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

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.”

Irene Duch-Latorre

The UW announced the winners of this year’s Cool Science Image contest in April: 10 photos and two videos, including this shot of pygmy marmosets submitted by Irene Duch-Latorre PhDx’20. “Pygmy marmosets are the smallest monkeys in the world,” she wrote. “While their pocket-friendly size makes them cute, it also makes them desirable exotic pets, and [they are] frequently trafficked far from their home range in the Amazon River basin.” See other winners on the UW News site.

Orange barrels and detours greeted campus visitors hoping to linger in the State Street and Library Mall area over the summer. Work is wrapping up this fall on a first phase of mall reconstruction (shown in the lower portion of the rendering above), with improvements that include trees, landscaping, and new seating areas. One of the first big changes: removing the hulking concrete podium and stage, pictured at left, that split the mall in two. Photo: Jeff Miller; Rendering: City of Madison.

A beloved area of central campus gets a much-needed upgrade.

In Wisconsin, as the joke goes, there are two seasons: winter and road construction.

The campus end of State Street and adjoining Library Mall have been living up to that punch line this year, with orange barrels and noisy excavators detouring pedestrians in search of food carts and a place to people-watch.

But the changes to the historic area, which is bordered by Lake and Park Streets, aren’t being made without input from the people who frequent it.

“It’s really the beating heart of the campus and of the community. It’s where the president comes to speak, where memorials for September 11 have been held — all kinds of things happen in that space,” says Gary Brown ’84, director of campus planning and landscape architecture. “We want to get it right.”

UW and city officials reached out to gather opinions, holding public meetings and even installing chalkboards so passersby could express what they loved about the campus area and what they would like to see improved. People wanted it to be more flexible, lively, and colorful, and able to accommodate the variety of activities that the campus and community hold there throughout the seasons.

When the work is done this fall on the two blocks of State Street that make up the pedestrian mall, there will be new lighting, landscaping, public artwork, and seating areas. The project is also replacing the crosswalk at North Park Street that leads to the base of Bascom Hill. “[The area is] more of a community resource than just a campus resource. It’s used by everybody,” Brown says. “It’s really an amazing public space.” But completion of this project doesn’t signal the end of construction. What is officially considered Library Mall — the open area between the Wisconsin Historical Society and Memorial Library — will spend the next few years as a staging area for the second phase of renovations at Memorial Union and the construction of Alumni Park at the shore of Lake Mendota before undergoing its own facelift sometime in the future.

Students had a blast from the past

Photo: Bryce Richter

when plastic pink flamingos returned to Bascom Hill at the start of the fall semester. Echoing a classic prank by the 1970s Pail and Shovel Party, students placed 400 flamingos on the hill to promote Flamingo Run, a convenience store located in the campus’s new Dejope Residence Hall.

• The School of Human Ecology named Soyeon Shim as its new dean, succeeding Robin Douthitt. Shim was previously the director of the School of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Arizona. Also coming from Arizona is Paul Robbins ’89, who has been appointed director of the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. The School of Veterinary Medicine named Mark Markel as its third dean, following Daryl Buss MS’74, PhD’75 and Barney Easterday MS’58, PhD’61.
• As Memorial Union’s reconstruction continues,
  

  Photo: Herschel Kissinger

  workers removed the James Watrous murals that decorate the Paul Bunyan Room. The murals were painted in the 1930s and depict the Paul Bunyan legend. They will be returned in 2014. Similarly, murals in the Stiftskeller and the collection of steins that decorate the Rathskeller have been put into storage until the renovation is complete.

• Hiring a new UW-Madison chancellor took a step forward in September when the UW System formed a search committee. The group includes thirteen faculty members and twelve staff, students, administrators, and community representatives. Its charge is to form a short list of five candidates for the board of regents to evaluate to succeed Interim Chancellor David Ward MS’62, PhD’63.
• Engineering Professor John Moskwa is the first university professor to earn the Cole Award for Automotive Engineering Innovation from the Society of Automotive Engineers International. It lauds his work in high-bandwidth engine transient test systems.
• Victory Media named UW–Madison
  

  Photo: Jeff Miller

  among the top 15 percent of military-friendly colleges and universities in America. The UW enrolls some 600 military and veteran students.