If you want to experience the beauty and vibrancy of the UW–Madison campus, you can now do so anywhere there’s an internet connection. Campus tours have gone virtual.

The tours launched in March, after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Wisconsin, though the desire for virtual tours existed long before.

“I began thinking about this two and a half or three years ago,” says Greer Davis, the associate director of undergraduate communications and marketing in the UW’s Office of Admissions and Recruitment. “We realized that a lot of people wanted to come to the university but never visited here.” These audiences include international students, those with disabilities, and those without the means to travel to Madison. “We wanted to showcase campus for them,” Davis says.

The arrival of coronavirus accelerated the effort. Beginning March 11 — two days before campus closed for spring break, and as it turned out, the rest of spring semester and summer term — the admissions office teamed with the Office of Campus and Visitor Relations to put together a series of video tours, shooting 20 in just a few days. Potential students can now see much of the campus area, from State Street in the east to the medical campus in the west, and from the ancient Red Gym to the still-under-construction Chemistry Building. All the tours are available on the admissions website.

Although the fall application cycle had closed by the time the pandemic arrived, Davis and her colleagues wanted the tours to be ready, as prospective students tour campus year-round.

“We didn’t plan to do this because of COVID,” says Davis. “But it certainly became a huge priority, knowing how much of an impact campus tours make.”

No men allowed: a group of 1960s female students relaxes in the Elizabeth Waters Residence Hall courtyard. The dorm would be the last on campus to remain segregated by gender. UW Archives 2018s00424

By 2005, Elizabeth Waters Residence Hall was the last standing gender-segregated dorm on campus. For many alumni of that time, it was a familiar arrangement. For many students, it was antiquated — weird, even. Wrote one in the Badger Herald: “The time has come for UW to end this wretched, backward invocation of sexism and mindless promotion of prudery.” A year later, it became a coed dorm, ending a long era.

The UW’s first-ever purpose-built dorm was also its first women’s dorm. Ladies Hall was constructed in 1871 and was later renamed Chadbourne Hall after former chancellor Paul Chadbourne, partly in retribution for his stubborn opposition to coeducation. The paradoxical naming streak continued for the second women’s dorm (and oldest functioning dorm on campus today), Barnard Hall — after former chancellor Henry Barnard, who opposed university housing entirely because of its high costs.

The earliest residents of Ladies Hall needed permission to leave the dorm outside of usual class hours, and they were only allowed to see visitors during scheduled receptions in common areas. The hall’s principal also advised the women on their habits and how to comport themselves in public.

Many strict housing rules continued into the latter half of the 20th century. Between the ’40s and ’70s, parents received a letter from the university before the start of each academic year informing them that female students under the age of 21 were required to live in university-approved housing or provide a guardian’s written permission to live unsupervised off campus.

Curfews were commonplace. According to a 1949 housing document, women who tried to return to their dorms after 10:30 p.m. on weeknights would be locked out. Only a housemother had access to the building’s keys, so residents needed permission to be gone overnight or to stay out past curfew. Late-night studying at the library? Too bad. Freshmen could request a key for curfew extension until 12:30 a.m. once per semester, while seniors earned the luxury of requesting a key twice per week. Exceptions were made for university-sanctioned events and for Daily Cardinal staffers.

For many years, men could only enter women’s dorms during certain evening hours and were never allowed to stay overnight. The board of regents approved coed housing, separated by floor (and later by wing), for select UW residence halls in 1972. All halls are now coed, and most floors and wings stopped being separated by gender in 2011. Students are free to come and go as they please. We suspect they wouldn’t accept anything less.

Gloria Ladson-Billings is one of several prominent women featured on the UW Women at 150 website. School of Education

Throughout the academic year, campus celebrated the 150th anniversary of women receiving degrees from the university. The Class of 2019 gifted a statue to the university, a new giving fund called In Her Honor was established to support gender equity on campus, and the UW Women at 150 website featured stories on these UW trailblazers:

• Clara Bewick Colby 1869, a renowned suffragist who was among the first class of six women to graduate from the UW
• Signe Skott Cooper ’48, a World War II veteran and nursing pioneer at the UW
• Ada Deer ’57, a Native American activist and the UW’s first Elder-in-Residence
• Thelma Estrin ’48, MS’49, PhD ’52, a computer scientist who introduced technology to medical research
• Lorraine Hansberry x’50, the first black female playwright to have a show on Broadway (A Raisin in the Sun)
• Gloria Ladson-Billings, a UW professor emerita known for research examining racial disparities in education
• Grace Wahba, the first female faculty member in the UW Department of Statistics
• Mabel Watson Raimey 1918, believed to be the first black woman to graduate from the UW and the first to practice law in Wisconsin

There had, in fact, been women at the UW prior to this. The Normal Department, which taught teachers, had female students since 1863. But this was not the same as full access to the university. In 1869 — 150 years ago — the UW graduated its first baccalaureate alumnae: Clara Bewick Colby, Anna Headen Erskine, Elizabeth Spencer Haseltine, Jane Nagle Henderson, Helen Noble Peck, and Ellen Turner Pierce. The next year, Chadbourne left, but women stayed.

This year, the UW is celebrating that 150th anniversary. In this special women’s issue, you’ll read about just a few of the amazing women (and one who’s less-than-admirable) who have passed through campus in the last century and a half. We know we’ve missed a lot of influential Badger women. Is there someone we should know about? Write to us.

On, alumnae!

Blank outlined several key goals and investments for the university. One is to build on educational outcomes by offering greater flexibility for students. An increase in online courses is helping students meet credit requirements while they’re studying abroad or doing an internship. The UW is exploring all-online degree programs for nontraditional students, with the hope of developing at least one undergraduate program by 2020. It’s expanding early-start programs, which allow incoming freshmen to earn credits during the summer, and rolling out gap-year programs, which will accommodate those who earn admission but wish to delay full enrollment so they can travel, work, or volunteer.

A second priority is accessibility. The UW established Bucky’s Tuition Promise last year to reduce the financial burden on low- and middle-income families. Four years of tuition is now covered for any incoming Wisconsin student whose family’s household income is below the state median of $58,000. Noting that the university has tripled its investment in scholarships over the past 10 years, Blank said that it still faces shrinking state and federal aid. “I want every student who can qualify for admission to UW–Madison to be able to afford to come,” she said.

Blank identified research as an area of concern, with the UW’s expenditures lagging behind its peers over the past decade. Despite an 11 percent increase in research dollars during the past two years, the UW has dropped to sixth in national research expenditures, following decades among the top five universities. To address the trend, the UW is increasing stipends to attract top graduate students and establishing industry partnerships with the likes of GE Healthcare, Johnson Controls, and Foxconn.

Above all, the quality of the university “rests on its faculty,” Blank said. A cluster-hire program, which recruits cross-disciplinary faculty members with aligned interest in high-demand research areas, will hire more than 50 faculty members over five years. Another program is giving departments new tools and financial support to recruit faculty members from underrepresented groups in their respective fields. The biggest barrier remains the lack of competitive pay. “We’re number 14 of the 14 Big Ten schools,” Blank said, noting that UW professors earn, on average, 10.4 percent less than those at peer institutions. “That does not reflect our reputation and our strength.”

All of these key areas, Blank said, require reinvestment from the university as well as a renewed commitment by the state. She concluded by quoting former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “If you want to create a great city” — and a great state, she added — “first create a great university, and then wait 100 years.”

Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection

This elegant purse was one piece in the original bequest of Professor Helen Louise Allen to form the textile teaching collection that — 50 years on — still bears her name and continues to inform students, researchers, and historians today. This piece has become a talisman for the collection’s golden anniversary, which the School of Human Ecology is celebrating this year. The purse is an example of an ancient art called zardozi, a distinctive metallic embroidery associated with India and the Middle East. Taken from the Persian words for gold (zar) and embroidery (dozi), zardozi is usually formed around natural motifs wrought in silver, gold, and copper wire or metallic threads accented with sequins, beads, pearls, semi-precious stones, and jewels.

In a polarized world, UW–Madison fosters tough conversations.

On a warm autumn afternoon when I needed it badly, I got a shot of hope for the future of conversation. Pulling up a chair at the Memorial Union Terrace and eavesdropping there under the old oak trees, I heard brilliant debate by research scientists about the best way to get a stubborn gene to express. At another table, there was virtuosic smack talk accompanying a game of cribbage. These lovely (loud!) sounds are ear candy after the deafening silence of being among too many people staring at their phones. They confirmed for me that the great collegiate tradition of chewing the fat with friends lives on.

But I still worried about our collective capacity to have deep conversations about tough topics with people who aren’t already our friends or colleagues and who we suspect see the world from a different perspective. Research shows that, for the first time in more than two decades, members of both political parties have strongly unfavorable opinions of their opponents. And our society is highly subdivided in other ways, so that people often end up congregating almost exclusively — in real life and through online communities — with others who share the same racial, religious, and demographic profiles.

Luckily, though, many at UW–Madison are actively seeking, encouraging, and developing the ability to discuss difficult topics fruitfully. Students are seeking out opportunities to talk through some of the biggest matters on their minds, and they (like many faculty members) are eager to argue respectfully and learn more about what they don’t understand. And those of us eager to reclaim conversation — the face-to-face kind — as a means for sifting through the complexity of contemporary life and building bridges can learn a lot from listening to what people on campus are doing.

Fireside chats

Later last fall, I joined the student-run Afternoon Conversation Series, a regular all-comers-welcome meetup held beside the flickering hearth of the Prairie Fire coffee shop inside Union South. I found about a dozen undergrads and graduate students listening intently as the day’s invited guest, Sumudu Atapattu, director of the UW Law School’s Research Centers and a specialist in international environmental law, spoke in soft, serious tones about the impacts climate change is already having on daily life in places vulnerable to rising sea levels, including parts of Alaska.

Though the legal and human rights implications of climate change Atapattu detailed were sobering, the students present seemed undaunted, going on to pepper her with thoughtful questions about how they might help push for change. One young woman wondered if she could combine her interests in law, science, and economics in a career. Absolutely, Atapattu says. If we’re going to meet the challenges of climate change, “all of those disciplines need to learn how to communicate with each other.”

Last year the group also discussed the status of the young immigrants known as DREAMers and international women’s health. After the conversation, one of the group’s organizers told me that the aim of these intimate talks on serious topics is to give students a chance to interact with professors without “the usual intimidating student–teacher power dynamics.”

The art of argument

UW mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg is a fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and professional-grade curator of talk — one of those classic social network figures who’s as comfortable discussing baseball and James Baldwin as he is breaking down the intricacies of multivariable equations. Over tea at a café near campus last spring, Ellenberg says that, for him, a key benefit of working at “this gigantic, multifarious institution” is having many opportunities to chat and mind-meld with researchers working in far-flung disciplines, who often shed surprising new light on his work, and he on theirs. But he also enjoys the “intellectual exfoliation” he receives as a result of speaking with other faculty members who aren’t afraid to challenge conventional wisdom and “push you to expand and enlarge” how you view an issue.

One such stimulating loofah figure Ellenberg always likes being “a little conversationally scraped by” is Harry Brighouse. The UW philosophy professor has argued on his popular blog and at various campus gatherings on teaching methodologies that the standard, top-down instructional model many American college classrooms follow does students a disservice. Research shows that college students (and adults generally) can pay attention to a single speaker for only about 20 minutes. So Brighouse makes a deliberate point of beginning classes with a short lecture, but then largely ceding the floor to his students.

To keep the conversation on track — or to redirect when one or more students begin to dominate a group discussion — Brighouse continues to dole out questions carefully. And he has his students — most of whom are accustomed to socializing mainly with their dorm and apartment mates — introduce themselves to each other over and over. It’s a strategy inspired by his own experience as an undergraduate at King’s College London, where he not only took all of his classes with the same group of people, but lived and ate meals with them, too, sparring over philosophy and history all the while.

And his chief aim, he explains, is to help students burn through shyness to become friends and strong intellectual debate partners for each other.

“Some of my students come to college reeeeally reluctant to argue. But even they will eventually say, ‘What are we going to argue about next?’ They’re really hungry for this,” Brighouse says.

Describe your path

In his cozy office decorated with vintage school maps and a stellar collection of LEGO Star Wars ships, Greg Downey, associate dean for the social sciences in the College of Letters & Science, keeps a small conference table. Students know they can sit down and discuss their aspirations and future plans, bouncing ideas around until they land on ones that feel, if not perfect, then good enough for now. And it’s here — as well as in the college’s popular Taking Initiative professional planning course, which Downey leads, and its new SuccessWorks career center — where Downey and his colleagues are invested in helping students get hands-on experience and find the right words to describe their evolving skills and interests to prospective employers.

Companies consistently report that they consider strong verbal and written communication skills essential for hiring, and there’s evidence from social psychology showing that creating an overarching narrative (aka storyline) for your life helps people gain healthy perspective and move ahead fruitfully. Downey has each of his students develop a “two-minute career story” and practice delivering it with classmates. Some struggle with the assignment. Maybe they’ve heard that speaking about your accomplishments amounts to bragging, or they’re still not entirely sure what they want to do with their lives, Downey explains. But once they hear other students sharing similar stories and realize that it’s okay to be still exploring options and just say this plainly, they usually get more comfortable.

But there are other reasons why he thinks it’s important for him, and faculty and staff at colleges everywhere, to be available to speak with students about whatever’s weighing on their minds. “UW students are accomplished and goal-oriented,” Downey says. “If you set them a task, they will work through it.” But he and other campus advisers have also realized — partly in light of the fact that the number of college students seeking treatment for anxiety and depression has shot up in recent years — “that we need to be continually active in encouraging our students to talk with us, and talk with each other,” he says.

Beyond managing coursework, many students today face “family pressures, peer pressures, [and] pressures from jobs. Technology pervades their lives, and while sometimes it helps them cope, sometimes it ratchets those pressures up.”

Group dynamics

More and more, students and faculty are seeking out and welcoming conversations where they can feel not only free, but encouraged to unfurl — working through difficult thoughts together with others in an unhurried way, saying things they’ve never said (or thought) before, opening up new doors of understanding to combat distrust.

Last fall, the UW released its Campus Climate Survey, which found that, while most students find the campus to be a safe, welcoming, and respectful place, students of color and from other historically disadvantaged groups consistently rated the climate less favorably overall than students from majority groups did. And since then, the work of various UW discussion programs created to foster greater equality, inclusion, and understanding across differences has taken on new urgency.

One such program, run by the UW School of Education’s Department of Counseling Psychology, is Diversity Dialogues. When it started almost 15 years ago, the big, burning divide that students wanted to discuss was the difference between students from the Midwest and the coasts. But now that issues of racial discrimination, gender nonconformity, and economic disparity have shot to the forefront of national news, students from different racial, ethnic, gender, and class backgrounds are eager to meet and talk about how these dimensions have shaped their experiences and perceptions.

UW professor of counseling psychology Steve Quintana, who directs Diversity Dialogues, says that one of its primary objectives is to help students recognize that all people (not just those who are obviously similar to them) are “living rich, interesting, and complex lives.” The theory behind deepening social understanding is that it makes it easier for people to understand and appreciate (if not always love) why others may act a certain way or hold a certain view.

To help students who typically have never met before they start talking, Quintana and other dialogue facilitators give participants different cues, such as asking them to describe pivotal childhood experiences or their own negative or positive experiences of diversity. A running rule is that no one can interrupt whoever is speaking for at least 90 seconds. Facilitators also work to sustain a respectful balance by reminding participants that every person’s perspective and personal experience are valid.

They also point out that mixed-company conversations on race, in particular, have a tendency to become “one-sided white confessionals,” wherein white students wax on describing their guilt over certain societal privileges they’ve enjoyed, at the expense (in terms of comfort) of black students in the group. But just naming the potential dynamic up front and noting that it can place additional burdens on black students is a surprisingly effective way of keeping it at bay, Quintana says.

After they’ve participated in the program, many students tell him that learning how to trade notes on class, race, sexuality, and other topics in a calm, non-adversarial setting (unlike so many of the combative finger-pointing sessions we see on TV today) made them feel more flexible and open — and eager to keep speaking with people who aren’t obviously like them. Getting new “windows into the depths of people’s experience is rewarding,” Quintana says. Once they’ve realized that everyone has an interesting story to tell, students often say they’re more likely to break the ice with strangers in everyday settings.

Comfortable with uncomfortable

UW professor Christy Clark-Pujara often spends the first few sessions of her classes on African American history and the history of slavery speaking with students about why it’s important for them to be able to discuss race together, even though it’s a subject many of them have been told to avoid. And she explains that “it’s okay to feel uncomfortable in this class, and even a good thing, because that’s where you learn and grow.” Clark-Pujara knows most of her students have so far been taught only the scantest rendition of black American history: “First there was slavery. That was bad, but some people were nice. Then there was Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, and now everything’s fine.” But then she begins fleshing out that time line with stories that fly in the face of certain well-oiled myths, including the myth that slaves did little to resist their circumstances.

“When you look at the primary documents, the history of slavery becomes a history of great resistance — not only physical, but moral, emotional, and cultural resistance,” Clark-Pujara says. She also disproves the folkloric belief that Wisconsin was always free of slavery. French-Canadian trappers brought slaves with them when they settled here in the early 1700s. When Southerners — including Henry Dodge, two-time governor of the Territory of Wisconsin — arrived in the early 1800s to mine for lead in the southwestern part of what later became the state, they had slaves with them, too.

At some point during the semester, students of different races overflow with “indignation” over never having been given an inkling of this richer, more complicated history. Clark-Pujara is there for all of it, ready to help them talk through and process “the terribly uncomfortable” fact that the “economic ascent of the United States rests on the backs of enslaved black people.” Empathy is a major theme in the class, she adds.

As we neared the end of our own conversation, Clark-Pujara pulled out two thank-you notes she had just received from students who’d taken her Introduction to African American History course. Each described a different way in which the class and Clark-Pujara’s teaching had changed not only their minds but their lives. The notes were beautiful. And they reminded me why talk, at the UW and everywhere, is so vital to staying alive and engaged: our world is never going to be perfect, and individuals and systems will inevitably let us down. But we should by no means withdraw and give up.

By debating and grappling with new ideas together with others, in real time — riding tides of confrontation without getting too rattled, watching one another’s faces light up and fall and light up again — we get to take another look at what we think, and make it better.

But we can’t get there through silence.

Number of manholes on campus. Photo: Jeff Miller.

There’s a reason why UW-Madison is in the Big Ten: it’s a big university. Its central campus covers 936 acres and has 388 buildings (since the opening of Signe Skott Cooper Hall, home of the School of Nursing, in 2014). Servicing all of these buildings across all this area isn’t easy. The university uses 1,107 manholes to maintain twenty-five miles of sanitary sewers, and twenty-five miles more of storm sewers. That means the UW has one manhole for every 238 and a half feet of pipe.