The border-battle football rivalry between the University of Wisconsin Badgers and University of Minnesota Gophers was already one of the oldest in the country, dating to 1890.

Other sports — notably men’s and women’s hockey — would eventually contribute their own chapters to the storied Badger-Gopher matchups, but in 1962, football was king. What happened in Camp Randall Stadium on that November day still resonates, more than six decades later.

“The most significant game of all in a highly significant rivalry,” says Joel Maturi, a Minnesota native who was an assistant athletic director at UW–Madison and, later, athletic director at Minnesota.

Bill Brophy, another native Minnesotan who served as sports editor of the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, was a young boy in 1962. But he remembers.

“My dad took the train to Madison for the game,” Brophy says. “He was still mad a month later. He told me the story. He said Minnesota got screwed.”

The game had large implications — the winner would go to the Rose Bowl.

The Gophers led, 9–7, when the Badgers tried to mount a late fourth-quarter drive starting at their own 20-yard line. Three completions from Ron Vander Kelen ’64 to his star receiver, Pat Richter ’64, JD’71 (later UW athletic director), brought the ball to the Minnesota 43-yard line. Two and a half minutes to play.

The next play lives in infamy for Gopher fans. Vander Kelen was rushed and hit by Minnesota’s star defensive tackle, Bobby Bell. His wobbly pass was intercepted, and joyous Gopher fans began dreaming about Pasadena in January.

Except a 15-yard penalty was called on Bell for roughing the passer. And soon another 15 yards was tacked on for “unsportsmanlike remarks from the sidelines,” as Sports Illustrated put it.

Suddenly the Badgers were at the Minnesota 13-yard line. “We still had to take it in,” Richter recalls, 63 years later. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy calls in my life, but you have to play it as it is and execute.”

They scored three plays later, winning 14–9. Minnesota players and fans were outraged.

“I touched the ball,” Bell told Sports Illustrated. “It was a legitimate rush.”

Crazy calls, the introduction of a slab of bacon, then an axe, and a heated personality clash between two charismatic hockey coaches — the rivalry between Badgers and Gophers athletics has produced legends and lore for the ages.

“Badgers May Abolish Football”

Incredibly, the football series, which began in 1890 and will continue this year in Minneapolis on November 29, is currently dead even. Each team has won 63 games, and there have been eight ties.

In 2010, when the Big Ten Conference added Nebraska and went to two divisions in football, Minnesota and Wisconsin were split up. Though teams would be allowed a crossover game, some discussions of scheduling did not include a Gophers vs. Badgers matchup.

“I think both [then UW athletic director] Barry Alvarez and I said that a game had to happen,” recalls Maturi, who then led Gopher athletics. “I made the comment at a meeting, ‘If we don’t play each other, I’m going to get fired.’ ”

The game happened, and indeed, only once in the 135-year history of the rivalry did the Badgers and Gophers not meet on the football field.

What caused them not to play in 1906 was the culmination of a decade-plus rash of serious injuries that led some to question whether college football should continue.

News accounts from those early games tell the story. Reporting on the first Badgers-Gophers meeting, in November 1890 — won 63–0 by Minnesota — the Green Bay Weekly Gazette noted: “The usual number of accidents occurred during the game — Leary of the Minnesota team having his nose broken; of the UW men, Davidson sprained his ankle; Sumner was quite seriously injured by colliding with one of his opponents, and Kerr, the captain of the team, was seriously injured about the head in a collision. He protested that he was not seriously hurt and continued playing but finally fell unconscious and was carried off the field.”

By 1906, university faculty and administrators discussed doing away with the sport. A March 1906 Wisconsin State Journal headline read: “Badgers May Abolish Football.”

There was a mass student protest on campus. Football survived, but the Badgers-Gophers game was suspended, as a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist explained in 1973: “The reason they didn’t play in 1906: college football with its mass formations had become too brutal. President Teddy Roosevelt ordered the colleges to suspend their most intense rivalries. … Roosevelt directed the rules committee to create a more open game. Thus the forward pass was introduced.”

An Axe and a Slab of Bacon

By 1930, the history and intensity of the Badgers-Gophers rivalry led a Minneapolis dentist named B. Fouch — a 1914 Minnesota alumnus — to create an unusual trophy.

Carved from black walnut, “it is two feet long and one foot wide,” the Star Tribune reported, “has a raised football in the center, the word ‘Bacon’ at each end, and the initial ‘M,’ reversible to a ‘W’ when the slab is hung the other way.”

UW Athletics

It became known as the “slab of bacon,” with the winner of the Badgers-Gophers football game gaining possession until the next meeting. It changed hands across a dozen years, and then, in 1943, the slab of bacon disappeared after a Gopher victory in Minnesota.

A Star Tribune article the Monday following the game said a Badgers manager had tried to present it in the Gophers’ locker room, only to be told “all trophies are frozen for the duration” of World War II.

The slab of bacon wasn’t seen again in public for 50 years, when it was unearthed in Madison in 1994 by a UW athletics intern cleaning a storage room. Oddly, it hadn’t been completely ignored. Somebody had written on it the scores of the Badgers-Gophers games from 1943 to 1970 in thick black marker, according to a 2023 New York Times series on college sports mysteries.

By the time the missing slab was discovered, the rivalry had another trophy: the Paul Bunyan Axe, donated by the Badgers’ National W Club. It was presented for the first time in Minneapolis in January 1949, at halftime of the Badgers-Gophers basketball game. Gopher football legend Francis “Pug” Lund accepted it, Minnesota having won the 1948 game 16–0.

Today’s tradition of the winning team feigning to chop down the goalposts with the axe did not happen immediately. Richter, who played in the early 1960s, said he and his teammates never swung the axe.

Minnesota sports historian Ryan Barland looked into the origin of the chopping and couldn’t pinpoint it precisely, noting that “the practice was started in the 1980s (at the earliest).”

The chopping is a big deal now. Andy Crooks ’08 was a high school All-State player in Wausau in the early 2000s prior to coming to the UW, where he first played linebacker, then tight end. Crooks always wanted to be a Badger, but his high school girlfriend’s parents were Gophers who serenaded him with the Minnesota fight song.

“That ‘Ski-U-Mah’ stuff,” Crooks says.

He wasn’t having it. Crooks arrived in Madison fully versed in the rivalry.

“There is not a better feeling,” he says, “than taking that axe and chopping those posts down. There’s nothing more disheartening than when a team runs across the field and takes [the axe] from you.”

The original Paul Bunyan’s Axe is now in possession of the College Football Hall of Fame, the W Club having replaced it in 2000.

An Upset and an Abdication

In a memorable 1961 game in Minneapolis, with a Rose Bowl bid on the line for Minnesota, the Badgers upset the Gophers, 23–21. Richter caught two touchdown passes, and Minnesota fans were furious.

The loss left the Ohio State Buckeyes with a better record than the Gophers. Remarkably, however, the Ohio State faculty voted 28–25 to reject the Rose Bowl bid.

A faculty member told Sports Illustrated: “We’re upset that the image of Ohio State is that the school is merely an appendage to the football team.”

There was a near riot in Columbus. Some 2,000 students “burned members of the faculty in effigy,” the magazine reported, “snake-danced down the main street, and surrounded the capitol building.” The bid went instead to Minnesota, and the Gophers won the 1962 Rose Bowl, 21–3, over UCLA.

From Ecstasy to Shambles

Even the fiercest rivalries have ebbs and flows, and for a time — a decade starting in 2004 — the football Badgers dominated the Gophers.

One game seems to particularly haunt Gopher fans. In 2005, in Minneapolis, the Gophers had the ball and a 34–31 lead with less than a minute to go. Forced to punt near their own end zone, the unthinkable happened. The Badgers blocked the punt and recovered the ball for a touchdown, securing a 38–34 Badgers win.

“It was a home game,” says Minnesota’s Barland, who was a Gopher student at the time. “We were beating our rivals. To go from that ecstasy to shambles was a foundational part of my college experience.”

Five years after the blocked punt, in October 2010, UW head football coach Bret Bielema drew the ire of Gopher fans when he had the Badgers go for a two-point conversion after taking a 41–16 lead with under seven minutes to play in Madison.

Was Wisconsin running up the score?

“A very poor decision,” Gophers coach Tim Brewster said afterward. “It was wrong.”

“We Bring Out the Best in Each Other”

The Badgers-Gophers rivalry has also been heated in both men’s and women’s hockey.

The NCAA sanctioned women’s hockey in 2000, and since then the Badgers have won eight national championships and the Gophers six.

Writing about the rivalry in 2019, the Star Tribune called it “fierce.” The occasion was the 2019 national championship game between the Badgers and Gophers. The Badgers won, 2–0, behind a 27-save performance by goaltender Kristen Campbell ’20.

Gophers coach Brad Frost said, “We bring out the best in each other.”

The all-time series in women’s hockey is nearly as close as that of football. When the Badgers and Gophers met last, in March 2025, in the semifinals of the Frozen Four, each team had 57 wins, and there had been 16 ties.

The Badgers won, 6–2, securing a one-win advantage in the border-battle series and going on to win their NCAA-record eighth national championship.

“They Hit You to Hate You”

The Badgers-Gophers rivalry in men’s ice hockey dates to 1922 (a two-game sweep by the Gophers), but from 1936 to 1964 they didn’t play, as Badger athletics discontinued hockey until November 1963.

The apex of the rivalry arrived in the following decade and centered on two larger-than-life head coaches.

Bob Johnson and Herb Brooks had much in common: both had played hockey for the Gophers, and both would coach the men’s hockey Olympic team. They were energetic, quotable, and terrific coaches. There was one more thing.

“History tells us they’re probably two of the greatest American coaches ever,” says sportswriter Brophy, who knew and covered them both. “But they truly didn’t like each other.” In the 1970s, Johnson coached the Badgers and Brooks the Gophers.

“I was struck with the level of dislike between the two programs,” Brophy says.

Mike Eaves ’78 was a star player for the Badgers team that won the 1977 NCAA championship. Eaves later coached the Badgers, and in 2002 he spoke to Capital Times sports columnist Joe Hart about the intensity of the Badgers-Gophers hockey rivalry.

Eaves described entering the Minneapolis arena as a player, taking the ice and thinking, “Holy moly, this is hate. … The tenacity on the ice was incredible. When they hit you, they hit you to hate you. It was special.”

In November 1977, eight months after the Badgers won the national title, the Gophers were coming to Madison for a two-game weekend series at the Dane County Coliseum. During the week, at a luncheon in Minneapolis, Brooks made a comment about the Badger hockey fans.

“They get about 8,000 people in there,” Brooks said, “and half of them are drunk.”

Word drifted back to Madison. Some enterprising Badger fans concocted a photo of Brooks sucking on a beer can and distributed copies to fans seated near the Gophers coach.

“There were hundreds of them being held up behind the bench,” Brophy says. “It got to Herb. After the game, in the area where Herb was doing his press conference, some kid from the band asked Herb to sign the photo. Herb grabbed the guy and threw him up against the wall. Then he cooled off. But it was like, ‘Wow!’ It was real. He really didn’t care for Wisconsin and Wisconsin didn’t care for him.”

Ironically, within a few years, Bob Johnson’s son, Mark ’94 — who now coaches the powerhouse Badgers women’s hockey team — would star on the 1980 Olympic “miracle” team that won the gold medal. Their coach? Herb Brooks.

Doug Moe ’79 is a longtime Wisconsin journalist and author.

Published in the Fall 2025 issue.

What about the Badgers-Gophers rivalry in men’s and women’s basketball?

Watch video highlights of the teams’ 2025 matchups below!

Choudhury wanted to be an entrepreneur. He didn’t just want to be his own boss, but rather to launch the sort of company that would attract venture capitalists (VCs), one that would be a Very Big Deal.

“Starting a company, you need something that is very groundbreaking, very revolutionary,” he says. “VCs will tell you, don’t make anything that’s marginally better than what you have available today. A VC-backed company would have to have exponential growth. You need to 10X their investment.”

Choudhury thought he was in the right field for that: electrical and computer engineering. As a grad student, he worked in the lab of Professor Leon Shohet, along with Daniel Benjamin ’16, MS’17, PhD’21 and Josh Blatz MS’18, PhD’21. They were using plasma to make microchips better, faster, and more powerful. Computer chips are a promising line of work — they’re vital to the booming AI industry. And Choudhury was willing to be patient.

“I didn’t think entrepreneurship would happen right away,” he says. “I thought I’d go to work for IBM or Intel — I had a job offer from Intel. I’d work there a few years and then eventually start my own company.” He figured Silicon Valley was where he would find his Very Big Idea and venture capital backers.

But in 2016, opportunity walked into the lab in the person of Michael Sussman, a professor of biochemistry. Sussman and his chief scientist, Ben Minkoff, were interested in plasma but not in making computer chips. They wanted to use it to study the structure of proteins. Proteins are one of the keys to disease. Viruses, bacteria, cancerous cells — all have characteristic proteins.

The Shohet lab found a way to help Sussman — a process called Plasma-Induced Modification of Biomolecules, or PLIMB. It was a revolutionary idea, one worth taking to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) to have it patented. It was the kind of big idea Choudhury was looking for, and he and Benjamin — along with Shohet, Sussman, Minkoff, and Blatz — decided to launch a start-up company around PLIMB: Immuto Scientific.

Immuto appealed to WARF as much as, if not more than, patenting PLIMB itself. In recent years, WARF has been increasing its role as a venture capital investor for UW-connected start-ups. Immuto seemed like an ideal candidate for investment.

A Better Mousetrap

Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. Ralph Waldo Emerson is supposed to have said that, or something like it, but you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s WARF’s motto. The foundation’s purpose is to promote inventions. And its history is tied up in rodent removal.

Actually, WARF’s motto is “partnering with University of Wisconsin research to solve the world’s problems,” which is more apt if less evocative.

The foundation began its life 100 years ago, in 1925, at the urging of Harry Steenbock, who wanted the university to control and benefit from the process he invented for enriching foods with vitamin D. WARF patented that process, and many other ideas. WARF’s licenses bring in revenue through royalties, and WARF then returns funding to the university.

Last academic year, WARF’s support for UW–Madison totaled $159.8 million. One of its most successful patent licenses is for warfarin — not a better mousetrap, maybe, but a better rat poison. Warfarin was developed in the 1930s by biochemistry professor Karl Paul Link 1922, MS1923, PhD1925. Later, the chemical at the heart of warfarin was found to be a useful blood thinner to prevent strokes.

Erik Iverson, who has served as WARF’s CEO since 2016, refers to warfarin as one of the university’s “diamonds in the rough.” (See sidebar, below.) It’s one of the inventions that has provided an outsize return to WARF and to the UW.

Since Iverson came to Madison, he’s been looking for ways to create more — and more profitable — diamonds.

Erik Iverson has led WARF since 2016. During his tenure, he has focused on finding “diamonds in the rough,” inventions with potential for high profit.

“When I arrived at WARF, we had our IP [intellectual property — essentially, patent and licensing], which is our bread and butter, the soul of this organization,” Iverson says. “But I was brought on to identify [ways of] both strengthening the licensing pipeline but also broadening out the sources of revenue.”

By broadening the sources of revenue, Iverson means chiefly helping WARF grow into a venture capital investor that puts its money in — and earns significant returns from — UW–based start-ups. Under his leadership, WARF added several new divisions, including WARF Therapeutics, which does drug discovery; WARF Accelerator, which identifies potential start-ups and helps them build the skills and teams that will make them attractive to investors; and WARF Ventures, an in-house VC fund. His hope is to find not only new warfarins but also the companies that will produce and sell those warfarins.

“Warfarin, our namesake, is the most prescribed drug in history as a blood thinner,” says Iverson. “Every successful tech transfer office in the country has a drug in its portfolio. WARF is no different.”

Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. But build a better drug, and the world will remunerate.

This is one reason why PLIMB and Immuto appealed to WARF. The process has a clear application in drug development. Previously, biochemists could find the structure of proteins only by crystallizing them and then looking at them under an electron microscope. The process is slow and expensive, and it takes proteins out of their natural state, which means the outcome is prone to failure.

“Crystallography takes over a year sometimes to get a single structure. It costs over $100,000,” says Choudhury. “It’s been a big bottleneck in the pharmaceutical industry.”

PLIMB could accurately discover the structure of proteins in their native environment.

WARF saw the possibilities in PLIMB and Immuto right away — it was just the kind of company that WARF’s venture-capital group wanted to back.

De-Risking

To make the UW a player in the world of high-tech entrepreneurship takes more than invention. It takes money. Madison may not have the kind of investor money that New York or San Francisco or Boston can command, but with WARF, it offers a clear method for promoting technology transfer — business-speak for turning ideas into inventions and inventions into products. This is what attracted Iverson to Wisconsin. And it’s what brought Greg Keenan here, too. Keenan, who heads WARF Accelerator, brought experience from Boston and Silicon Valley, where he had worked in technology start-ups. When he talks about what Accelerator does, the term he comes back to again and again is de-risk.

“We do technology de-risking and market de-risking,” he says. “And what’s exciting now, we’re starting to de-risk teams.”

Risk, of course, is central to venture capitalism — venture is just a synonym for risky. The popular image of venture capitalists is that they embrace high risk for the hope of large rewards. But in general, businesspeople — even VCs — don’t actually like risks nearly so much as they want rewards.

“It’s getting harder and harder to license technologies, because companies are becoming more risk-averse,” Keenan says. “They want to see more proof that these technologies work and can solve the problems they were trying to address.”

Accelerator tries to remove the most obvious kinds of risks.

Each month, WARF holds a roughly three-hour meeting to discuss the new technologies that UW researchers have developed. The university generates between 350 and 400 of these innovations each year, “about one a day,” says Keenan, “and our licensing team and our Accelerator team look at every one. It’s an awesome meeting, an energizing meeting, and a lot of fun.”

Sometimes, as with Immuto, members of the research team want to take their invention to market. Keenan estimates that WARF will seek a patent for about half of the ideas that come in, and for between five and 10 a year, it backs a proposed start-up. Keenan’s Accelerator group keeps a “holding pen” of around 40 ideas that it’s evaluating — de-risking to see if they’re worth backing with venture capital.

What does de-risking entail? The first thing WARF wants to see is “commercialization potential” — does this idea or invention have a market?

“Most of the time, [what we see is] not even a product yet. It’s still just an early-stage technology, maybe an idea, maybe just a kind of lab bench experiment. Translating that into a business or a product is a much, much more challenging activity,” says Keenan. “Ideally, we’re starting with a problem and bringing a solution to that problem. But a lot of times, we have what we call technology searching for a problem. Those are the hardest to sell.”

If the idea does solve a real-world problem, the next question is whether that solution is unique. If existing technologies solve the same problem, then even a new and practical invention can fail in the marketplace.

The next step in de-risking is to prove that the idea or invention works. “Frequently, what we’re funding are prototypes, a field trial, a marketing study,” Keenan says. “We want to meet a milestone that is meaningful to business and industry.”

If a potential start-up can meet those requirements, Accelerator tries to de-risk the team — to ensure that the potential start-up has the necessary talents to be successful.

“Our biggest question is who’s going to run this idea,” says Mike Partsch, who heads WARF Ventures. “The overwhelming majority of the time, the inventor of the technology is a professor on campus. They are a world-renowned scientist, very knowledgeable in their field, but they don’t know anything about running a company. So we need to recruit management talent from outside.” Once a start-up satisfies Keenan’s Accelerator team, Partsch’s Ventures team will decide whether to invest WARF money. That investment would likely begin with between $250,000 and $500,000 of seed capital and might rise to as much as $10 million over several rounds of fundraising.

But the funding is an investment and not a gift. Most start-ups fail, and as WARF is taking a risk, it expects a sizable reward. Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. But mousetraps currently sell two for $1.23 at Walmart, and that doesn’t give much room for profit. Venture capitalists want to see much higher potential.

“When we make a million-dollar investment, as a venture capitalist, we want to see a five- to 10-times return in seven to 10 years,” says Partsch. “We expect that investment to realistically be able to make multiples. If we saw an opportunity, and the entrepreneur said, ‘Oh, if you invest in us and we’re wildly successful, you could get a 25, 30 percent return,’ we’d be like, ‘No, not interested.’ ”

Immuto Scientific was one of the first companies to go through WARF Accelerator after Keenan arrived in 2017. “Our funding went in to help the cofounders build the first devices,” he says. Its idea appealed immediately to pharmaceutical companies, and Choudhury struck the WARF team as a strong CEO. WARF saw how quickly Immuto could turn technology into profit.

“The market is undeveloped for this technology, but it’s going to displace the X-ray crystallography market,” Partsch says. “It’s faster; it’s cheaper. It can grow the [drug] market, because companies will now use [Immuto] for every single drug candidate instead of just the 10 percent or so that they think have potential.”

The line from lab to profit seems clear for Immuto. But that’s not the primary direction in which Choudhury wants his company to go.

Successful Exit

Choudhury wants to solve big problems, and the thing about the plan that makes so much sense to Partsch and Keenan — the problems it shows such promise at solving — is that they’re limited. Speeding up drug development is a small problem.

“We knew right away that there was a service business here,” Choudhury says. “And we could make some money on services. But then we thought, how do we make this into a high-growth business? We’ve got to make drugs of our own with this platform.”

For three years, from 2018 until 2021, Choudhury and Benjamin and the Immuto team developed their ideas with WARF Accelerator. Then WARF Ventures put significant money into the company, and for the next two and a half years, Immuto built up its customer base among pharmaceutical firms.

For the team at WARF, Immuto is heading toward what venture capitalists call a “successful exit,” either a stock offering that invites broad public investment or the sale of the company to a bigger, established firm. Either will make all of the early investors rich.

But this isn’t the kind of success Choudhury is hoping for, or at least not the only kind.

While the company was growing, Immuto was looking for an opportunity to solve a big problem — like curing cancer.

Cancer seemed like a prime area for PLIMB investigation because of its nature. Cancers are, essentially, protein problems.

“What happens in cancer is that a protein gets mutated in some way or it gets overexpressed,” says Choudhury. “Drug developers identify these proteins, and then they make drugs against them. But the same overexpressed protein exists in healthy tissues.”

Drug developers often run into problems creating cancer treatments in the lab, because they’re only dealing with a protein drug target in a test tube. If the drug candidate destroys the protein and kills the tumor in a lab setting, it looks like a success. But put it in a live patient, and suddenly it’s causing collateral damage. Now healthy tissues are suffering. Or worse, patients can die of the cure.

PLIMB enables researchers to find a drug that leaves the healthy protein alone. “We can design drugs to the structure of the protein that are only specific to the tumor,” Choudhury says. “When we test that same drug on the healthy tissues, it doesn’t bind to that protein in the healthy tissues.”

Immuto’s opportunity arrived in the form of acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, a cancer that affects bone marrow. The only current treatment for AML is a drug called Mylotarg, which was discovered in 1991, granted accelerated FDA approval in 2000, and removed from the market in 2010, because it caused potentially fatal liver disease. It was approved again in 2017, but carrying a warning that it was associated with “hepatotoxicity, including severe or fatal hepatic veno-occlusive disease.”

Immuto is developing a new treatment for AML, one that is currently being tested in mice. Choudhury believes it might make it to market in the next few years.

For Choudhury, this is the point of entrepreneurship: not making 10X money or building companies, but creating technologies and then using them to help people. It doesn’t greatly matter if that’s through sale to a Big Pharma firm or continuing to go it alone. The goal is to produce cures.

“This is our North Star,” he says. “What can we do to eradicate disease? How quickly can we get a therapeutic to a patient? Because patients are running against time here.”

Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. But cure a cancer, and you solve a Very Big Problem.

I graduated during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and remember the added layer of stress that came with searching for my first job. Friends left and right were pivoting to remote roles, moving across the country, finding new ways to use the lessons they learned in the classroom. As a journalism major, I knew there was a job out there for me somewhere, but questions weighed on me as I began my search: Would I find something fulfilling? Where would it take me next?

My path was typical for a young reporter. Eager to make my mark, I started off as an intern at one of Wisconsin’s largest newspapers and then transitioned into a full-time reporting gig at a smaller paper in central Wisconsin. I cried when I didn’t get a job I’d been hoping for at a bigger publication. I learned, as many grads do, that it’s necessary to “work your way up.”

Despite my initial concerns, my first job was formative. It was also nerve-wracking and intimidating. I had to fight off imposter syndrome at every turn while learning new skills and getting to know new colleagues. Everyone offered advice: Be yourself. Build your network. Find a mentor. Be patient. Take risks. Solve problems on your own. Ask for help.

At the time, it all seemed impossible. But eventually the advice paid off, and my journalism career kicked into gear.

The job market for recent grads is ever-changing. As always, some fields are booming and others lagging. But Badgers can find success anywhere. The following stories highlight UW alumni who found themselves on unexpected paths, overcame early struggles, or discovered a passion they had never anticipated — all traced back to that pivotal first job.

“What If I Just Went All In on This?”

Katie Roberson ’19 knows the sting of postgrad rejection all too well.

“I applied to so many jobs in advertising and communications,” she recalls. “I got some interviews, but nothing panned out. It was disheartening.”

After graduating with a degree in communication arts and a certificate in digital studies, she juggled multiple jobs at Target and a Madison event-planning company, on top of an endless stream of applications. But one thing remained constant: photography.

After a disheartening entry into the job market, Katie Roberson took a risk and started a photography business.

“I had been taking pictures since freshman year of college — mostly for fun and for a little extra money,” Roberson says. “One day, I realized I was spending more time editing photos than applying for jobs. And I thought, ‘What if I just went all in on this?’ ”

The idea was both thrilling and terrifying. A creative passion wasn’t the same as a stable career, and she wrestled with doubts about whether she could turn it into something sustainable. But after months of contemplation, she decided to take the leap. In 2020, she officially launched Katie Ann Photography LLC.

Then the world shut down with COVID-19.

“All of my bookings got canceled overnight,” she says. “It felt like the worst possible time to start a business.”

But rather than give up, Roberson pivoted. She leaned into learning, honing her craft, refining her marketing strategy, and connecting with potential clients online. She offered discounted sessions to build her portfolio and experimented with different types of photography.

Slowly, word spread.

“I remember the moment things started to shift,” Roberson says. “I opened bookings for summer senior photo sessions in late spring and suddenly had dozens of inquiries, and for the first time, I thought, ‘This might actually work.’ ”

Five years later, Roberson has built a thriving business, specializing in high school seniors, college graduates, and family portraits. What started as a side hustle has become a full-time career — one she never imagined but wouldn’t trade for anything.

“Taking that leap and believing in myself was the best decision I ever made,” she says.

Roberson says a first job doesn’t necessarily have to be traditional. “If you have a skill or passion that you love, don’t be afraid to explore making it your career. The risk might just pay off.”

“Say Yes to Conversations”

Adaptability is a hallmark of being a Badger.

For Aaron Her ’24, there was no clear roadmap for breaking into the business world. With a degree in consumer behavior, he landed an internship at the department store chain Kohl’s, working in marketing and analytics at the corporate headquarters.

Having grown up in Milwaukee in a low-income household, Her didn’t have industry connections or a clear-cut path to success.

A decision to step out of his comfort zone and arrange a networking meeting changed Aaron Her’s life.

“I’ve seen how valuable networking is. While many of my peers landed great internships or mentors through family connections, coming from a family of immigrants meant not having that,” he says. “I’ve had to work harder to get an opportunity and to prove myself.”

But Her’s willingness to step outside his comfort zone opened unexpected doors. While he was still figuring out his career path at Kohl’s, a conversation at a networking event changed everything. He met an executive from Dell Technologies who introduced a new perspective on sales.

“I always thought sales was just cold-calling people and pushing them to buy stuff,” Her says. “But the way he described it, as problem-solving, as relationship-building, made me see it in a totally different light.”

Her reached out to the executive on LinkedIn and asked if he’d be open to grabbing coffee.

“That conversation ended up changing my life,” he says.

Her began researching sales roles at Dell and applying to sales training programs. His efforts paid off with a position as an inside sales account executive at Dell in Austin, Texas.

“I remember getting the job offer and feeling this mix of excitement and fear,” he recalls. “I had never done sales before. But I reminded myself that the skills I had — communication, adaptability, persistence — would carry me through.”

Now Her is responsible for generating more than $8 million in revenue and managing a diverse portfolio of clients. He’s thriving in a field he never initially considered.

“I had to create my own opportunities,” he says. “Even when the path isn’t clear, believing in yourself and seeking out connections can lead to incredible possibilities.”

His advice to new grads?

“Say yes to conversations. You never know which one will change your life.”

“Life’s What You Make It”

Tamia Fowlkes ’22 always thought her path would take her far from home. After earning her journalism and political science degrees from UW–Madison and completing a master’s in journalism at Columbia University, the Milwaukee native was set on chasing big stories outside of Wisconsin. But when an opportunity came up in Milwaukee at the same newspaper where she had interned as an undergraduate, it felt like the perfect choice.

Fowlkes is a public investigator at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, covering labor, politics, and culture — exactly the kind of journalism she dreamed of doing growing up.

Tamia Fowlkes followed her gut and landed her ideal journalism job.

“When I was offered the job, I had a call with my mom, and she said, ‘I remember when you said in your eighth-grade graduation speech that you wanted to report on your community and make a positive impact,’ ” Fowlkes recalls.

Fowlkes has written about national political conventions and interviewed the pop star Chappell Roan, but she’s most passionate about helping everyday readers — those who reach out to her with tips, concerns, and questions.

Like many fields, journalism can be tough to break into, but Fowlkes advises new graduates to pursue their passions and not wait for permission.

“I think back to that Hannah Montana song: ‘Life’s what you make it, so let’s make it rock,’ ” she says with a laugh. “My college career and the time after has been defined by following my gut and knowing exactly what I want to get out of something, and then trying my best to actively pursue it. Even if it doesn’t always work out, at least I tried.

“People can certainly tell you no,” Fowlkes adds, “but the best thing you can do is just put yourself out there and keep trying.”

“You Don’t Have to Have It All Figured Out”

Sometimes, UW grads strike gold from the get-go. That was the case for Caitlin Mensing ’14, who graduated with degrees in community and nonprofit leadership and sociology. Initially drawn to public health and education, she explored opportunities with AmeriCorps and other nonprofits, uncertain where she’d land. Then a friend introduced her to Project Success, a Minneapolis-based youth development nonprofit.

An email introduction led to a Skype call, which led to an interview. By the Tuesday after her college graduation, she was stepping into her first full-time role as an administrative manager at Project Success.

“I remember feeling this mix of excitement and nervousness,” Mensing says. “I was grateful to have a job lined up, but I didn’t know yet if I would grow into it.”

Eleven years later, Mensing is the director of administration for the entire organization.

“I didn’t expect to go into administration,” she says. “I thought I’d be working more directly with programming. But taking on an operational role gave me insight into how nonprofits function at every level. I learned how funding works, how to support a board, and how to manage an organization’s day-to-day needs.”

Caitlin Mensing embraced the learning curve that came with her job.

Mensing discovered parallels with her late mother, who had spent more than two decades in education administration.

“I remember looking around one day and realizing how similar my role was to what my mom did,” she says. “It was an unexpected full-circle moment, and it made me feel like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.”

Mensing attributes much of her professional growth to being open-minded and embracing the learning curve that came with the job.

“You don’t have to have it all figured out,” she advises new grads. “Find an organization whose mission you believe in and a role where you can gain a variety of skills. Your first job doesn’t have to be your dream job, but it can set the foundation for whatever comes next.”

“On the Cutting Edge of Innovation”

After earning a doctorate in chemistry, Tyler Ogorek PhD’24 didn’t head to a research lab or pharmaceutical company like many of his peers. Instead, he made an unexpected pivot into business strategy.

Now, he’s a consultant at Bain & Company in Chicago, where he works with clients across industries to tackle complex challenges. To Ogorek, his path is a reminder that career boundaries are often more flexible than they seem.

Tyler Ogorek benefited from an unexpected career pivot.

“Not many PhDs know that consulting is a field that’s open to them,” he says. “It’s an extremely rewarding career path that should be top-of-mind for PhDs looking to enter the workforce in an area not strictly aligned with their educational background.”

The leap into consulting wasn’t random. It was strategic, informed by careful preparation. The role constantly pushes him to think critically and creatively.

The real draw for Ogorek is the intellectual thrill. “I work with clients across all strategy topics,” he says. “You get a chance to solve the toughest problems businesses face, in topics on the cutting edge of innovation.”

Whether you’re working in a chemistry lab or a corporate boardroom, Ogorek is proof that the most rewarding career pivots are often the ones that blend curiosity with courage.

Allison Garfield ’20 is a freelance journalist based in Chicago.

Published in the Fall 2025 issue.

Wenc covers the paper’s evolution from a way to make money by students who had no idea what they were doing to a phenomenon that influenced today’s style of news parody. The Onion’s approach to making up the news is now ingrained in the nation’s psyche, to the point where people react to headlines that strain credulity by saying, “It sounds like an Onion story.”

Wenc engagingly captures the staff’s freewheeling chutzpah, which she attributes partly to ’90s slacker culture. When an advertiser asked to speak with the publisher, they had to look up what a publisher does, make up a name for their mythical administrator, and have someone posing as the publisher call back. Wenc also highlights the absurdly random nature of the staff’s early decisions, from the name of the publication to its very concept. But, seemingly by accident, the paper succeeded from the beginning.

As Wenc says, “A bunch of 20-something Generation X nobodies out in flyover country had invented something that would become one of the most culturally influential American publications of all time.”

This excerpt deals with the very early days of the Onion.

[In 1988, Tim] Keck decided to start his own newspaper. “I didn’t really have a good idea of what that was; I just knew I wanted to start a newspaper. I was going to quit school and do this newspaper. And then I met this guy in a history of science class, part of the Integrated Liberal Studies program at Madison. His name was Chris Johnson x’91.

“He’s one of those people that just has a weird light and energy around them. Completely fearless,” Keck says. “Can make a trip to the grocery store weird and uncomfortable and electric. He had this crazy childhood in Brazil and Poland and Sweden, and then he went to high school in Lodi, Wisconsin.

“When I met Chris,” Tim says, “I was like, ‘That’s the guy. I can’t do this on my own. I need somebody like Chris to do it with me.’ I talked to him about the idea, and he immediately jumped in.” Amy Reyer ’89 (Amy Bowles at the time, who would sell ads and write for the Onion in its first year) says, “Tim has a healthy dark streak that draws him to the most complicated, brilliant people. He’s genuinely curious about what makes someone tick. The weirder, the better.”

But then, out of the blue, not long after they’d started brainstorming, Johnson said he was going to drop out of school and move back to Brazil with his dad to work on a business venture. Tomorrow. He packed up his stuff and vanished.

Keck was shocked and bereft at the abrupt loss of his friend and purported business partner. At the same time, he was impressed by the boldness of it all. The disregard for convention. The hugeness of the move. He kept on working on the newspaper idea, but found he didn’t have the confidence to do it by himself. So he decided to go to Brazil on a cheap courier flight and convince Johnson to come back. He returned victorious and very hungover 10 days later. Johnson had said he would return in six months.

Keck had taken a room in my apartment around this time, and I remember him telling me about the newspaper idea when he got back from Brazil. He said they wanted me to be the art director, whatever that was. (Though I did do some drawings now and then, I actually became the copy editor.) I hadn’t met Johnson yet, but I was excited enough that I wrote about it in my diary: March 3, 1988.

Johnson finally got back to town, and then it was time to rock. “We didn’t have editorial ideas or anything complicated like that,” Keck says. “We just wanted to start a newspaper.” Keck’s mom loaned them $3,000, and they rented a [rundown] three-bedroom apartment on East Johnson Street, a few blocks from both State Street and the capitol, to be the office — and their home. The living room was the production and editorial area, and Andy Dhuey ’89 was brought in to live in the third bedroom and help pay the rent. Keck’s mom would also be their adviser.

The first problem was what to call it. The only requirement was that it couldn’t be serious. Maybe The Rag? How about The Paper? Then one day they were visiting Johnson’s uncle Nels, who lived in Madison. “We ate onion sandwiches a lot,” Keck says. “Why, I don’t know, but we did, and Johnson’s uncle said, ‘Why don’t you call it the Onion?’ ” Keck adds, “I’m sorry I don’t have an interesting story about why we called it the Onion; that’s it. We made a lot of snap decisions in those days.”

Reyer’s roommate, Pete Haise ’90, tells me, “And then I think somebody drew a pretty good onion, and that was the clincher.”

The Onion’s first issue, featuring Keck’s arm as the “Mendota Monster.”

There would also be coupons on the bottom of the front page, he said. “They were all thrilled with me because of the coupon concept. Everybody loves coupons.”

Sturm agreed to let the new paper publish Down and Out Dawg. Keck also found another cartoonist he wanted to publish: Scott Dikkers x’87, the creator of Jim’s Journal. As Keck put it, “The Daily Cardinal paid them $5 a comic strip. I paid them $10.”

“So now we had some advertisers,” Keck said. “We had a name. We rented a Mac. This is in 1988, so it was a [primitive] little Mac, the ones where you had to put the floppy disk in and out and change it 80 times just to run a program. But we didn’t have any idea about the content in the publication.”

They had no editorial mission. No cause they wanted to promote. No message they wanted to send. They did love Spy magazine. Doing something in that spirit would be cool. But, otherwise, no topic fascinated them enough to make an entire newspaper about it.

As far as I know, only one other person from my high school class besides me graduated from UW–Madison, a guy named Todd Brown ’93. He was good-looking, funny, and charismatic, with parents from the Twin Cities. One day I went to visit him in his dorm during our freshman year, and he had a new friend there, a guy he’d met at the Ark Improv, a little independent theater a few blocks from State Street where he’d been taking classes and performing: Matt Cook ’89. Matt and I hit it off right away. He was from Chicago, he was really funny, and he was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt. We started hanging out all the time. That summer at a party at my first apartment, a tiny, sweltering attic two-bedroom on Conklin Place I shared with our friend Rachel [Johnson x’89], I introduced Keck to Matt Cook. Several of us were hanging out on the street — really an alleyway — waiting for Matt to show up.

“The first time I saw Matt Cook,” Keck said, “he was roller-skating with a refrigerator box on top of him down the street and then intentionally running into [stuff]. Like ‘Oh no! Oh no!’ and then ‘It’s okay, I’m okay!’ Like doing tons of pratfalls.” The box was so big it covered Matt completely, making it look like it was zooming around all by itself. He careened around bashing into things, and we all just about died laughing. Keck said, “Matt is really funny, and he’s self-hating, and creative, and not afraid to make a fool of himself. He kind of likes it. And that’s the ingredients of a great comedian.”

Keck says, “If there was a person who created the Onion’s voice, it would be Matt Cook.”

As the Onion evolved, stories became more political.

Brian Stack MA’88, who later became a writer and performer with Second City, Conan O’Brien, and Stephen Colbert, started his performance career at the Ark Improv in Madison. He told me that Matt Cook was in the first show he ever saw there. Cook joined other interesting performers from that era, like Joan ’84 and Bill Cusack. And also, “Chris Farley, the late great Chris Farley,” was there, too, “with his bandana and his Marquette rugby jacket.” Cook says, “I was Chris Farley’s first director. I taught him everything he knew about comedy except for cocaine and hookers and booze, because he learned that stuff by himself.”

Stack praises Cook and his creative style. “Matt was one of the most original thinkers I’ve ever met. He would do very, very fun experimental things with the Ark that were very conceptual and weird in wonderful ways.”

One day, Keck and Johnson asked Cook to meet with them. “It was this baby-businessman thing,” Cook said. The calendar had been pretty successful, Keck and Johnson said. Now they wanted to do a newspaper. Cook asked them what kind of newspaper, and they said that’s why they’d invited him to the meeting. “So sitting there at that time, at that very meeting, I said, ‘How about we just make it all up? Have all made-up stories, but play it like it’s a real newspaper?’ ” Keck remembered that the Cardinal did an April Fools’ Day parody every year that was always really popular. “Well, I’m just gonna … do that,” he thought. The Onion would not be a real newspaper. It would be a comedic parody of one.

Keck and Johnson finally had their concept. They went to Reyer and Haise’s place and said, “Okay, we’re gonna unveil this thing. You’re sworn to secrecy.” (Their other roommate was Deidre Buckingham ’89, who became the photographer for the Onion in the first year. Buckingham, a skilled photographer and darkroom developer, told me that she had always wanted to be a photojournalist, but had flunked the skills test to get into UW’s journalism school because she couldn’t spell. The Onion became her outlet instead.)

Reyer says, “I didn’t even know them well enough to guess what it was. I was so sure it was gonna be lame.” They unveiled the concept and explained: “We’re gonna make up fake news. And people are going to believe it.”

They said it was going to be called the Onion, and Reyer said, “Please tell me that it isn’t like the onion has these deep layers of meaning. Is it just random?”

Johnson and Keck said, “It’s totally random. People will think it means something, but it doesn’t.”

“That was the beginning of it,” Reyer says. “And it actually was a big deal. It never felt like that at the time, though.” They asked Reyer if she wanted to help out, and she immediately said yes; she had a huge crush on Keck. She began selling ads, brainstorming, and eventually doing a little writing. Buckingham signed on, too.

Amy Reyer was born in New York City. When her family moved to Washington, DC, she attended the school Sidwell Friends. “It was a private school with some really smart kids,” she says. “And I did not feel like one of them.” For college, she wanted something completely different. “I thought, ‘I want to go to a Big Ten school. And I want to be anonymous.’ ”

Anonymity was important. Amy has a very famous older sister, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a Second City and Saturday Night Live alum who had been working in film and would soon be cast in a lead role on Seinfeld. Amy’s younger sister is actress Lauren Bowles. Amy, the middle child, said she was a theater kid too. “But it’s not what I wanted to do. I was good at it, but it’s not what I wanted to do.” She was also tired of being in a small place — her Sidwell class was only about a hundred people — as well as “sort of being labeled as a dumb blonde” there. “That sucked,” she says. “It really sucked. And UW–Madison, when I visited, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is so great. It’s, like, 85 percent blonde. Nobody will notice me. I’m just gonna be a regular person here.’ ”

Keck and Johnson asked Haise if he would sell ads. He said no. Though he used to do ad sales for the Cardinal, he was done with that. He had gotten fired from the Cardinal for skipping too many meetings. And he had other jobs now, including renting apartments and bartending. Whatever worked to keep him cruising. But after being asked “five times,” he finally caved, and within a few weeks he was the advertising manager.

Haise saw it as “rallying around a cause,” saying, “I never thought there could have been a better job.”

Haise was from Wauwatosa, a suburb of Milwaukee, a place for which he had great affection. His parents had divorced when he was young, and it may not have been a great time for him. Luckily, Haise was a very outgoing and social guy, and he had his hometown to give him a foundation even if his parents were not together. At the time, I saw him as this sort of surfer-dude Deadhead. According to Reyer, he was “baked all the time.”

The first issue of the Onion came out in the fall of 1988, with the front-page story “Mendota Monster Mauls Madison,” written by Matt Cook under the pseudonym Gunnar Downes (they wanted the most macho-sounding name possible), about a mythical lake monster named Bozho. The purposely blurry photo by Deidre Buckingham showed the head of the “monster” breaching the water. It was actually Tim Keck’s arm with a stocking over it; Photoshop had not been invented yet. (I remember seeing him at the office afterward and asking why he was all wet.) The rest of the issue was a pretty anarchic mix of stuff. Most of it was written in the week or two before the first issue came out. In addition to copyediting, I wrote occasionally that year too; in the first issue I have a little story of the sort that would later be called “flash fiction.” We also published a story by a creative writing friend of mine.

The issue included excerpts from the campus police blotter — gossipy content that people would want to read, but that you didn’t have to pay for. Lorin Miller ’90 and Sandra Schlies ’90 wrote soap-opera summaries, which turned out to be one of the main reasons people picked up the paper. To create some buzz before the first issue hit the streets, Keck and Johnson printed out stickers with the Onion’s name and the motto they’d invented, “Witty, Irreverent, and a Little Nasty,” and stuck them up around town.

Keck said, “And it was just a pile of crap. When I saw it, I was like, ‘This is really, really bad.’ But strangely, it was successful. Like, right off the bat.”

A student at Madison at the time, future Onion writer Joe Garden x’92, said, “I remember being kind of impressed by it because back in those days, you had the regular alternative weekly, you had the socialist weekly, you had the feminist weekly. You had a second socialist weekly. The music weekly. You had all these free papers everywhere. And the Onion, even as raw and primitive as it was with the ‘Mendota Monster’ issue, it stood out from the rest of them.”

In only 10 months, Keck and Johnson had made the Onion out of nothing into a highly popular campus presence.

Excerpted from Funny Because It’s True: How the Onion Created Modern American News Satire by Christine Wenc. Copyright © 2025. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

A few weeks after final approval of the landmark House v. NCAA settlement, universities began sending revenue-sharing payments directly to student-athletes. The date marked the definitive end of a system of amateurism that ruled college sports for decades but crumbled under legislative and legal scrutiny in recent years.

“It’s a different game now,” says Nolan Winter x’27, a star forward on the men’s basketball team at UW–Madison, which is among the large majority of Division I schools that have opted in to the new structures of the settlement. “I think there are benefits and also downsides to it.”

The hope for all parties — schools and student-athletes alike — is that the House settlement will bring some stability back to college athletics. Chaos has largely reigned since 2021, when a series of policy changes permitted student-athletes to profit from use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL) and to transfer schools unlimited times without losing playing eligibility. Lack of clarity on NIL rules has given rise to questionable recruiting practices as programs search for a competitive edge.

“The past four years haven’t been viewed as sustainable,” says UW athletic director Chris McIntosh ’04, MS’19. “It’s been highly unstructured, very vague, ever evolving. Having said that, I am proud of the way that our organization and our people have navigated these times.”

The House settlement establishes a framework for how universities can compensate student-athletes for the financial value they bring to their programs. (The case is named for one of the plaintiffs, Grant House, a former Arizona State swimmer.) It also creates oversight mechanisms to ensure that third-party NIL deals are legitimate, market-based sponsorships, rather than disguised payments to secure recruiting commitments — an escalating practice in recent years.

There will, of course, be winners and losers within this new model. Fortunately, Badger athletics has developed a playbook for success over the past four years: staying true to core values while embracing the change.

House Rules

This summer, Camp Randall opened its gates to concertgoers for the first time since 1997, with shows by Coldplay and Morgan Wallen. It’s part of the athletic department’s exploration of new revenue streams as it settles into the post-House era. Fans may have noticed other efforts of late, including Culver’s logos on the Kohl Center court and expanded alcohol sales in the Camp Randall concourse.

“We’ve operated in a way that’s been fiscally responsible, anticipating this change for years now,” McIntosh says. “It’s put us in a position in which we can and will contribute up to the limits of revenue sharing defined by House.”

For the 2025–26 academic year, that means UW–Madison will allocate $20.5 million directly to student-athletes. That maximum annual figure is expected to rise throughout the 10-year term of the House settlement, which caps the compensation pool at 22 percent of the average annual revenue that major Division I schools earn from broadcast rights, ticket sales, sponsorships, and other sources. The payments are on top of traditional scholarships and benefits, as well as third-party NIL deals. It’s up to the discretion of schools to decide how the compensation pool is distributed.

House v. NCAA Settlement, at a Glance

As part of House — a class action case that consolidated three federal antitrust lawsuits by former college athletes — the NCAA and its power conferences also agreed to pay some $2.8 billion in back damages to players who did not have the ability to profit from NIL since 2016. The negotiated formula earmarks roughly 75 percent for football players, 15 percent for men’s basketball, 5 percent for women’s basketball, and 5 percent for all others. The payouts (on hold as of July because of a legal appeal over the formula) will come from the NCAA, though partly by reducing its future revenue distributions to conferences and schools. At the UW, the football and men’s basketball programs accounted for 75.3 and 13.6 percent of team-specific revenue, respectively, in 2024. Though several more sports generate revenue, those two are the only programs to run a profit and fund others.

Another structural change from the House settlement relates to roster management. The NCAA used to cap the number of scholarships schools could offer in each sport but did not limit roster sizes, creating lots of space for walk-ons. The settlement reverses the approach, removing the cap on scholarships but restricting the size of rosters. For instance, the new roster limit in football is 105 players, down from the 125 that the UW traditionally carried. The Badgers can now offer all 105 players scholarships, up from the prior cap of 85, though McIntosh notes that the walk-on tradition will remain at the UW.

In what was the final sticking point of the House settlement, any current student-athletes who might have been cut due to the new rule can stay on the team without counting toward the roster limit until their eligibility runs out.

As part of the grand compromise, while student-athletes can now receive direct revenue sharing, a new governing body will attempt to rein in some of the excesses of the early NIL era.

A Long Time Coming

After her freshman season in 2023, UW women’s basketball point guard Ronnie Porter x’26 opened up her Instagram direct messages to find a $25,000 NIL offer from Degree.

She thought it was spam. Eventually, she realized the deodorant brand was quite serious in recruiting her to its Degree Walk-On program, where she joined four other Division I athletes as brand ambassadors with a national platform. She used it to share her journey of overcoming adversity as an undersized, underestimated walk-on.

“I didn’t come from a lot,” Porter says, “so I’m able to use what I get from NIL to do what I wasn’t able to do growing up and also provide for my family. And that means everything.”

Porter, now a senior, has developed into a mainstay in the UW’s starting lineup and leveraged her success into other NIL arrangements. One of them is with Madison-based Exact Sciences. The health diagnostics company has developed an NIL program with an annual cohort of student-athletes. The deal includes social media sponsorships, community appearances, and tailored career coaching. UW volleyball player MJ Hammill ’24 even landed a job at the company after completing the program.

You’ve likely come across other NIL work. Pepsi and Mountain Dew splashed Johnny Davis x’24 and Braelon Allen x’25 on billboards. American Family Insurance and volleyball star Devyn Robinson ’24, MS’25 developed a social media campaign to celebrate her newfound voice as a role model. Rowing sisters Gracie ’25 and Libby Walker x’27, whose grandfather is a farmer and former UW rower, secured a sponsorship with the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin.

“Those are the types of opportunities, where there’s value to all parties involved, that were a long time coming,” McIntosh says.

The UW was quick to get into the game. UW athletics established an NIL department in 2022, adding several dedicated staff positions that help student-athletes navigate the new world of opportunity. It provides educational programming around brand marketing and financial literacy, and manages a marketplace in which UW players can field sponsorship deals. Student-athletes also have access to UW Law School’s Law & Entrepreneurship Clinic for no-cost NIL contract review and legal assistance.

In a model reflected across college athletics, the UW has been supported by an independent nonprofit called The Varsity Collective. The group turns donations and business partnerships into the bulk of third-party NIL deals presented to UW student-athletes.

“Without them, I can’t imagine where we would be today,” McIntosh says. “They have stepped up at a time in which we desperately needed help, given the change of pace.”

The Wild, Wild West

The chance to create true business opportunities, McIntosh notes, is “what NIL was intended to be philosophically and what I hope it will be in the future.”

But in reality, before House, the national recruiting landscape often devolved into pay-for-play in the name of NIL — that is, school-affiliated donor collectives offering financial packages to players for their expected contributions on the field, not for the market-based value and use of their name, image, and likeness. Some states even passed friendly legislation to give their home universities expanded leeway over NIL deals and protection from sanctions. The NCAA first enacted an NIL rule change in July 2021 after several states passed laws on the matter and the Supreme Court signaled a broad skepticism of the amateurism model in an antitrust case called NCAA v. Alston. Fearing more legal battles, the NCAA put few constraints on NIL. Primarily, it prohibited a school or its employees from directly paying a student-athlete.

The lack of NIL regulation, combined with unlimited transfers and the weak enforcement of existing recruiting rules, led to the wild, wild west. In addition to traditional recruiting, there’s been a scramble to retain current players and entice transfers — with NIL as an expanding part of the pitch. In a high-profile example from this past spring, a Tennessee quarterback skipped practice while seeking to renegotiate his NIL contract before entering the transfer portal and leaving for UCLA. (In June, the UW and Varsity Collective filed a lawsuit against the University of Miami for allegedly interfering with a football player who had signed NIL agreements with them.)

A key area of the House settlement aims to restore order to the college sports landscape and NIL in particular. A new entity called the College Sports Commission is taking over most enforcement efforts from the NCAA, which has long been derided for its inefficiency and inconsistency with rule violations around recruiting and impermissible contact. It will have wide latitude in assessing infractions and resolving appeals through arbitration.

The College Sports Commission will oversee other systems put in place by House, including the NIL Go clearinghouse. Managed by the accounting firm Deloitte, the clearinghouse will review all third-party NIL deals over $600 to ensure legitimate business purpose and realistic compensation using a market-value algorithm.

These reforms, McIntosh believes, will ultimately benefit the UW.

“Market-based NIL remains a huge opportunity for our student-athletes, and I think that’s an area in which Wisconsin can thrive,” McIntosh says. “We have an incredibly high level of engagement with sponsored partners and businesses, not just in the Madison market, but across the state and beyond.”

Core Values

Not all universities are as well positioned to succeed in the post-House era, either financially or competitively.

The Ivy League conference and a smattering of other schools opted out of the House agreement and revenue sharing altogether. The move preserves their existing financial model but leaves them without a major recruiting tool. Other universities have already cut smaller programs such as tennis, swimming, and track and field for fear of House’s financial fallout, a conversation that McIntosh insists is a nonstarter at the UW.

“Our priority is to preserve 23 sport programs at Wisconsin,” he says. “Broad-based opportunity is one of our core values.”

Badger fans have experienced the joys that come with a deep varsity sport lineup, even in these years of upheaval. Women’s hockey won the 2025 national title in an overtime thriller. Men’s cross country has won seven consecutive conference championships. Volleyball continues to sell out the Field House.

Last year, UW men’s basketball served as a notable case study for how to build a competitive team in an evolving landscape while sticking to your principles.

After the 2023–24 season, the Badgers lost a pair of key starters to lucrative opportunities in the transfer portal: point guard Chucky Hepburn x’26 left for Louisville, while leading scorer AJ Storr x’26 landed at Kansas. Many observers expected a down year.

In this era, some coaches would have searched the portal for splashy replacements to quiet the headlines. But not Greg Gard. He believed in developing his remaining roster and complementing it with players who would fit in well.

“Our strategy begins with retention and building around the student-athletes we’ve recruited since high school,” he says. “In addition, we’ve tried to be very smart about who we add as transfers to fill out our roster. Adding players who will fit in culturally, academically, and socially is just as important as how they’ll fit from a basketball standpoint.”

Enter John Tonje MS’25, a senior guard coming off an injury-ravaged season at Missouri where he averaged just 2.6 points per game. The unheralded transfer transformed into a superstar on the Badgers, scoring 19.6 points per game, earning All-American honors, and emerging as an NBA draft pick.

“The culture and foundation around him here at Wisconsin gave John an on-ramp to having immediate success,” Gard says. “He came in wanting to earn everything that was given to him.”

Gard’s belief in his roster and Tonje’s ever-steady presence proved contagious. Seniors Kamari McGee ’25 and Carter Gilmore ’25, underdogs who stuck with the program for years despite scant playing time, emerged as solid contributors. Nolan Winter and John Blackwell x’27 took big leaps in their sophomore seasons. Returning starters Steven Crowl ’24, MSx’26 and Max Klesmit ’25 rounded out a squad that, against the odds, improved its record to 27–10 and earned a top-three seed to March Madness. And by season’s end, ESPN rated Tonje the best transfer in all of college basketball.

Then in May, eight players from that team earned their college degrees. Perhaps surprising for the times, the graduation rate for student-athletes at UW–Madison has risen to a record 94 percent.

“It’s my number one point of pride from this past season,” Gard says. “As much as we talk about other things, graduating is still the end goal. In the recruiting process, academic success is nonnegotiable.”

The State of Play

In March, McIntosh traveled to Washington, DC, to testify in front of the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on antitrust.

“There is no doubt that college athletics is at an inflection point where the decisions made over the next couple of years will define the landscape for the foreseeable future,” he told the members. For as many questions as the House settlement answers, it leaves the door open to even more. Antitrust lawsuits against the NCAA continue, including cases that aim to classify student-athletes as full employees and target rules such as the four-year eligibility limit. Uncertainty swirls around the intersections of House and Title IX, the federal law that ensures equal opportunity for men and women in college sports.

McIntosh believes stabilizing college athletics will require national legislation to preempt a patchwork of state laws, confirm the classification of student-athletes as nonemployees, and provide limited antitrust protections. (At press time, there was movement on a presidential executive order and congressional legislation around such issues.)

“We need safe harbor so that we can create common sense rules that are necessary to operate sport,” he says. Or as he told the subcommittee: “I don’t think we want 13-year college athletes.”

For the UW’s athletic director, preserving meaningful opportunities for future generations of student-athletes is deeply personal.

“My experience as a student-athlete transformed my life,” says McIntosh, who starred on Badger football’s offensive line in the late ’90s. “While so much has changed since then, the core of what this opportunity can do for a young person hasn’t changed at all — the ability to leave here with a degree from the University of Wisconsin, compete under the mentorship of world-class coaches and leaders, and grow socially.

“That’s the experience I want for all our student-athletes in each of their sports. What’s changed is how we deliver it.”

Preston Schmitt ’14 is a senior staff writer for On Wisconsin.

Published in the Fall 2025 issue.

When Sean Jacobsohn ’94 attended a Golden State Warriors game in 2022, he received a well-intentioned promotional item with an untimely sponsorship. The item: a nine-inch-tall replica of starting guard Jordan Poole. The sponsor: FTX, described on the bobblehead’s box as the team’s “official crypto platform and NFT marketplace.”

“This was right around the time FTX was imploding,” says Jacobsohn, a lifelong collector and successful executive and venture capitalist. “I realized right away I had something here.”

Enter Jacobsohn’s Failure Museum: a personal collection of artifacts showcasing a wide range of failed companies, products, and ideas. The collection began with the bobblehead and now includes everything from botched launches, such as cans of New Coke, to formerly viable products that lost their purpose, such as Blockbuster membership cards.

It’s a cheeky hobby with a deeper purpose. In addition to showcasing each item online, Jacobsohn shares his thoughts about failure on his blog and LinkedIn page, detailing what business leaders can learn from each unique misfire. Because as good as success is, Jacobsohn says it’s the failures that are frequently more revealing — and common.

“Not a lot of people like to talk about failure and lessons from failure, but really, most companies fail at some point,” he says. “Even the most successful companies have had to pivot, and many of the most successful entrepreneurs have had a failed start-up before. I’ve found that you really need to learn from failure and learn quickly.”

Mequon to Silicon

These days, Jacobsohn uses his expertise and position to help entrepreneurs and their companies build successful teams, find new opportunities, and raise funds. He also sits on 10 company boards and serves as a board observer for four more.

He’s come a long way since his first taste of entrepreneurship as a teenager, when he combined his lifelong interests in sports, collecting, and business. “I bought entire memorabilia collections from other students and sold the pieces for a lot more in aggregate,” Jacobsohn says. “That helped me pay my way through college.”

Growing up in Mequon, Wisconsin, Jacobsohn knew he wanted to attend one university and one university only: UW–Madison. Seeking a well-rounded business education, he declared majors in finance and marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business while minoring in international business. Along the way, he founded a student-based sports club, got involved with school entrepreneurship programs, and over the course of four years, watched the Badgers go from a one-win football team to Rose Bowl champions.

As he neared graduation, Jacobsohn spotted an interesting job ad in the Badger Herald for a position at Prudential Financial, which became the launchpad for his business career. He then earned an MBA at Harvard Business School, joined three early-stage companies that eventually went public, and became involved in angel investing.

In 2014, he was recruited by Norwest Venture Partners, a $12.5 billion global venture capital firm in the heart of Silicon Valley that has investments in more than 700 companies.

“I continue to network with entrepreneurs and product leaders to see what opportunities they’re looking to start,” says Jacobsohn, a partner at Norwest. “I’m always looking for companies in spaces that I think are ripe for disruption.”

In other words, he helps businesses successfully launch and operate … and not become fodder for the Failure Museum.

Turning Lemons into Lemonade

Businesses and products fail for any number of reasons. Maybe a product was ahead of its time or entered a saturated market. Maybe a business ignored customer feedback or had the wrong leadership team in place.

While Jacobsohn has identified primary reasons for failure — he frames them as the “Six Forces” — what’s universal is that no business leader sets out to fail. Jacobsohn’s blogging doesn’t mock or point fingers, and his open-minded approach has earned him fans, including some executives who have directly experienced failure themselves.

When he first blogged about Juicero, a tech-infused juicer that hit the market in 2016 and now lives in the museum, the company’s original CEO reached out to Jacobsohn, and the two sat down for an interview. Other business leaders soon followed suit, giving Jacobsohn and his readers a unique and unfiltered perspective.

“I’m one of the few people deeply interested in their stories,” he says. “Allowing them to tell their side of things can benefit a lot of entrepreneurs.”

Since launching the Failure Museum, Jacobsohn’s personal collection of items has grown significantly. Through donations and his own forays into eBay, he’s amassed more than 1,000 artifacts, all of which can be viewed online at the website failure.museum. Products, companies, toys, sports memorabilia: it’s all there, and even Wisconsin has representation in the museum. Among other items, Jacobsohn owns a program from a 1926 NFL game between the Chicago Bears and the Milwaukee Badgers — and no, that’s not a printing error.

Pro football was much less popular than college football at the time, and the thinking was that by naming a team the Badgers, Wisconsin fans would pay more attention to them,” Jacobsohn says. “Milwaukee and Green Bay actually played each other 10 times. Green Bay won nine of those games, they tied once, and people stopped going to the Milwaukee games.”

Some recent acquisitions to his collection include Amazon Dash buttons, textured Brush-Ups teeth wipes from Oral B, and Heinz EZ Squirt ketchup, which came in colors such as bright green and purple. Jacobsohn also maintains a wish list of items he hopes to add to the collection — everything from LaserDiscs to Colgate frozen meals. Each new item provides another opportunity to generate insights into failure, and Jacobsohn says the public response to his work on the topic has been overwhelmingly positive. He’s also landed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, among other news outlets, as a growing number of journalists take interest in his unique collection.

Jacobsohn wants you to come away from the Failure Museum feeling optimistic — because with the right mindset, failure can lead to innovation. After all, a product like the Apple iPhone might not exist as we know it today without a few Newtons or Pippins (look them up) along the way.

“Failure can be your springboard to success,” Jacobsohn says. “You shouldn’t fear failure and shouldn’t be afraid to take risks.” •

What does “go there — wherever there is” entail?

When researching a book on legendary Packers football coach Lombardi, Maraniss convinced his wife, Linda, to move to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to experience the minus-17-degree environs of Ice Bowl fame. There, he met Lombardi’s paper boy, golf caddy, and the piano player from his favorite supper club.

In 1991, “going there” required ditching a rental car in a tiny Oklahoma town and cajoling a pilot at a small airstrip to fly him to Norman in an open-air, two-seater plane, despite a terror of flying. The goal was to make Anita Hill’s press conference on sexual harassment allegations against then–Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. “My need to get there in time overwhelmed all of my fears,” he says.

Though Maraniss spent only two years as a UW student, they were crucial ones in shaping his journalistic spirit.

“I attribute my entire sensibility,” he says, “to Madison and to the University of Wisconsin.”

“Ink in My Blood”

David Maraniss arrived in Madison in the summer of 1957 in a two-tone Chevy packed with his parents and three siblings, shortly before his eighth birthday. His beloved Milwaukee Braves were on their way to winning the National League pennant and the World Series, and his father, Elliott Maraniss, had secured the job that “saved our family.”

This was five years, seven cities, and three newspaper jobs after Elliott was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee and fired from the Detroit Times — an experience recounted in David’s book A Good American Family. Elliott turned to the Capital Times, with its reputation of standing up against McCarthyism.

“I was born with ink in my blood,” David wrote for his Pulitzer profile. “My grandfather was a printer in Brooklyn, and my father spent most of his career as a newspaper editor straight out of The Front Page, with a gruff demeanor, soft heart, and instinctive sense for the news.”

Maraniss often tagged along with his dad to work. Elliott once introduced him to colleagues by saying, “He’s going to be the best writer of all of us.” That is a moment Maraniss never forgot. “It propelled me in some ways,” he says.

Maraniss needed that extra push as he struggled to figure out where he fit into the family. His younger sister, Wendy, who died in a car crash in 1997, was a brilliant classical pianist. “I had two older siblings who were pretty much geniuses, Jim and Jeannie. They went to Harvard and Swarthmore and got 1600s on their SATs, and I was the dumb kid in the family.”

The romance of the old-time newsroom in downtown Madison drew him in. “Reams of copy paper, dark blue carbons, glue pots, pneumatic tubes, thick markup pencils, cigarette butts on the linoleum floor, the [copy desk] manned by old guys in suspenders with flasks of liquor stashed in the bottom drawer,” recalls Maraniss. “That was the newspaper milieu imprinted on my brain, and I loved it.” At age 19, Maraniss began writing for his father’s paper and for the next five years worked there and at Madison’s WIBA radio. He repurposed wire service copy from the Washington Post, including the famous reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on President Richard Nixon and Watergate. His own beats were sports and student protests, topics he returned to later in his career.

Maraniss calls his UW–Madison experience “a tumultuous time,” packed with chess matches in the Rathskeller and basketball games in the Red Gym. After his sophomore year in 1969, he married his high-school sweetheart, Linda, and the next year, their son, Andrew, was born. Linda recalls sending David to the store to buy diapers; he came home with a Simon and Garfunkel album instead.

He dropped out of the UW, although in 2014 he was awarded an honorary degree and notes, “It was a disaster that turned into a wonderful thing.”

“The University of Wisconsin affected me mostly by osmosis,” explains Maraniss. “The whole sensibility of the school and the Wisconsin Idea and ‘sifting and winnowing’ — it soaked into my body in a way that probably no course I could have taken would have done. I’ve been shaped by that progressive notion of academic freedom, the truth, trying to connect learning to living.”

Maraniss, now working full time on his books, still lives in Madison for part of the year, and he calls the Memorial Union Terrace his favorite place in the world.

One-Day Masterpieces

At age 25, Maraniss headed east to the Trenton Times, and in 1977 he started at the Washington Post. His journey to becoming a legendary reporter — earning his first Pulitzer for reporting on Bill Clinton in 1993 — was not without its speed bumps. He shares a time when his reporting went sideways: his coverage of the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

“It was my first political campaign, and I was covering Jimmy Carter at my first job outside of Madison. And I wrote an opening paragraph that probably had 10 or 12 dependent clauses in it.”

“Davey,” his editor told him upon reading it, “try diving off the low board for a while.”

Those are surely not words Maraniss ever said to his own reporters. Along with distinguishing himself as a writer, he served as a Post editor, and people who’ve worked for him describe him as patient, encouraging, brilliant, and sensitive. The latter is a trait he attributes to his mother, Mary, whom he describes as a “preternaturally calm woman, not easily provoked.”

Journalist Anne Hull’s work exposing mistreatment of veterans amid the squalor at Walter Reed hospital won the Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2008. Maraniss worked with Hull on that series as her editor.

Her job as a national enterprise reporter put her on the road for months at a time. “It can be a lonely process out there,” says Hull. “What made it so great was David Maraniss. He made me feel like I had a partner in the reporting.”

She praises his ease at building the “scaffolding” of a story. They also had fun. She’d share mixtapes of music reflecting the location and themes of her reporting. When editing together, she’d join him for his routine reporter lunch of egg salad on rye toast with a V8 juice.

“He’s a gift that rarely ever happens in a newsroom,” says Hull. “He’s extremely smart, extremely well read, but you’d never know it because he doesn’t flaunt it.” At the Post, reporters could observe Maraniss in his glass office. Every few hours, he’d emerge in his socks and make a newsroom round, earning him a moniker from Hull: the Shaggy-Headed Shambling Shaman.

He was in that fishbowl when he composed what became known as a “Maraniss masterpiece” in just one day: a 9/11 article that is taught at journalism schools around the country. Maraniss conceived the story while sleeping, scrawled out a one-page outline, taped it above his computer screen, and began typing at 6 a.m., four days after the terrorist attacks. He produced a chronological narrative about dozens of daily routines that were forever altered by the event.

Maraniss repeated that process in 2007 as part of the team covering the Virginia Tech mass shooting. That story, also written in one day, contributed to another Pulitzer.

Due to his atypically serene newsroom demeanor, he was often the good-cop contrast to such editors as Ben Bradlee or Bob Woodward. His approach paid off when Janet Cooke insisted she had not made up her Pulitzer-winning 1980 story about an eight-year-old heroin addict. Around 1:45 a.m., after 11 hours of pressure from the team of editors, Maraniss asked the others to leave the windowless conference room.

“I knew she would not be able to lie to me,” he explains. “Without in any way approving of what she did, I understood the horror she must have been facing at the moment, being exposed as a fraud.”

Alone with Maraniss, Cooke confessed.

Today, the Pulitzers serve as paperweights on his desk. And Woodward is a golf partner, close friend, and a fan. “Besides being a great journalist and a great writer, he is always interested in what a story means, where it fits into the morality of people and country,” says Woodward. “Without being self-righteous or self-important, he shows what’s right, what’s wrong, and what are the implications. I’m not overstating it to say he’s a moral force.”

“I’ve Got to Do His Biography”

The morning after Clinton was elected president in 1992, Maraniss woke up in a motel outside Little Rock, Arkansas, reflecting on how well he’d come to know what made the president-elect tick over the past year.

“I’ve got to do his biography,” thought Maraniss, who has a fierce competitive streak, whether it’s getting the story or winning a game of Scrabble. “I don’t want someone else doing it.”

That began his career of writing books. His mission remained the same: “Search for the truth and use deep reporting and common sense in its pursuit.”

Last year, the Wisconsin Historical Society received proof of just how deep Maraniss’s research goes when he donated 150 boxes filled with thousands of notecards, binders, tapes, and photographs from his books. Whether the subject is sports or politics, his books explore racial justice — another thread he traces back to his father, who was commander of an all-Black unit in World War II.

“Clinton was a product of the segregated South, and he wanted to change that,” he says. “Vince Lombardi was very strong on race and gender issues, even as he was old school in so many other ways. Rome 1960 is about Muhammad Ali, Abebe Bikila, Wilma Rudolph, and what they had to endure. The Obama book, obviously, deals with race. Once in a Great City does, too.”

Maraniss’s current obsession is Jack Johnson, the son of a former slave and the first Black heavyweight champion boxer back in 1908. He refuses to devote the steep commitment of time — typically three to four years — to a book unless the subject evokes a curiosity verging on obsession for him.

To do so, it must illuminate the sociology and history of America. And Johnson’s life hits on all Maraniss’s pulse points: racial justice, sports, politics, and underdogs. His working title is Ghost in the House, “a reference to what Muhammad Ali’s trainer would whisper to him in the ring before every match, meaning that Jack Johnson was watching him.”  

The Next Generation of Journalists

Ink as a genetic marker among the Maraniss clan has now been passed along to his two children.

His son, Andrew Maraniss, has authored four books of narrative nonfiction on sports figures tied to racial justice and underdogs. His daughter, Sarah Vander Schaaff, is a playwright and journalist whose career began at CBS News. During COVID, Maraniss did a podcast with Sarah for two years called Ink in Our Blood. His four grandchildren, who range in age from 11 to 20, are well on their way to becoming another generation of writers, from theater to poetry to sportscasting.

The Maraniss children describe their parents as “youthful.” David and Linda raised the kids as “one of the gang” with their friends.

Andrew tagged along to news conferences, met politicians, and pocketed Associated Press photos of the Milwaukee Brewers. The kids joined the Washington Post’s rotisserie baseball league, sang songs around the piano at Maraniss house parties, and played touch football every Sunday afternoon in the green grass under the Washington Monument.

“Bob Woodward was the first person who ever showed me a Walkman, and he got my sister and me some 45 records,” Andrew says. “So I grew up around these great reporters and editors, and it gave me the confidence to become a writer myself.”

“He’s very attuned to the younger generation,” Sarah says of her father. “And he’s actively engaged in the next generation of journalists.”

Indeed, Maraniss teaches classes at Vanderbilt University and views mentoring as among the most important facets of his work.

Philip Rucker is glad he feels that way.

Rucker, who was the Post’s national editor before recently making the jump to CNN, began working with Maraniss during the 2012 campaign cycle as he covered the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. “David taught me how covering politics is not just about the politics, the slogans, and the strategies. It’s ultimately about the people,” says Rucker.

Their roles switched when Rucker became an editor. He worked on the piece Maraniss wrote with Sally Jenkins on U.S. representative Jim Jordan ’86, not as a politician but as a wrestling champion and coach.

And how was the copy Maraniss turned in?

“David’s copy sings like nothing you’ve ever heard before,” says Rucker. “He is a masterful composer of stories.” •

The 1986 comedy Back to School stars Rodney Dangerfield as vulgar businessman Thornton Melon, who joins his son Jason (Keith Gordon) as the world’s unlikeliest freshman at Grand Lakes University, a.k.a. the University of Wisconsin–Madison. It was filmed on campus 40 years ago, when a crew arrived with a modest $11 million budget and a supporting cast of midlevel actors, including a fledgling Robert Downey Jr. With help from a script cowritten by Harold Ramis (Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day), they made magic against a backdrop of Library Mall, Science Hall, and the Red Gym, beating out Aliens with the year’s sixth-highest-grossing movie.  

Director Alan Metter picked the UW–Madison location for its classic Big Ten charm, which reminded him of old-time sports movies. The Madison portion of the shoot kicked off on October 11, 1985, as thousands of would-be extras lined up to audition at the campus-area music venue Headliners. For nine days, the actors hit their marks in Wisconsin’s autumn light, striding across a carpet of multicolored leaves. The gorgeous UW setting proved worthy of its Hollywood closeup. During his time on campus, Dangerfield delighted the throngs of local gawkers as he filmed a scene on Bascom Hill in slippers and a striped bathrobe. At a news conference for the film’s premiere in June 1986, the comedian claimed he’d considered attending UW–Madison as a teenager, insisting, “I like the song ‘On, Wisconsin!’ ”

Whether or not that story is true (and most likely not), filming at the UW brought out the best in Dangerfield. It transformed him from a standup comedian who dabbled in movies to a screen icon with a distinctive persona. With Back to School, he took his place in the cinematic pantheon alongside his contemporaries Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy.  

A Role Model for Living Large

The movie introduces Dangerfield’s Thornton as a self-made millionaire who believes in education even though he’s barely seen the inside of a classroom. Concerned about Jason’s social struggles at college, he shows up at Grand Lakes University to serve as his son’s role model for living large. He wisecracks his way through the UW locations, bribes the school’s president (Ned Beatty), pays the author Kurt Vonnegut (playing himself) to write a paper on the subject of Kurt Vonnegut, woos a soulful English professor (Sally Kellerman), infuriates a combustible historian (Sam Kinison), and violates every known NCAA rule in an extravagantly silly finale with the campus diving team.  

Thornton offends everyone and everything, to the point where the film itself can be offensive. Though some of the jokes are now unamusing, and some of the attitudes unpalatable — as is true in many decades-old comedies — Dangerfield’s performance stands the test of time. He positions himself on the crass end of 20th-century comedy, combining the verbal wit of Groucho Marx, the physical inventiveness of Curly Howard, and the funny faces of Jerry Lewis.

Dangerfield brings his own twitchy, eye-popping, head-bobbing style to the mix. He even incorporates snappy one-liners from his standup act. “The football team at my high school, they were tough,” he barks, assuming his “I don’t get no respect” persona. “After they sacked the quarterback, they went after his family!” Following Caddyshack and Easy Money, Back to School offered nothing new in casting the comedian as a slob among snobs. But filming key scenes at sincere UW–Madison rather than in cynical Hollywood encouraged Dangerfield to express a previously unknown sensitivity. Here, he’s practically poignant. Thornton’s tenderness toward his son gives the ridiculous premise a whiff of credibility. His rapport with the English professor gives the love story an eccentric appeal. And his third-act dedication to passing his courses at Grand Lakes University gives the normally sarcastic Rodney Dangerfield the rare chance to touch a movie audience.

Facing a do-or-die test and the near-certainty of academic failure, Thornton delicately intones Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” To the astonishment of the university staffers who had underestimated him, he follows up with an impassioned statement of purpose: “I’m gonna pass this test! I’m stayin’ in school!”

Thornton scrapes by with D’s, but never have mediocre grades been so inspiring. •

Over the past 20 years, the UW–Madison assistant professor of art has shaped paper and cardstock into room-sized installation pieces, brilliantly colored collages, and densely patterned constructions that evoke mandalas, clockwork, and architectural models. In his paper sculptures, Velliquette leaves “no flat surfaces and not one spot unembellished, even in the spaces invisible to the viewer,” writes essayist Wendy Atwell in a 2020 catalog of Velliquette’s work. “He spends anywhere from 300 to 500 hours to make each one. He cuts around 5,000 pieces of paper that he rolls, stacks, and glues together, using a variety of techniques.” These techniques include the ancient arts of Chinese quilling and Japanese kirigami, which uses folding and cutting to make 3D objects.

Velliquette’s years of patient, focused exploration have resulted in some of the most ambitious, awe-inspiring pieces ever created with paper and glue.

From Performance Art to Paper

The artist’s dedication to paper evolved through chance and circumstance, a winding path almost as intricate as his sophisticated sculptures. As an undergraduate at Florida State University in the 1990s, Velliquette focused on performance and installation work. But as a student artist intent on creating performance environments, he needed affordable materials that were easy to source, deconstruct, and store. These early set pieces, which survive only in photos and video, were made largely with cardboard, paper, fabric, and paint. Loose and improvisational, they convey themes of discovery and play.

“My BFA was such a rich, wonderful experience,” Velliquette recalls. “I went into college not even thinking that art was an option, and I left so passionate and clear about what I wanted my life to be.” After taking a few years to travel and work odd jobs, he applied to UW–Madison for graduate study, still committed to performance and installation. Laurie Beth Clark, a professor in the art department, was his earliest advocate, sharing her video library and her knowledge of performance art history.

After Velliquette came out as gay, his work increasingly focused on queer identity. “I was creating characters in otherworldly environments that suggest the figure is on some sort of journey of discovery, although you never quite knew who it was or where it was going.”

With Clark’s encouragement, he began systematically documenting these performances and soon found a receptive audience for his videos on the international lesbian and gay film festival circuit. For a graduate student, this was a tremendous vote of confidence. After graduation, Velliquette took a job as a videographer on a cruise ship, and in his free time, he used the ship’s video equipment to explore new characters, costumes, and stories. While he describes this experience as an important period of self-exploration (the actual work, he says, was “terrible”), a subsequent move to San Antonio, Texas, proved much more fruitful. There he found teaching gigs at local colleges, a shared studio space, a community of fellow artists, and opportunities to design several room-sized installations.

“Studio work was sporadic,” he says. “I made quick art with lo-fi materials assembled aggressively with layers and layers of ornamentation. There was a sense of urgency to what I made, aggravated by the manic bursts of time I spent in the studio that doubled as my bedroom.”

Giant Eyeballs and Goofy Monsters

Velliquette’s first cut-paper works are vivid pictorial images, fantastic landscapes of waving grasses and seas of fire populated with tiny figures, outstretched hands, and giant eyeballs. Goofy monsters peek out over walls or between ocean waves; bright rainbow hues offer hope, countered by falling drops of blood or tears. Lovingly detailed and brilliantly colored, these apocalyptic dramas would be unnerving if they weren’t so beautiful. Velliquette also explored simpler compositions: single blooms and still lifes, lively cartoonlike creatures, eye-popping colors, sharp outlined shapes, and passages of delicately scissored texture. A rich repertoire of motifs and basic forms — eyes, hands, profiles, stars, serpents, and more — recurs throughout Velliquette’s work, and he has returned over and over to comical, lumbering beasts that sport huge eyeballs, toothy mouths, and lolling tongues.

During a 2009 Arts/Industry residency at the Kohler Company in Wisconsin, he imbued these creatures with new dimension by creating beast figurines in porcelain. Charmed by the little 3D figures, Velliquette decided to try using paper to make sculpture. He had already been pushing the limits of paper collage by layering shapes, gluing spiky blossoms into place, and curling thin strips into loops and ribbons, but this was an entirely new direction.

Rather than building an image up from a sheet of paper, he began using heavier cardstock to form fully three-dimensional beasts, totemic abstractions, and large towers. Through trial and error, Velliquette learned what worked and what didn’t. His paper beasts gradually grew shaggier, stranger, and much larger in scale; the totemic forms and abstract symbols stretched into ever more eccentric and elongated profiles; and his virtuoso towers rose as high as 12 feet. The drama, humor, and nerve of these ambitious works caught the attention of critics and curators, and they cemented Velliquette’s reputation as one of today’s most innovative paper artists. According to Virginia Howell, director of the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking in Atlanta, not only is Velliquette “incredibly talented in his own work, but he understands and sees connections between contemporary artists and the papercraft traditions of the past. He’s a fantastic advocate for paper and is able to share why this humble material is so important to work with.”

Velliquette’s expanded technical repertoire informs every aspect of his studio practice, from new site-specific works and reliefs to public art pieces. Starting in 2010, his schedule of exhibitions, commissions, residencies, and teaching opportunities became filled to capacity.

Monochrome Masterpieces

It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, 2021

Then came the pandemic, and Velliquette’s pace slowed way down. He spent a lot of time alone in his serene studio in downtown Madison, an orderly inner sanctum that thrums with creative energy and a sense of deep calm. With no looming deadlines or professional commitments, he found he had time to “just play and take as long as I wanted on a piece.”

His meditation practice was also deepening, and those hours of concentrated focus supported his ability to slow down, lavishing hours of attention on a single piece. As Atwell writes in her catalog essay, “Using his intuition and concentration, he builds up the forms that often involve repetitive tasks such as cutting the same shape 1,000 times.” The work that emerged from this period is strikingly distinct in his portfolio: monochrome, mandalalike abstractions that pair dizzying complexity with a profound sense of quiet. They invite a kind of devotional attention from the viewer.

Velliquette spends anywhere from 300 to 500 hours to make each of these intricate paper sculptures, cutting some 5,000 pieces of paper that he rolls, stacks, and glues together. The works have fanciful titles such as the one above: The fullness of experience in the emptiness of awareness, 2022

Velliquette starts with a symmetrical, four-fold structure, building out from the center in a series of improvised moves, each decision laying a path for the next. The repeated layers of simple shapes, the cut and pierced textures, the play of light and shadow, and the mystery of the interior spaces combine to create an ineffable whole. They evoke a sense of hush that seems worlds apart from the boisterous, polychrome excitement of Velliquette’s earlier work. These pieces demand a wildly impractical amount of time — he can only complete two or three in a year — but Velliquette has great appreciation for what he’s learned from this slow, meditative process.

“The looking experience happens in the mind; the eyes are just the tool, the mechanics to get it there,” he says. “I talk to my students about this a lot. It’s really an intimate experience, because you’re essentially putting something directly into somebody’s mind, that most intimate space.”

Passing on the Magic

Velliquette’s art class for non-majors draws close to 500 students per year in 30 sections. Among his stellar “Rate My Professor” comments is this one: “He was probably the best instructor I have ever taken a class with.” Photo by Bryce Richter

Teaching has been a constant thread throughout Velliquette’s career, from his sojourn in Texas to his current position as assistant professor of foundations in UW–Madison’s Department of Art. His first Madison gig was in 2005, when Clark invited him to teach a summer session on video production for artists. That summer he met his now-husband, UW chemistry professor Tehshik Yoon, and it soon became clear Madison would be his home. He began teaching more courses for the Art Department, and in 2009, he offered the first art class for non-majors.

Considered an experiment in the beginning, the course started with 20 students; it now has close to 500 students each year in 30 sections. His foundations courses — Drawing Fundamentals, 2-D Design, and 3-D Design — are an integral part of the art curriculum, and he places great importance on professionalism, careful documentation, and a disciplined studio practice — lessons first learned at the UW that have served him well as an artist. “Michael is a great teacher, but he’s also been one of the leaders in our department in thinking about teaching,” says fellow UW art professor Michael Peterson MA’91, PhD’93. “He’s been central to reworking our foundations curriculum. Our teaching is immensely stronger for his efforts.”

Velliquette’s current focus is a series of bright gold reliefs that combine layered, kaleidoscopic texture with the playful, iconic imagery from his earlier paper work: open palms, teardrops, giant eyeballs, and beasts. He uses these simple elements to conjure a sense of infinite space, a glittering, dream-like realm of symbols, shapes, and color. Immersive, expansive, and unabashedly beautiful, these mature works radiate peace, hope, and possibility. “Ultimately,” Velliquette says, “my work is about creating an experience that’s uplifting, to elevate a sense of happiness and kindness in the mind of the viewer.”

Jody Clowes is a curator, writer, and director of the James Watrous Gallery in Madison.

Published in the Summer 2025 issue.

hen Annika Hallquist ’24, MSx’25 reflects on her undergrad years at UW–Madison, she does so in halves: before AI and after AI.

Hallquist was a sophomore in November 2022, when the release of ChatGPT abruptly ushered in a new era of generative artificial intelligence. Initially, the industrial engineering student dismissed the AI chatbot as a “cheat tool.” But the following semester, the professor of her machine-learning class encouraged students to embrace the technology as something of a teammate and tutor — a tool that can assist with tricky coding tasks and reduce complicated concepts into understandable terms.

“I’m jealous seeing freshmen and sophomores take the incredibly hard weed-out classes that I took, knowing that they have AI,” Hallquist says. “I’d have to wait in a long line during office hours to get a coding project done. Now they use AI to help them if they’re stuck.” Still, she recognizes the value of her college education before AI and fears what skills incoming students might lose with its ease of use.

“I got the best of both worlds, because I had a really strong foundation in my coding skills, in mathematics, in chemistry, in physics,” says Hallquist, who’s now pursuing a master’s degree with a focus on AI. “It’s critical to have that foundation for a future career. You want to use AI as a tool, but you don’t want to use it as a crutch.”

Fortunately for Hallquist and other UW students grappling with generative AI, their university has emerged as an early leader in the field.

In February 2024, the UW launched RISE-AI, the first of several focus areas for the Wisconsin Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) Initiative. The effort takes an accelerated approach to hiring specialized faculty, investing in research infrastructure, and promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration. It aims to bring an additional 50 AI-focused faculty experts to campus over the next few years — and with them, a new catalog of cutting-edge courses to help students prepare for a brave new world.

No need to wait, though. There are already enough AI courses at UW–Madison to fill several semesters of credits. So this spring, I sat in on four futuristic classes that span the fields of engineering, law, philosophy, and educational policy. In all of them, I found instructors equipping students with both the technical skills and ethical frameworks to address the biggest questions of our time.

Not that the answers are yet clear.

EEK! AI!

Aaron Aguilar PhDx’27 has been teaching Educational Policy Studies 123 for just two semesters, but he’s already noticed a seismic shift among students when it comes to the use of AI in the classroom.

“The patience that students have for professors who are like, ‘Eek! AI!’ is really over,” he says. “They know that AI is here and we’re going to have to deal with it.”

In the introductory course — Education, Technology, and Society: AI, Big Data, and the Digital Divide — the students are tasked with crafting an AI policy on behalf of UW–Madison.

Aguilar tells the students that every decision they make around permitting or restricting use of AI reveals what they value or don’t value about education. Policy choices have far-reaching consequences, both practical and ethical. “If you say, ‘I’m okay with AI proofreading papers,’ then you’re saying that you’re okay with students not developing or practicing proofreading skills,” he tells the class. “Or if you say that younger students need to develop the foundational skill before they use AI, now you have a conundrum. What’s the age? Where do you draw that line?”

Aguilar’s own policy for the course reflects the realities around the omnipresent tool. He allows students to use generative AI for writing assignments so long as they formally cite any language pulled from it and include a 200-word reflection on how they used it. But at the end of every class, he asks the students to close their laptops and handwrite a brief essay on a notecard.

“Instead of creating a policy that I can’t enforce,” Aguilar says, “I changed how I teach the class so I can get a constant perspective on their thinking process without guessing whether they used AI.”

AI is far from the first technology to disrupt education. But it’s a big leap from calculators to OpenAI’s deep research, which is so powerful it can produce a passable dissertation in a few days. At what point does assistance from AI encroach on true authorship? In class, the students search for consensus around permissible uses of AI in essay writing. Yes for checking grammar and punctuation. Maybe for brainstorming and organization. No for original writing. Many argue that AI shouldn’t replace our own creativity, critical thinking, and chances to learn from mistakes, but they struggle to clearly delineate those processes in the context of policy-making.

One group writes on the board: “We value the process of learning, human error being essential to academic growth.”

The exercise informs their big group project: the university’s AI policy. Having grappled with all the complexities, most groups opt against a campuswide policy. Instead, they encourage instructors to define what they want their students to get out of a particular class and assess how the use of AI can align with those goals.

“I was smiling a lot as I was reading their papers, because they were making conscious decisions,” Aguilar says. “They’re now beyond cheating is bad or don’t use AI to cheat. They’re more precise about where they think AI should play a role and why.”

ART VERSUS AI

Questions around AI and authorship extend beyond the classroom to the courtroom. In the AI & the Law seminar, UW students tackle emerging legal questions in such areas as copyright, data privacy, and liability.

Professor BJ Ard is an expert in the intersection of law and technology, and his latest paper notes that generative AI “defies the assumptions behind existing legal frameworks.” This is due to the technology’s multifaceted training and creation process. A generative AI model is trained on a large initial dataset of text, photos, or videos that informs its output of new materials. If I copy an artist’s work, it would be fairly clear how, why, and when I did it. If AI does it, those questions become incredibly complicated.

Do you blame the parties that curated the training data? The developers who trained the AI model? The end user who wrote the generative prompt and pressed the button?

Ard notes that the involvement of so many actors over time makes it difficult to identify the purpose of the copying, which can be decisive under some copyright tests.

Copyright registration is among the more straightforward legal questions around AI, and even then, it can be dizzying. The U.S. Copyright Office does not protect any machine-generated works unless the human author can claim substantial control over execution. AI artists are pushing the limits of that position.

Ard presents two case studies from author and AI artist Kris Kashtanova. The comic book Zarya of the Dawn received copyright protections for its human-written text and composition but not for its AI-generated images. Simple enough. But the artist’s Rose Enigma, an AI-generated artwork based on a hand-drawn sketch, resulted in this arcane decision: “Registration limited to unaltered human pictorial authorship that is clearly perceptible in the deposit and separable from the non-human expression that is excluded from the claim.”

Got it? (Good thing there’s law school.)

Throughout the seminar, Ard aims to demystify the technology behind AI. He gives students a baseline technical understanding of the decisions involved in training and designing generative AI software.

“Nothing about these problems is easy, but they’re also not totally unprecedented,” he says. “There’s no need to shy away from them because you’re not a computer scientist.”

After class, I ask Signe Janoska ’17, MIPA’19, JD’25, a law student who uses AI for work as a software engineer, what initially interested him in the Law 940 seminar.

“It’s an opportunity to wrap my head around the legal challenges governing AI under the guidance of somebody who understands that about as masterfully as you can, given its early stage of development,” he says. “It hasn’t given me all the answers, but it’s given me tools and perspectives that allow me to wrestle with the questions.”

ETHICAL EQUATIONS

Does AI have moral rights?

It’s a classic philosophical dilemma, and UW–Madison’s AI Ethics course explores it in depth. In an absolutist camp, students argue that humans are a distinctive species, with unique cognitive and emotional capacities, and therefore constitute a category of their own with exclusive rights. The gradualists argue that other animals — and perhaps one day, conscious AI — have relatively high capacities and deserve more consideration. But if you try to draw that line, how do you account for the limited capacities of some humans, such as newborns or comatose patients?

What makes Philosophy 941 unique is not these high-minded discussions; it’s the highly technical exercises that tend to follow. The new field of philosophy of AI addresses concepts such as algorithmic bias — errors in a computer system that create unfair outcomes for certain groups of users. Unraveling the causes requires both a philosophical and a mathematical approach.

“There are some hardcore math topics in this class,” says Professor Annette Zimmermann.

Issues around algorithmic bias hit close to home. Wisconsin’s supreme court wrestled with its implications in the 2016 case State v. Loomis, which challenged the government’s use of a risk-assessment software in criminal sentencing. The algorithm calculates the likelihood that an offender will commit another crime based on actuarial data. Proponents of the predictive AI tool argue that it mitigates potential human bias. Critics point to a ProPublica investigation that found that Black defendants are “almost twice as likely as whites to be labeled a higher risk but not actually reoffend.”

If AI is trained on flawed data, it can perpetuate the same biases. This is of particular concern to AI philosophers, since research shows that people tend to automatically trust the accuracy and objectivity of machine-generated data.

Earlier in the semester, Zimmermann spoke virtually at the AI Action Summit in Paris. With a new book, Democratizing AI, she’s emerging as a leading thinker on how governments and citizens engage with the technology.

“Decisions to deploy AI are currently made by a very small set of corporate actors, like OpenAI and Anthropic,” she says, noting that U.S. policy-makers of all stripes have shied away from AI oversight. “Ordinary citizens should be able to provide input on decisions that will affect them, either through direct participation or by elected representatives. It looks like neither is happening in this case.”

If politicians aren’t up for the challenges of AI, perhaps her students will be. The course has inspired Lydia Boyce ’25 to pursue a career in AI ethics after graduation — “to be part of the rising effort to establish an industry norm of more equitable and accessible AI,” she says. Zimmermann’s main goal is to help her students avoid superficial stances on AI.

“Right now, public discourse oscillates between two extremes — AI hyperism, which wants deployment without guardrails, and AI doomerism, which wants a complete deployment moratorium,” she says. “Both positions prevent people from reasoning critically about the opportunities and risks in these tools.”

WHAT’S BEHIND THE MAGIC

UW–Madison students needn’t go far to learn about the latest in AI from an in-demand engineer. Professor John Lee was on sabbatical at Apple last year and is now finishing a research project with NASA to develop conversational AI agents that measure and manage the trust that a human has in them. Their end destination? Mars.

“It’s to support teams doing deep space exploration, where they can’t easily contact Houston when they have a problem,” Lee says. “If you’ve seen the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s very much like designing [the supercomputer] HAL.”

In his course Industrial and Systems Engineering 602, students are tasked with developing their own AI applications by the end of the semester. You’d think that would require a lot of technical coding experience, but Lee notes that you no longer need to be fluent in the programming language Python. Now you can ask an AI tool like Gemini to write lines of code for you.

Lee teaches “what’s behind the magic,” focusing on how AI models are built and how they function so that students can use them effectively. The title of the course, AI for People, underscores the importance of designing technology around human-centered needs: to enhance our productivity rather than replace it, and to think through all the potential consequences of our decisions.

“You can give [the AI assistant] Dot your calendar, and it can remind you to give your mother a call on her birthday,” Lee says. “It’s like an assistant or companion. But if you design it in a way that automates that relationship, you can imagine Dot just buying flowers for your mother and you see the bill, or Dot calling your mother and impersonating you. Those are things that undermine your agency and automate you out of the process.” A hot topic around AI is its propensity to hallucinate and provide, with complete confidence, a demonstrably wrong answer. In one class, Lee tasks students with “tricking” AI. One student gets it to describe a nonexistent academic paper that she supposedly cowrote. Another asks for a list of famous people who have spoken at the UW. It wrongly includes Bill Gates, and when prodded about the topic of the speech, confabulates an entire story.

The students learn they can minimize hallucinations as a user by uploading supporting documents along with the written prompt — allowing AI to process new information instead of only relying on its original training data.

Even Lee is routinely awed by the growing capabilities of generative AI. To help me prepare for the class, he shared a podcast episode that explored the themes of his syllabus. It sounded just like any other tech podcast, from the engaging, informative breakdown of the topic to the natural, friendly banter between hosts. It took me 15 minutes to realize it was an AI podcast. Lee had generated the audio in a few seconds by opening Google’s NotebookLM, attaching the syllabus, and pressing a button.

GETTING THE MESSAGE

At the start of the semester, Lee was troubled to learn that a few of his students had avoided AI for fear of being accused of cheating or because of other concerns.

“People who can work well with AI will succeed, and those who can’t will be in deep trouble,” Lee says. “If you’re 10 times as productive as your coworker, guess who’s going to have a job at the end of the year when they have to make some cuts?”

Annika Hallquist, the master’s student whose undergrad experience was split in half by the emergence of generative AI, has heard his message loud and clear.

“On the very first day of class,” she says, “Professor Lee told us, ‘I don’t think jobs are going to be replaced. But I think people are going to be replaced with people who know how to use AI.’ ” •