store, received an associate’s degree from the community college a few miles away from the family’s home in Addison.

“I’ve never seen such buildings before,” said Estrada. “I thought the campus would be more close together.”

Her classmates viewed the campus with similar awe, peppering tour guides with a wide range of questions: How much time do they give you in between your classes? Is living in a dorm just like a big sleepover? How much do you have to study? What’s that building with the columns?

Alondra Avitia and Jacara Mackley, both fourteen, giggled as they observed students lounging with open textbooks on Bascom Hill.

“Me and my friend, we’re like, ‘They have really nice grass’ — and I love grass,” Avitia said.

“And [the students are] really fashionable,” Mackley chimed in. “They make sweatshirts look really pretty with jewelry and stuff.”

Addison Trail officials say they already see the partnership with UW-Madisonmaking a difference: in 2012, 88 percent of the graduating class went on to college, compared to approximately 80 percent before the program started.

Longo, who expects to graduate from UW–Madison in the spring with a degree in communications, is considered another success story. She was a member of the first Addison Trail freshman class that toured UW–Madison. At the time, she knew nothing about college life, and she hadn’t given any thought to what it would take to be admitted to a university. Today, she wears her red tour guide attire proudly, giving two or three campus tours per week, scheduled around her classes. When she graduates this spring, she hopes to land a job in public relations.

“I was exactly in you guys’ shoes,” Longo told the Addison Trail students on the fourth of five visits scheduled last fall. “They take you on this field trip so you can start with an end in mind.”

School officials know of at least six students since 2006 who enrolled at UW–Madison after graduation.

Based on the success of the partnership, Addison Trail expanded its required college visit program this year. Now, in addition to the freshman trip, sophomores at the high school take a mandatory field trip to Illinois State University as a contrast to a large public university. Juniors and seniors at the college are invited to join smaller groups touring campuses that include Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, and Elmhurst College.

But the UW–Madison visit remains the flagship field trip for the high school, with no plans for change in the near future.

At one of the last stops on a recent tour, a cluster of Addison Trail students stood in front of Bascom Hall as tour guides explained the history and legend behind the Abraham Lincoln statue. When a guide explained how some students believe that rubbing Abe’s foot brings good luck, the high schoolers’ faces brightened. Several took off running at full speed to jump up and touch the statue in a quest for good fortune.

Addison freshman Ryan Zygowicz reached the statue first and rubbed Abe’s foot purposefully before climbing down to catch his breath and share his hope.

“I wished to just become successful in life and to go to a good college,” he said.

Vikki Ortiz Healy ’97 is a reporter and columnist at the Chicago Tribune.

During times of pain and uncertainty, forgiveness and dignity offer a way forward. Illustration: Edel Rodriguez

“Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present,” he wrote in a journal when he was a teenager, putting to paper more than one hundred rules of civility.

We’re saying the same today, albeit with different words. Calls for civility came daily during the recent American campaign season, it seemed. It was within that milieu that featuring a UW professor’s research and a former student’s work on two human qualities — forgivenesss and dignity — had particular appeal to us at On Wisconsin.

When I turned to online sources to confirm that treating others respectfully was a trending topic, I was richly rewarded. I discovered the National Civility Center, the Civility Project, the Institute for Civility in Government — even the Civility School (although that link took me to a web page that mentions cotillions and mastering chopsticks).

Then I saw a news headline reporting “Grandmothers Seek More Civility from Congress,” and I knew this was serious business.

These days our discourse can devolve into an exchange more combative than civil. We are so determined to use our mouths to argue that we forget to use our ears to listen to other points of view. Apparently powerful forces, such as grandmas and hurricanes, are needed to convince us to work through our differences.

As we struggle with these differences, our coverage of Robert Enright and Donna Hicks explains how they are finding ways to deal with tremendously difficult circumstances: helping those who have experienced horrific personal injury and entire countries that are at war.

Conflict has always been part of humankind, but thanks to Enright and Hicks, we see a way forward. We can apply their lessons to our own lives, pledging to forgive, to value dignity, and to demonstrate civility as we navigate our complex world.

Dave Florin served as chair of the Wisconsin Alumni Association in the 2011–12 academic year. C&N Photography.

A member of the search committee explains what the UW needs.

After UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin PhD’85 departed in 2010, former Chancellor David Ward MS’62, PhD’63 stepped in on an interim basis. Dave Florin ’92, recent Wisconsin Alumni Association board chair, is serving as an alumni representative on the search committee appointed to recommend a successor. He recently talked with On Wisconsin about what the UW wants — and needs — in its next chief executive.

What unique perspective do you bring to the search committee?

As a UW–Madison alumnus, I am looking at the process as a representative of a broad community of 396,000 of my fellow graduates all over the world.

Why do you feel it’s important for alumni to stay connected and aware of the search for the next UW–Madison chancellor? The university is at a critical juncture right now, and plays an incredibly impactful role within the entire state, if not the country. … We’re also at a point where, as a percentage of revenue, state support is at its lowest levels in history. This chancellor will have to navigate through some really challenging times that require a dynamic leader, and a tremendous amount of vision to maintain the level of leadership the people of this state demand.

What qualities are you looking for in these candidates, and ultimately, the next leader of the University of Wisconsin?

It’s an incredibly complex job, so he or she has to have a vision for how the Wisconsin Idea will come to life in the future. … The ideal candidate will possess tremendous leadership skills; the collaborative communication style needed to build trust both on and off campus very quickly; a great amount of physical and mental stamina, as this is not an easy job by any means; and an open mind to find the solutions required for continuing to deliver the world-class academic and research experience we are known for.

What’s next?

After narrowing the field of top candidates, the search committee is presenting the finalists to a selection committee of the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents. That committee and UW System President Kevin Reilly will recommend a final candidate to the full board of regents. A board vote to appoint the next chancellor is expected in April 2013, with a start date of July 1.

Update: The UW named four finalists for the chancellor position on February 21, 2013.

The Olympic Stadium in London’s Olympic Park is pictured prior to the 2012 Games. As an example of the sums of money that nations can spend on the worldwide contests, the opening ceremony alone for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi is expected to cost Russia about $52 million. Phil Walter/Getty Images.

Andrew Zimbalist ’69 has an inside track on the finances that drive Olympic bids and stadium deals. But are they a boon or a bust for the host cities?

Andrew Zimbalist ’69 will never forget the time that National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern accused him of single-handedly trying to destroy the American sports industry. It was part of a rant that erupted, Zimbalist recalls, when he was advising the National Basketball Players Association opposite Stern at a negotiating table at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.

In 1998, NBA owners and players were battling in a lockout that slashed the regular season to fifty games. Zimbalist, an economics professor, had a reputation for sharp analyses that often shattered accepted wisdom. He and his group arrived early for the meeting and were sitting with their backs to high-rise windows in a room with commanding views of midtown Manhattan.

The last to enter was Stern, and the commissioner’s eyes remained fixed on the floor as he took his place at one end of the table. Billy Hunter, the players’ union chief, suggested they begin, when Stern intoned, “I see you have a new member on your side of the table.” After Hunter introduced “our economist,” Stern went into a diatribe that impugned him and a colleague, and, according to Zimbalist, culminated in a twenty-second crescendo during which Stern stood up and pumped the air with his arm, practically yelling, “If Zimbalist is on your side of the table, we might as well all take off our clothes, get on horses, and march down Fifth Avenue.”

The room went silent and Zimbalist felt like he had fallen into an alternative universe. “I’m saying, ‘Holy Toledo! What’s going on here?’ ” He later learned that Stern was known to berate individuals as a strategy to divide the opposition. “I’m sure he was trying to intimidate me,” says Zimbalist, adding, “David and I get along now. He is a brilliant commissioner, and I have great respect for him.”

This 2012 photo shows discarded fencing outside the Olympic indoor pool and the OAKA sports hall, leftovers from the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. It’s not unusual for such facilities to fall into disrepair when cities can’t afford to maintain them. Oli Scarff/Getty Images.

Zimbalist, the Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, is no stranger to the ire of powerful people. In the two decades since his career took a sharp turn toward analyzing the enormous lucre surrounding sports, the field of sports economics has grown considerably. As one of its preeminent members, Zimbalist often testifies as an expert witness in court cases, acts as a consultant, and serves as a media expert. He has published at a prodigious rate on topics ranging from the commercialization of college sports, to how Title IX has affected society, to the internal dynamics of leagues.

It began in 1990, when a clash between baseball players and owners led to a thirty-two-day lockout that all but eliminated spring training. American fans were riveted, and Zimbalist’s eleven-year-old son Jeff was no exception. “I’m putting him to bed, and he says, ‘Dad, I don’t think I’m going to play Little League this year,’ ” Zimbalist recalls. Because the pros weren’t playing, Jeff assumed the lack of a season extended to his team.

“I didn’t know a heck of a lot about baseball economics, but I knew that wasn’t true,” Zimbalist says. From there ensued a discussion about the distinctions between the Major and the Little Leagues.

Then Jeff said, “Hey, Dad, you’re an economist, you like baseball, you just finished your book on Panama. Why don’t you write a book on the economics of baseball?” That was a Thursday night, and Zimbalist didn’t teach the next day, so he went to the basement of Smith’s Neilson Library and discovered two things: first, nobody had written about baseball economics in an accessible way, and second, “baseball had an antitrust exemption they got from the Supreme Court in 1922,” he says.

The realization started a churning process in Zimbalist’s mind. An acquaintance had recently spoken highly about Steve Fraser, an editor at Basic Books who liked the confluence of academic and popular writing. Zimbalist knew he had stumbled on a story about how powerful interests were leveraging an anachronistic privilege to profit handsomely from the national pastime. “On a lark,” he recalls, he dashed off a two-page book proposal that afternoon, thinking he would never get a response. Three weeks later, he had an advance to write Baseball and Billions, which became a business best seller.

The book clearly hit a nerve. Within minutes after Zimbalist did a public radio interview in New York to plug it, someone came into the studio holding up a sign saying that a big international law firm was on the phone. Weil, Gotshal & Manges was looking to enlist Zimbalist as an expert witness on behalf of Jets running back Freeman McNeil and the NFL Players Association in an antitrust suit against the league. At stake were the rules surrounding free agency. The players won.

In time, Zimbalist was called to testify before Congress and state legislatures on public policy issues relating to sports, encountering people such as George W. Bush (then a baseball team owner), then-baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, and U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum. He got into tangles with powerful owners and politicians, including then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was leading the charge for a new Yankee Stadium and was incensed by Zimbalist’s number crunching.

Sports economics was a brand new field, and Zimbalist’s models showed that more often than not, stadiums and arenas built at public expense ended up wreaking havoc with local budgets. The enormous hype around stadium projects — especially when owners threatened to leave one city in favor of another — muddied rational evaluation of the real costs and benefits.

“Sports is this massive thing in our culture and in many cultures around the world, and it gets an enormous amount of media attention,” says Zimbalist. This helps create what he calls “a natural, uncritical expectation” that wooing teams is “an unquestioned boon to the community.”

If Zimbalist is concerned about the effects of such sports mania on cities, he’s even more concerned about the effects on entire nations. His critique of mega sporting events — notably, the Summer and Winter Olympic Games and the quadrennial World Cup, governed by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) — is biting. In economic terms, he sees both organizations as monopolists that use that position to fuel bidding frenzies among cities vying for a turn on the world stage.

The way this tends to play out, he says, is that local organizing committees form that are initially made up of construction firms joined by labor unions and architects. Soon lawyers and bankers come on board, and together they grow into a big enough coalition for politicians to become enamored of their lustrous plans. This core group stands to gain a great deal from a civic project that requires the construction of massive sporting facilities, as well as infrastructure improvements capable of housing, feeding, transporting, protecting, and communicating with fans and media expected to flood the city for seventeen days.

At this stage, Zimbalist maintains, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) or FIFA play the role of glamorous sophisticate, challenging suitors to keep upping the ante by adding big-name architects to build dazzling structures in an attempt to outdo their rivals. This adds up to even more temptation for the moneyed interests who stand to profit mightily, whether or not the games ultimately benefit the community as a whole. In the meantime, the suitors spend lavishly on making a case based on civic pride and the virtue of sports, on a public relations campaign, and on hardball backroom dealings. The city of Chicago, Zimbalist says, spent $100 million on a losing Olympic bid.

The problem is that a dispassionate and honest economic analysis — not the kind of slick puff pieces dutifully produced by name-brand consulting firms at a hefty price — shows that, except under rare circumstances, these mega sporting events end up hurting the city or the country as a whole. The Athens Summer Olympics in 2004 may have contributed to the current financial turmoil in Greece, according to Zimbalist. Initially budgeted at about $2 billion, he says, the cost of the games ended up at $16 billion. Most of the venues built for the games now stand as decaying and eerily forlorn monuments to the hangover from a party that turned out to be too good. Plans to turn the Olympic Village into a community were never brought to fruition, says Zimbalist, and money to convert athletic facilities for local use evaporated.

The most plausible argument for hosting a mega event is that it brings in money from outside the country or region that can — in theory — boost the local economy. The problem is an irrational bidding process, says Zimbalist, that is driven by a monopolist on one side and local organizing committees that have successfully “hijacked” the political process on the other. Good economic models don’t look only at the upsides of these events; they also weigh them against the downsides.

Zimbalist and others in the field he helped to pioneer look at aspects such as whether the imperative to build quickly drives up labor costs, in turn leading to cost overruns and compromises that result in shoddy construction that ends up requiring significantly higher maintenance expenditures over time. The actual cost of the 2008 Beijing Olympics was $40 billion; the original budget was $5 billion to $6 billion.

Then there is the less tangible benefit a host city derives from projecting an image and gaining more prominence. “They all say that,” scoffs Zimbalist, but in reality, the cities have limited control over the impact of the publicity. A worst-case scenario is Munich 1972, which ultimately branded the city as the site of an atrocity when terrorists took Israeli athletes hostage in the Olympic village and later killed them.

Zimbalist ticks off a list of less dramatic discrepancies between aspirations and results. “The overriding impression left as a result of the Beijing Olympics is that it’s an impossible place to live and that they have unbearably thick pollution,” he says.

A city must also consider whether the influx of sports tourists drives away those who might otherwise have visited. Zimbalist cites studies showing that skiers avoided Utah during the 2002 Winter Olympics and that passenger traffic at the Atlanta airport during the 1996 games was on par with previous and subsequent years. The theater district in London this past summer was “like a ghost town” while the Olympics were happening in another part of the city, he says.

There are also significant land-use issues that must be added into the analysis. What could have been built in East London instead of an Olympics complex? Prime urban land is a scarce commodity, and a thorough economic analysis must encompass questions about opportunity costs, such as whether an arts complex, office buildings, or even a public park might be more beneficial in the long run.

“Leakage” is another consideration, Zimbalist notes. The postmortem on the Atlanta games showed that in spite of flat overall tourism, hotel prices went up. But rather than benefiting the local economy, that money mostly went to large concerns not based in the city.

Andrew Zimbalist became a sports economist when the field was in its infancy. Dick Fish/Smith College.

Zimbalist doesn’t mind being pilloried by tycoons, instead treating the outbursts directed at him as a badge of honor. But it wasn’t always that way. From the time he earned his degree at Wisconsin until that bedtime chat with his son, Zimbalist mainly concerned himself with comparing economic systems. He did his Harvard University doctoral dissertation on enterprise management in Salvador Allende’s Chile, a country he chose based on a tip from one of his undergraduate professors, UW economist John Strasma, that it had the most reliable and comprehensive statistical data in Latin America. He had also published a book measuring economic performance in socialist Cuba.

While at UW-Madison, Zimbalist originally intended to major in French, until he enrolled in a literature class in which he was the only male among forty-two students. And when he discovered that he was the only male student to apply for a study-abroad program in Aix-en-Provence, France, he quickly backed out. “The thought of going abroad with thirty-five or forty females was too intimidating for my young soul at the time,” he says.

In his first sixteen years, his academic focus was on global macroeconomics, systems, and development. His interest in athletics was just in passing. “I can’t say I was the biggest sports nut going, but I was an American male who paid attention to that stuff,” Zimbalist says. But he found that he enjoyed the new direction his career took: “As somebody who had basically studied the economies of the rest of the world all my life, I got very turned on to the idea of studying the U.S. political economy through the lens of sports.”

While on campus, he briefly became a history major before being captivated by a lecture given by Robert Lampman ’42, PhD’50, an economics professor who had worked for President Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers. “He was a lovely man who became a role model for me,” says Zimbalist. He promptly changed his major and became president of the Economics Student Association.

These days, Zimbalist has been working on projects such as an initiative with Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig ’56 to sort out issues of revenue sharing. “Sports leagues are always trying to have some balance between the big city teams and the small city teams, so there’s ongoing interest in the competition,” Zimbalist explains. “The question is, ‘How do you structure that transfer of money in a way [so as] not to blunt the incentives?’ ” The economist also wrote a book on his fellow alum called In the Best Interests of Baseball? The Revolutionary Reign of Bud Selig.

Zimbalist co-edited his most recent book, International Handbook on the Economics of Mega Sporting Events, with Wolfgang Maennig, an economist at the University of Hamburg and gold medalist in rowing at the 1988 games in Seoul. The publication may have an impact on the decision now facing the IOC over which of the remaining contenders — Istanbul, Madrid, and Tokyo — will host the 2020 summer games. Zimbalist believes Brazil has taken on too much economic risk in seeking and winning both the 2014 World Cup, which will take place in seven cities, and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Asked whether he thinks his scholarship will have an effect on future bidding processes, Zimbalist responds, “The ability of the private interests to co-opt the public interests, I think, is more limited when the public sees that there is no strong evidence of an economic payoff.” At the same time, he hopes that members of FIFA and the IOC can be moved not only by the lures of grandiosity, but also by moral considerations.

“One would hope that they get the message and downscale some of this crazy bidding that goes on,” he says. “There are some smart people and sensitive people who have a sense of social responsibility and responsibility to humanity. They know that there are sustainability issues when they build like crazy things that are not going to last. … Maybe members of the IOC executive committee will step forward and say, ‘We should be re-evaluating our model; we could still be a bureaucracy and be socially responsible, and that will be our source of kudos, that will be our source of gratification.’

“Maybe,” says Zimbalist, “but I wouldn’t predict that.”

Eric Goldscheider is a freelance writer based in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Paula Bonner MS’78, WAA president and CEO, has been named president of the Council of Alumni Association Executives, which is made up of the leaders of alumni organizations supporting institutions of higher education.

It’s what every Badger needs: a Bucky cake pan. You can order your personalized baking pan at the Badger Marketplace at uwalumni.com/marketplace. You can also buy Babcock ice cream, brats, and a variety of other items ranging from diploma frames to alumni apparel and a doorbell that plays “On, Wisconsin!”

Share your news with fellow Badgers. If you’d like to report on a major life achievement, or simply give a status update, send a brief email to classnotes@uwalumni.com for consideration in the Class Notes section.