Recent advances in data analysis allowed the researchers to gain new insights about the impact of 100-year-old laws. PhotoQuest

A new study found that people who were born in “dry” counties during the Prohibition era lived an additional 1.7 years, compared to those born in “wet” counties. Because parts of the United States became dry through state and federal regulation at different times between 1900 and 1930, data from this period provided a natural basis for comparison.

Jason Fletcher MS’03, PhD’06 of the La Follette School of Public Affairs is a coauthor on the study, which was the first to look at the long-term effects of Prohibition on longevity.

“Researchers now understand that exposures during pregnancy, due to interruptions to fetal development, can have long-term cascading effects on later-life health,” Fletcher says. He adds that recent advances in data analysis allowed the researchers to gain new insights about the impact of 100-year-old laws.

The findings could have implications for public health policy during a time when the number of mothers who drink during pregnancy has risen from 9.2 percent in 2011 to nearly 14 percent in 2022.

WFAA staffer Briana Morganroth ’17 served ice cream during last summer’s state tour. The complimentary treat is a popular perk of the 175th festivities on the road. Chris Flink

What could be better on a warm summer day than a chance to mingle with fellow Badgers and enjoy free family activities?

In a continuing celebration of UW–Madison’s 175th anniversary and its contributions to communities throughout Wisconsin, the university’s state tour will include visits to several more cities this summer.

First up is a May 30 stop in the Fox Valley (Appleton), and Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin will join the team for this event. The remaining visits are Janesville on June 25; Chippewa Falls/Eau Claire on August 14; Waukesha on August 22; and La Crosse on a date to be determined.

The tour features activities such as games, giveaways, music, and photo booths, and complimentary Babcock ice cream will be available. Some of the visits will feature interviews with local alumni chefs or other foodie trendsetters following the events.

The tour began last summer, when UW–Madison traveled to Green Bay, Sheboygan, Milwaukee, and Wausau. The events are designed to celebrate the UW’s impact on the state. From the beginning, the university has positively influenced every corner of Wisconsin, functioning as a vital contributor to the state’s industry and economy and helping to raise the standard of living. It has also provided an affordable education to hundreds of thousands of students, many of whom have stayed in — or returned to — the state and continue to give back.

“The most meaningful part of the tour has been witnessing the tangible impact that the UW has on citizens of Wisconsin through partnerships with businesses and communities,” says Sarah Schutt, the Wisconsin Alumni Association’s executive director. “I imagine the UW’s founders would be proud to see how the university they envisioned so many years ago has evolved into today’s world-class institution and become an economic engine for the state.”

Don’t miss out on the fun! See 175.wisc.edu/state-tour for more information.

That is, except to Wisconsinites, who rewarded his earnestness by electing him to four terms from 1989 to 2013. He was, according to his famous campaign slogan, nobody’s senator but theirs.

Former colleagues of Kohl, fellow Democrats and rival Republicans alike, invariably describe him as gracious and honest, quiet but effective, and above all, dedicated to Wisconsin.

A decade after he left office, with Washington consumed by partisanship and gridlock, Kohl’s soft touch in the Senate seems almost archaic. But always an optimist, he continues to work behind the scenes to promote practical solutions to society’s problems. In 2019, he donated a record $10 million to the UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs. The gift has already proved transformative for the school, boosting its efforts to train future leaders and advance the public good.

“I think we are seeing all of our greatest fears right now. The chaos, the disregard for truth and facts, the unwillingness to listen and talk to each other,” Kohl says. “But my greatest hope is in the fact that we are still a democracy in the greatest country in the world. I think we can look to appeal to our better angels and come together if we make the effort.”

Kohl, 87, believes he still has a debt to pay off, despite decades of public service and hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropic gifts. It’s the debt he feels from having had such good fortune in his life. In his first stump speech in 1988, he noted that wealthy people have a “special responsibility to those who are not as comfortably well off” — those like his parents, European Jewish immigrants who came to America with nothing and built a business empire that set the stage for one of Wisconsin’s most beloved public servants.

The American Dream

The Kohl family’s American dream began 100 years ago. Kohl’s father, Max, emigrated from Poland, and his mother, Mary, from Russia. They left behind many family members in Europe who later lost their lives to the Holocaust.

Struggling to find their way in Milwaukee, the couple decided to open a corner food market beneath their southside apartment in 1927. Their English was so poor that customers had to point at the items they wanted to purchase.

Max and Mary Kohl often discussed social justice at the dinner table with their kids.

“They always looked forward to the future with optimism and determination,” Kohl says. “And they showed us that your life would be measured far more by what you contribute than by what you have.”

In 1946, at age 11, Kohl cut the ribbon at his family’s first supermarket, which would soon expand to multiple locations. In 1962, the family opened the first Kohl’s department store. It’s now the largest such chain in the United States with more than 1,000 stores. Kohl grew up with his sister and two brothers on 51st Boulevard in the Sherman Park neighborhood. A few hundred feet away on 52nd Street lived Bud Selig ’56, the future commissioner of Major League Baseball. They met in early grade school and have remained best friends for more than eight decades. They still meet for lunch almost every week, calling each other only by their last names.

“We have a lot of great memories, fun and funny stories, and maybe even a bit of a shtick,” Kohl says.

They bonded over sports from an early age, and Kohl delights in sharing the story of how the two faced each other as captains of their respective baseball teams in the sixth grade. In Kohl’s telling, Selig recruited a towering 6-foot-something stranger to pitch in the championship game. Kohl’s team struck out at every at-bat and lost 9–0.

“He has a wonderful imagination,” Selig says, laughing.

The two friends found their way to the UW for what Kohl calls the best four years of his life. Both he and Selig studied history and political science, roomed together, and joined the Jewish fraternity Pi Lambda Phi.

Kohl (right) with best friend Bud Selig in the 1955 Badger yearbook. He calls his UW experience the best four years of his life. UW Digitized Collections

At the UW, Selig became close friends with Charlie Thomas ’57, a Black football player, and encouraged him to join the otherwise all-white fraternity. It was a radical notion in the 1950s, but Kohl immediately offered his support.

Thomas’s pledging was controversial both inside and outside of the fraternity house. But on the night of the vote, which lasted until 2 a.m., Selig and Kohl deployed the persuasive skills that would later define their careers. They convinced their peers to integrate the fraternity. Thomas went on to a successful career as superintendent of North Chicago schools.

Kohl still holds dear the values his immigrant parents instilled in him: integrity, humility, determination, kindness, hard work, resilience. They’re the same ones that made him one of Wisconsin’s most respected employers and policymakers.

“He’s Unique”

After he graduated from the UW, Kohl earned an MBA from Harvard, joined the Army Reserve, and became president of the Kohl’s Corporation, which had expanded to 50 supermarkets and several department stores.

Taking after his father, Kohl continued to run the rapidly growing chain as if it were still a small mom-and-pop shop. He conducted many job interviews himself, believing that employees would be more loyal if they were hired by a Kohl family member. He made the rounds to every store, inspecting the tidiness of food displays and even bagging groceries for customers during busy times.

“With any store we walked into, he knew every employee by their first name, and he knew all their families,” Selig says. “You could tell his whole heart and soul was into it.”

Employees stayed for years, if not their entire careers. They had their own credit union and health insurance. They had five weeks of paid vacation. They received employee discounts and grocery coupons to buy Christmas dinner for their families.

“Our employees were extensions of our family,” Kohl says.

The family sold the business in 1979. Almost a decade later, when Kohl first ran for office, many former employees championed their former boss. Mary Carini, who worked for Kohl’s food stores for 10 years, was a registered Republican but volunteered for Kohl’s 1988 Democratic campaign, still touched by how he checked in on her during her divorce.

“He’s unique,” she told the Capital Times. “I never knew a businessman of his caliber of intelligence and drive, yet so compassionate toward people.” It didn’t hurt Kohl’s political prospects that he was the savior of the state’s professional basketball team. Milwaukee Bucks owner Jim Fitzgerald announced in 1985 that he was selling the franchise, lamenting that its arena had the lowest seating capacity in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Kohl feared a sale to out-of-town bidders.

“I knew I needed to step up and do what I could to keep the Bucks here,” says Kohl, who bought the team for nearly $20 million.

Kohl preserved the Bucks yet again in 2014. He sold the franchise with the contingency that the new owners make a long-term commitment to Milwaukee. He also donated $100 million to the construction of a new arena to help make that a reality.

And Kohl arguably deserves as much credit as anyone for the team’s 2021 NBA championship. It was under his ownership that the Bucks drafted league MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo and traded for all-star Khris Middleton. Before the championship parade, a TV reporter told Kohl that he made the moment possible by saving the team. Kohl, looking as always like he wanted to be anywhere but in the spotlight, responded simply: “Well, that’s nice to hear. I was one of many.”

Such implausible humility is familiar to anyone who knew him as a senator.

A Nonpolitical Aura

It’s one of the most effective and imitated slogans in recent political history: “Nobody’s senator but yours.”

“Voices of special interests were drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens,” Kohl says of his first Senate run in 1988. “And I made the pledge not to accept contributions from political action committees or other special interests.”

As he stated at his campaign kickoff event: “The important thing is that when the campaign is over, I will owe nothing to anybody but the people of Wisconsin.”

Crucially, Kohl’s everyman personality made it believable that he couldn’t be bought. He often wears the same navy-blue blazer with a faded Bucks cap. Even when he owned an NBA team, he sat with the crowd rather than at courtside. He’s lived in the same Milwaukee condo for 50 years. He prefers to dine at casual “paper napkin” restaurants like George Webb and Ma Fischer’s.

“I think in a lot of ways he was always seen as a guy with Wisconsin at the forefront and as a businessman at heart,” says Scott Klug MBA’90, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin who served with Kohl for eight years. “That gave him sort of a nonpolitical aura.”

Kohl was late to enter the crowded Democratic primary in 1988. At 53, he was a political outsider. He staked liberal-to-moderate positions on issues, overcame a few gaffes, and sailed through the primary, despite criticism about his heavy campaign spending. Kohl won the seat and held onto it with steadily increasing support. In his last Senate race, he carried all 72 Wisconsin counties. He did it by treating public office a lot like his business. But now, five million Wisconsin citizens were his customers.

A Workhorse Senator

He welcomed them all. The office hosted Wednesday morning breakfast for any Wisconsinites who happened to be visiting Washington, DC. The senator would stop by, take photos, and hand out Bucks pens. His aides were on hand to respond to the visitors’ policy concerns or assist them with their travel plans.

“It was mandatory,” says Ben Miller, who served as a legislative aide in Kohl’s office in the early 2000s and now oversees government affairs for UW–Madison. “Every week, we all had to be there with doughnuts and coffee.”

Kohl’s office earned the reputation as one of the best customer service operations in the Senate. If a constituent called about a missing Social Security check, his staff would promptly track it down. Every phone call was returned, and every letter answered.

Behind the scenes, Kohl was one of the Senate’s biggest (if quietest) players, sponsoring or cosponsoring more than 3,000 pieces of legislation over his career. With gun violence on the rise in the ’90s, he negotiated a series of bipartisan gun-control measures. He authored a bill banning guns in school zones. When the Supreme Court overturned it on a technicality, he rewrote the legislation to address the loophole and prohibit guns within 1,000 feet of schools. He also cosponsored the Brady Bill, which required an instant background check and a five-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns.

Such bipartisan compromises on a hot-button issue were anything but inevitable. In July 1998, Kohl wrote legislation mandating that manufacturers include child-safety locks with the sale of handguns. He allowed California senator Barbara Boxer to serve as the lead sponsor of the amendment, which the Senate rejected on a 39–61 vote. Less than a year later, Kohl introduced a nearly identical proposal. It passed 78–20.

“We used to call it the ‘Herb Kohl Vote Count’ in our office. There would always be more support than projected when Senator Kohl held a floor vote because his colleagues on both sides of the aisle trusted him,” says Jon Leibowitz ’80, a former chief counsel for Kohl who later became chair of the Federal Trade Commission. “Everyone knew he was doing it for the right reasons, and they would want to vote with him.”

With a soft voice, shy demeanor, and short stature, Kohl rarely commanded the room. But when he did talk, his colleagues knew to listen.

Republican senator Chuck Grassley told Milwaukee Magazine in 2010: “I’ll bet he never has done anything to harm or hurt anybody behind their back.” He added that he probably talked to Kohl less than to any other senator, and yet accomplished more with him than anyone else.

“Since I came from the world of running a business, politics to me has always been based on working hard, finding common ground, and getting things done,” Kohl says. “It often means being willing to meet in the middle.”

Over 24 years, he cast his fair share of controversial votes. He voted to prohibit same-sex marriage in 1996 but against a constitutional ban in 2006. In 2002, he supported the resolution to authorize the use of military force in Iraq.

“I had misgivings at the time but ended up voting in favor,” he says. “I was wrong.”

After his fourth term, Kohl retired from the Senate in 2013. His colleagues lined up to recognize his legislative achievements around public education, health care, child and senior care, consumer rights, and Wisconsin’s dairy industry. One called him “a classic workhorse senator, as opposed to a show horse senator.”

“He saw it as his job to give a voice to people who need to be heard in Washington — children, working families, and farmers,” says Tammy Baldwin JD’89, who won Kohl’s Senate seat after he retired. “I think when you ask people what they want public service to be, Herb’s legacy is a shining example of what it can and should be.”

Leading by Example

Kohl’s father once told him the old adage “Money is like manure; it’s not good unless you spread it around.” Kohl has made a habit of it.

In 1990, he started the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation, which has provided more than $30 million in grants and scholarships to Wisconsin students, teachers, and schools. His main charitable entity, Herb Kohl Philanthropies, has awarded thousands of grants to nonprofits that support educational and economic opportunity.

“My parents taught me the immeasurable value of a good education,” Kohl says. “Education is an investment with the greatest return. It is also the great equalizer.”

After the UW struggled for years to fund a new sports facility to augment the aging Field House, Kohl stepped forward with a $25 million lead gift in 1995 for the basketball and hockey center that still bears his name.

And now he has turned his attention back to policymaking. In 2016, he gave a $1.5 million gift to the UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs to establish the Herb Kohl Public Service Research Competition, which supports evidence-based policy and governance research by faculty members and students. Topics have ranged from childhood poverty and solar energy to water quality and opioid prescriptions.

Encouraged by its success, Kohl donated $10 million in 2019 to boost the school’s outreach, teaching, and research efforts.

“Our democracy is being threatened by bitter partisanship, and the La Follette School is poised to lead by example — fostering cooperation, respectful discourse, and service to others,” Kohl said at the time.

The school now hosts the annual La Follette Forum, convening hundreds of lawmakers and leaders to discuss timely policy topics and bridge partisan divides. It’s launched a poll to capture Wisconsin residents’ thoughts on policy issues. And it’s holding several community events across the state this fall to share policy research and enhance public discourse.

“At UW–Madison, we’re not just convening conversations,” says Professor Susan Webb Yackee, director of the La Follette School. “We’re creating the research that identifies major problems and connects them to solutions. We’re educating future leaders whose public policy skills will translate to government action.”

With Kohl’s support, the UW is becoming an incubator for practical solutions and a setting for common ground. To say he’s fighting an uphill battle may be the understatement of this political decade. Congress — and much of the country — has doubled down on partisanship and division.

Is it too late?

“I have to believe that there’s still room in today’s political environment for people like Senator Kohl,” says Miller, his former legislative aide. “Otherwise, I’m not sure how I would get through the day. I don’t want to lose hope. And part of that optimism is because of what he’s instilled in me.” •

Mnookin: “Nearly everyone I’ve met shares a deep sense of pride in this university.”

Jennifer L. Mnookin started her job as UW–Madison chancellor on August 4, and she wasted little time immersing herself in Badger culture. She served Babcock ice cream at an all-campus party on Bascom Hill, posed for pictures with her new friend Bucky Badger, and scheduled listening sessions with faculty, staff, alumni, student groups, legislators, tribal leaders, and community members. Mnookin also took time to tell On Wisconsin about her unique approach to creating a vision for the UW’s future.

How are you adapting to life at UW–Madison after 17 years at UCLA?

It’s been an exciting first few months, a whirlwind but wonderful. I’ve been soaking in as much as I can about our university, our broader community, and the state. That’s involved many meetings with faculty, staff, students, and alums, and opportunities to do things like meet with fruit farmers who partner with one of our agricultural research stations, hold a baby pig at a county fair, and start to meet community leaders and legislators in Madison and across the state. Provost Karl Scholz has teased me that every time he asks me, “How’s it going?” I respond with some enthusiastic version of “Great!” and then share with him some interesting tidbit that I’ve just learned about this amazing university.

What’s so striking is that nearly everyone I’ve met shares a deep sense of pride in this university. Though we might sometimes have different ideas about priorities, virtually everyone does want to see us continue to grow and thrive, and I’ve already benefited from hearing a variety of thoughtful perspectives about UW–Madison’s next chapter.

I’ve also been grateful for the many suggestions about how my husband and I should best embrace our first winter in Wisconsin. I’m hearing that lots of layers are even more important than the perfect winter coat! (I still do have a little time before I actually need that winter wardrobe, right?)

What are your top priorities for your first year at the UW?

My top priority right now is to listen and learn. The best vision for the university’s next chapter isn’t going to emerge from a 10-point list from on high; it’s going to grow out of building a genuinely collective vision for the university’s future. I’ve been asking everyone I meet two questions: What is working well here? And where do you see the most meaningful opportunities for change?

I want to hear ideas that are feasible and concrete, and I also want to hear ideas that are ambitious, creative, and innovative.

I am deeply committed to making sure UW–Madison is a place where we can discuss everything — the ideas we strongly agree with and the ideas we strongly disagree with. That’s sifting and winnowing, and it’s part of what both academic freedom and freedom of speech are all about. At the same time, I want to make sure our students feel safe and supported and know that they belong here even when they’re in discussions with classmates who might have very different worldviews. Both the university as a place of vibrant and sometimes challenging intellectual exchange, and the university as a space of belonging for those who are with us, whatever their identities, backgrounds, or political perspectives, are very important to me.

How do you see UW–Madison leveraging its strengths to make a difference in the world?

I’ve spent my academic career at top public universities, and they all have a mission to make a difference in the world — but here at UW–Madison, that mission is even a bit stronger and more foundational to our identity and sense of purpose. There are several reasons, I think, that we’ve been able to build this culture and to engage in real-world problem-solving in an energetic way.

The first is our dedication to working across disciplines to solve complex problems. We have veterinarians working with physicians, pharmacists, and engineers, for example, on research related to animal health that also has major implications for human health in areas like cancer treatment and animal–human disease transmission. Cross-disciplinary work can be enormously challenging, but we know that bringing creative researchers together across disciplines to work on critical problems can spark extraordinary discovery and innovation. There’s a serious interest in thinking across here, and that’s a great thing.

Related to this is a second important value, the Wisconsin Idea. Our commitment to public service shapes the way we teach and drives many of the crosscurrents that make our research enterprise extraordinarily broad, deep, and excellent. As we approach our 175th anniversary next year, we have an opportunity to celebrate the Wisconsin Idea in a way that further builds UW–Madison as a national and global model for what a great public university can be.

Finish this sentence: “I’ll have a brat, cheese curds, and …”

A scoop of Babcock Dairy’s orange custard chocolate chip!

Salas’s precarious life as a migrant worker led him to value labor rights. Wisconsin Historical Society

As a labor organizer, as a student, and as an educator, Jesús Salas MA’85 follows one principle, which he learned from Cesar Chavez: “When you start something, you stay for the duration,” Salas says. “It doesn’t matter how long the duration is.”

Throughout his career, from teenage migrant worker to UW System regent, Salas pursued goals requiring long-term effort. In the 1960s, he helped create the labor union Obreros Unidos, and after earning his master’s, he helped establish UW–Madison’s Chican@ and Latin@ Studies program. Persistence saw him through.

Salas was born in Crystal City, Texas, in a community of Chicano migrant workers. They followed an annual circuit, traveling north as the frost receded and south as it advanced again.

Throughout the 1950s, Salas went to school in the communities where his family worked, until his parents bought a café in Wautoma, Wisconsin.

The precarious life of a migrant worker led Salas to value labor rights. In the 1960s, he began to organize fellow laborers. His initial efforts were frustrating: owners fired those who joined unions, and county officials harassed organizers.

But Salas took inspiration from Chavez, who was then organizing migrant workers in California. He chose to persist.

Eventually, Salas connected with a UW–Madison professor, Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush MA’24, PhD’28, an economist with the Institute for Research on Poverty.

“She headed the first Poverty Institute Migrant Wage and Working Conditions Study, and she hired me and my brother to go into the camps and introduce a whole core of graduate students from UW–Madison,” Salas says.

While organizing, he completed his bachelor’s and then master’s degrees, a process that took about 20 years.

And when he was done, he took his degree in political science and began teaching at Milwaukee Area Technical College, where he helped establish a bilingual teaching program.

Governor Jim Doyle’67 appointed Salas to the UW System Board of Regents in 2003, and he served until 2007. He worked on the physical planning committee, advocating for infrastructure improvements and for continued growth in services for the Latino community.

In retirement, Salas continues to travel to Crystal City, Texas, and to advocate for migrant workers’ rights.

“It’s been a long haul,” he says, “But we stay with it.”

Sethi: “We should remember that people at the CDC, people in our local health departments, are human beings just like us.”

For more than a decade, Ajay Sethi has been on the UW–Madison faculty in the Department of Population Health Sciences, doing the typical work of a professor with a mostly low-profile professional life. He conducted research in Uganda and Wisconsin and taught courses in epidemiology. Following the increasing occurrence of measles outbreaks in the United States, he took an interest in misinformation and conspiracy theories. He developed a course called Conspiracies in Public Health, aiming to help practitioners have conversations with clients and the community about hot-button health topics. During the pandemic, Sethi was in demand as an expert — he gave more than 400 interviews in 2020 and 2021. His low-profile days are over.

What’s it like to be featured so often in the news?

It definitely has changed how I spend my time. It certainly has made me feel like I’m part of an enterprise at the university, trying to help the public navigate the pandemic. It gives me a sense of purpose, and that’s always an important thing for anybody to have — when you wake up in the morning, to feel like what you’re doing may make a difference. But I also understand that every interview or every engagement with the community is just a tiny little drop in the bucket.

A lot of scientists became media figures. What mistakes have they made?

I’m sometimes a little dismayed when people who are part of the pandemic response are finding fault in what the Centers for Disease Control is doing. While I understand that there should be healthy debate in thinking about risk communication and how we help society navigate this, I think public arguments and finger-pointing by credentialed people only erode trust further. We should just remember that people at the CDC, people in our local health departments, are human beings just like us.

Why do you focus on misinformation?

I’ve always incorporated some element of behavioral science in most of my research — just thinking about what types of behaviors may promote the spread of infectious diseases and what kind of behaviors can prevent their becoming a burden to ourselves and to society. I don’t find that a lack of knowledge is preventing us from managing COVID-19. Really, it’s the division that we have in society that prevents us collectively from moving on. When we have that, it just generates a lot of resistance toward things that are quite normal.

What have you taken away from your public experience?

It’s been a privilege to be asked to contribute to news stories and to represent the university. I’m not out in the community as much as some people are, but when I do get those opportunities, I try my best.

Sethi is on the faculty in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH). In May 2022, SMPH and UW Health, which have partnered for more than 100 years, launched the Wisconsin Medicine campaign to raise funds in support of research, education, patient care, and health equity. Learn more at wiscmedicine.org.

Ross with the rare mahogany that had been stored in the Forest Products Lab basement since 1919. Steve Apps/Wisconsin State Journal

When the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol caused extensive damage to historical wooden artifacts, Robert Ross, the acting assistant director of the USDA Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) on the UW–Madison campus, came to the rescue.

The vandalism had caused damage to doors and woodwork made of mahogany, which now has protected international conservation status. This means that the old-growth mahogany originally used in the Capitol is no longer available.

Ross knew that Forest Products happened to have some priceless mahogany that had been stored in its basement since 1919, most likely left over from a study on wooden propellers used for warplanes in France.

Lab staff carefully wrapped some 3,000 pounds of the precious wood and shipped it to the Capitol, where repair work began in June.

Ross told the FPL website Lab Notes that he felt privileged to play a part in the restoration. “I consider working on the U.S. Capitol the most important project I’ve ever worked on,” he said, “because it serves to rebuild the heart of our democracy.”

It’s a nice night, about 37 degrees and clear — a stark contrast to the six-inch blustery blizzard blanketing Madison. Lindsay arrives, and Linda hops into the car. The Zoom call that Linda’s taking on her iPhone automatically connects to the car’s Bluetooth, and it takes a bit of fumbling to get it back to the phone’s speaker. It’s rush hour — 5:05 p.m. eastern time — but traffic is pretty light. The two are going to have dinner with the other members of their “bubble”: Linda’s son, Lafayette, and his family. By all accounts, it’s a perfectly average family on a perfectly average night.

Only this family is far from average, especially its matriarch. For she’s Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield, and in two months, she will be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve in President Biden’s cabinet as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. One of the first cabinet picks announced on November 24, 2020, her nomination was met with resounding applause from diplomats and leaders across the globe.

This is not Thomas-Greenfield’s first time in a presidential administration. Under George W. Bush, she held the post of U.S. ambassador to Liberia. Beginning in 2013, she served the Obama administration as the assistant secretary for the Bureau of African Affairs. She held that position through 2017, when it was eliminated by the Trump administration in a downsizing effort. Thomas-Greenfield is a proud career diplomat, but it’s certainly not the direction she had anticipated her life would take. Her dream was to be a lawyer; it’s the first thing she remembers wanting to be when she grew up. While that dream may have changed over time, UW–Madison recognized her excellence and service with an honorary doctor of laws in 2018.

Excellence and service run in the family: Thomas-Greenfield met her husband, Lafayette Greenfield, while they were both working in Liberia as foreign service officers for the U.S. Department of State. Lindsay followed in their footsteps and now works as a foreign service specialist stationed in La Paz, Bolivia. She’s home for the holidays, but heads back overseas tomorrow (thus Tuesday night’s family dinner). And son Lafayette II realized his mom’s childhood dream and earned his law degree from Howard University in 2013. He is now a partner at a DC firm.

Raising a family while in the foreign service wasn’t an easy feat, but Thomas-Greenfield excels at transitions. “Studies have shown that the most stressful time in a person’s life is when they’re moving from one place to another,” she says. “As foreign service diplomats, we have these stresses every two to three years.”

Perhaps her most challenging move, she recalls, was relocating to Pakistan from Kenya. “Me, too!” Lindsay chimes in from the driver’s seat. Mother and daughter share a quick aside, tallying up the places Lindsay has lived.

“Maybe seven?” Lindsay thinks. “No,” says Linda. “You lived in Nigeria, the Gambia, Kenya, Pakistan, and Switzerland with me.”

“And Lima!”

“Oh, she was in Lima, Peru!”

Linda transitions back to her Zoom call and, like a proud parent, adds, “And then she joined the foreign service and went to DRC Congo, and is now serving in La Paz.”

Amid all of these transitions, it was important to keep the family grounded. No matter where they were, every year the whole family would return to the U.S. and Thomas-Greenfield’s home state of Louisiana. There the children could connect with their family, grow up knowing their relatives, and develop a sense of rootedness.

Thomas-Greenfield was born in Baker, Louisiana, in 1952. The population at the time was shy of 5,000. As she described in a 2018 TEDx Talk, “We’re in the Deep South. I’m in a segregated town in which the KKK regularly would come on weekends and burn a cross in somebody’s yard.” Graduating from high school was bold for Thomas-Greenfield, and not just because she was bused every day past two all-white, better-funded high schools to get to her own.

Her mother had gone to school only through eighth grade. Her father left school in third grade so he could work. “He couldn’t read or write,” she said in the TEDx Talk, “but he was the smartest man I knew.”

After graduation in 1970, Thomas-Greenfield made another bold move by attending Louisiana State University (LSU). She was not wanted there: LSU “had to be forced” by court order to accept nonwhite students. “I was entering a hostile environment,” she said. Among the students on campus alongside her was David Duke, who became grand wizard of the KKK.

It was natural, Thomas-Greenfield says, to expect overt racism in the South. When she came to Madison for her graduate work, she assumed that racism wouldn’t be an issue.

“It was, for me, the first time I was in a community in which at least I believed that race was not a factor,” she reflects.

But she quickly learned that her assumptions were wrong. “There had been a football game, and you know how crazy State Street can be after a football game. I was walking out of the library and walked up to State Street. I was standing on the corner waiting to cross the street, and somebody passed by in a car, called me the N-word, and sprayed me with a water gun,” Thomas-Greenfield recalls.

In the car, her daughter is silent.

“That was the most devastating experience I’ve ever had. … I wouldn’t have been devastated if that had been in Louisiana, because you always expect it. In Wisconsin, I didn’t expect that. It really took my breath away to have that happen in Madison.”

Thomas-Greenfield cautions current UW students of color to be prepared: “Racism exists everywhere. They need to be prepared for it, but they should not let it stifle them. … My feeling about racism is it’s not my problem, as much as it is the problem of the person who is the racist. Don’t take their problem and make it into your problem.”

The transition from Louisiana to Madison was so stark, it reminds Thomas-Greenfield of the cultural shift she experienced moving from Kenya to Pakistan. “I had to adjust to being comfortable in a white world,” she says. “A friend of mine [from the UW] just sent a picture of us from Madison, and it was just me as the only Black person. Every other person was white. My friends were like, ‘Where are the Black people in that picture, Linda?’ And I’m like, ‘You saw the Black people, it was me!’ ”

As Linda and Lindsay drive, the conversation shifts from the past to the future. For people across the world, 2020 was a year of massive transitions: working in offices to working remotely, in-person gatherings to virtual events, being employed to being jobless. And just three weeks after this car ride will come the monumental shift from a Trump administration to a Biden administration in the White House.

Where, exactly, will she start? “You start by engaging,” explains Thomas-Greenfield.

“Humbling yourself,” Lindsay adds, and Linda agrees.

“I think there will be a tremendous amount of humility that we have to bring to the table. It’s going to require a lot of effort.”

Effort and humility aren’t the only things Thomas-Greenfield will bring to the table; in fact, what she literally brings to tables across the world is what helped put her diplomacy on the map: gumbo.

Breaking bread is a diplomatic method that’s about as old as time. Whether it’s breaking bread or breaking crab legs, the method is simple, but effective. Step one: invite everyone over. Step two: share a meal — and realize you have more in common than not. Thomas-Greenfield adopted this method during her 35-year tenure in the foreign service, cooking her famous gumbo with leaders and diplomats across four continents.

“I called it gumbo diplomacy,” she said in her November nomination-acceptance speech. “Wherever I was posted around the world, I invited people of different backgrounds and beliefs to … make homemade gumbo. It was my way of breaking down barriers, connecting with people, and starting to see each other on a human level. That’s the charge in front of us today.” •

Chancellor Rebecca Blanks says that “investment in higher education is key to boosting our economy, even in difficult times.” Bryce Richter

If the coming state budget includes what UW–Madison hopes for, it will mean important changes, both visible and invisible. University leaders and the UW System Board of Regents have proposed new buildings for the Colleges of Engineering and Letters & Science, as well as greater borrowing power.

In particular, UW–Madison would like to have bonding authority for capital projects and for program-related revenue, such as the funds brought in through residence hall fees, athletics, and parking fees.

“The UW is the only Big Ten school without bonding authority,” says Ben Miller, a senior assistant in the office of UW–Madison’s vice chancellor for university relations. “We believe the university should be able to borrow to cover operational expenses, particularly for those programs that generate revenue to cover their costs.”

The two building projects are also major initiatives. The College of Engineering would like to replace the building at 1410 Engineering Drive. A new structure would enable the college to teach an additional 1,000 undergraduate students, which would help the UW meet America’s growing need for engineers and others who work in STEM fields.

The College of Letters & Science hopes to replace the Mosse Humanities Building, which has been home to many arts and humanities programs since it opened in the 1960s.

The building has long suffered from structural and materials flaws. Music and arts programs left Humanities in recent years — to the Hamel Music Center and the Art Lofts, respectively — and a new academic building will better serve the remaining humanities departments.

In addition, the UW is seeking funds to increase online learning opportunities, provide more health services to students, increase student financial support, and add agriculture positions to UW Extension. Chancellor Rebecca Blank described the requests as “a modest proposal that recognizes that investment in higher education is key to boosting our economy, even in difficult times.”

The regents sent their request to the office of Wisconsin governor Tony Evers ’73, MS’76, PhD’86, in hopes that he would include the initiatives in his budget proposal, which is expected in February. That proposal would then go to the Wisconsin legislature’s joint finance committee.

“We’re hopeful to see our goals achieved,” says Miller, acknowledging that the coronavirus pandemic has left the state with a weakened economy and that the UW is one of many priorities. “We’ll have to build awareness and educate lawmakers [on the need for these projects]. They’re all important proposals for campus.”

“I can remember those words banging off the walls and ceiling, shooting straight at my heart and ripping it open,” she recalls. “I remember at graduation, everyone throwing their caps up in the air and talking about the colleges that they were going to go to. And just those words from my counselor saying, ‘You’re not college material,’ just hurt me deeply. I was consumed with darkness; I felt hollow inside, disconnected and nonexistent, my dream shredded.”

Still, Braxton didn’t give up on her dream. One day, she stumbled upon a flyer at the Goodman South Madison Library, where she loved to read. It advertised just what she was seeking: a path to college.

The flyer was for the Odyssey Course, a six-credit, yearlong UW–Madison humanities class for adults facing economic barriers to higher education. Each year, it typically accepts 30 students — from teenagers to seniors — to study figures such as Frederick Douglass, Socrates, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson. By focusing on the humanities, the Odyssey Course empowers its students to find their voices and to create change in their lives and in the community.

A New Pathway

The Odyssey Course is the flagship of the UW Odyssey Project, launched by Emily Auerbach ’76, the project’s codirector and a UW English professor. Now in its 18th year, the project has four core programs: the course; Odyssey Junior, which offers classes for the children and grandchildren of Odyssey students and alumni; Onward Odyssey, which helps alumni of the Odyssey Course continue to pursue their dreams and college degrees; and Odyssey Beyond Bars, which brings credit-bearing and noncredit UW courses to Wisconsin prisons.

Auerbach started the UW Odyssey Project after talking with Wisconsin Public Radio’s Jean Feraca about the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a free class available to underserved adults nationwide. Although serving as a partial model for Odyssey, the Clemente course didn’t entirely align with Auerbach’s personal philosophy, and so she looked to a second model — one she knew well.

Her parents, Wanda MS’72 and Bob, attended Kentucky’s Berea College, which is tuition-free and also the South’s first interracial and coeducational college. Wanda grew up in Appalachia with no running water; Bob and his family had narrowly escaped Nazi Germany, and money was tight.

Auerbach knew the important role that Berea College had in lifting her parents out of poverty and clearing their paths to advanced degrees. She wanted to see the Odyssey Project mirror the college’s model, equipping students with the tools to break the cycle of generational poverty. To do this, Auerbach knew that offering classes alone was not enough.

As a result, Odyssey covers all course-related costs, including tuition, textbooks, and — during the pandemic — WiFi. The project also offers free child-care and meals during the weekly course, as well as providing financial support to the 75 percent of Odyssey graduates who go on to enroll in further college coursework. Although the pandemic has forced the project to adapt its in-person format to online, current students still receive funds to pay for meals and childcare during nights when class is in session.

“At the heart of the Odyssey Project is the belief that every student who enters our program — and we’ve admitted over 500 students now — has gifts that are waiting to be unwrapped,” Auerbach says. “They have voices that we hope to nurture, and they have dreams that can be achieved if we provide support and a pathway.”

Early on, the Odyssey Project faced skepticism. Auerbach and Feraca spent three years raising money and gaining institutional support before the first Odyssey Course began in fall 2003.

“I think a lot of people have the notion that if you’re living in poverty, why would you want to read Blake and Socrates? Why would you want a humanities course? It’s not practical. It doesn’t put food on the table right then,” Auerbach says. “But, in fact, there was a hunger for a program that would be a jumpstart into college. We had almost 100 applicants for the 30 spots that first year — every year, I turn qualified applicants away.”

Auerbach always memorizes each student’s first and last names prior to the initial class.

“I walk into class and go around the room and say all their names,” she says. “At that point, they know I see them. They know I don’t want them to drop out. They know that each one is important as a voice in the symphony that is our class.”

Not a Regular Class

Brian Benford ’18, MSW’20, who graduated from Odyssey in 2007, remembers his first day vividly.

“Emily said, ‘You know why I know all 30 of your names so clearly? Because I had to turn away a hundred people.’ That really hit home that this wasn’t going to be a regular class.”

Benford learned of the UW Odyssey Project in 2006. At the time, he was serving as a Madison alderperson.

“I had four kids, and I felt really good about my career. I felt really honored to serve the city of Madison, to open doors of public policy to other people,” he says. “But the one thing that was always missing throughout my life was that, here you live in this city where the flagship is UW–Madison … and I felt like I was an outsider.”

He hadn’t finished his bachelor’s degree because of challenges like raising children on a low income.

“I’m preaching to my kids that to reach your full potential, educational pathways are so important — but I didn’t have a degree,” he says. He thought the Odyssey Course could be an opportunity to explore going back to school, although he didn’t know if returning to college would be feasible. On that first day in Odyssey, though, Benford was hooked. He noticed the diversity in the classroom and individuals who had faced tremendous obstacles. Some had been incarcerated.

“It was very humbling,” he says. “Here, maybe I thought at times my life was rough, but to see these other people that were committed to being lifelong learners was amazing.”

The course wasn’t easy, but the support throughout was unflagging. It buoyed him as he pursued his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the UW, especially when — as he neared completion of his bachelor’s degree — he was diagnosed with cancer. As he began to recover, the Odyssey Project helped him get back on track by supporting him both in tangible ways, such as paying for books and courses, and in intangible ways.

“There’s someone that’s saying, ‘Oh no, we’re not giving up on you,’ ” Benford says, “and that’s what’s so important.”

Char Braxton, who found the Odyssey flyer in the Goodman library, graduated from the course in 2006.

“Odyssey made me feel like a human being, that I existed on Earth and that I had a purpose,” she says, adding that she could express herself in its safe environment. Although coming from different walks of life, classmates blended with each other like a pot of gumbo, she says. “No matter if we were a piece of shrimp, or a piece of chicken, or a piece of celery, we were all important.”

She strongly felt the love in the classroom, especially from Auerbach.

“She is a woman that believes in you, believes that you can get an education, and you can go to college. Yes, barriers are going to happen. Storms are going to come. We all have faced different hurdles in life, but you can still accomplish your dreams,” Braxton says. “There was just the fact that, no matter what was going on in your life outside of Odyssey, you knew when you came into that classroom, she had high expectations and love for you.”

Speaking Out

The Odyssey Course is especially imperative at a time when its students — many of whom live at or near the federal poverty level and 95 percent of whom are people of color — are hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic.

According to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, communities of color have been overrepresented among the state’s COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths since the start of the pandemic. The department attributes this to inequities resulting from racism and other forms of discrimination.

“Now more than ever, I feel we need the Odyssey Project,” Auerbach says. “I wake up feeling driven to help our students continue to find their voices. One thing that has been clear is that graduates of the Odyssey Project have a self-confidence and a sense of their place and their rights in ways that will help to bring about change.”

A self-described introvert, Josephine Lorya ’12, MSW’17 graduated from the Odyssey Course in 2008 and continues to speak up today. “Professor Emily always emphasizes, ‘Use your voice,’ ” including through voting, Lorya says. “ ‘Speak out against injustices; be a human, have that humanity in you.’ ” Lorya was raised in Nairobi, Kenya, after fleeing war in South Sudan, where she was born into the Otuho tribe. In 1996, she came to the U.S. as a refugee. She learned of Odyssey while braiding hair at a Madison salon, where a customer overheard her talking about wanting to go back to school.

“At that point, going to UW–Madison was just a dream,” says Lorya, who had been told by a high school guidance counselor that she wouldn’t get into a Division 1 college. Education was something she saw as the key to success, but she lacked the resources for school.

Once in the Odyssey Course, Lorya developed skills to be inquisitive. She recalls reading Plato’s allegory of the cave — which illustrates human perception, truth, and knowledge — and how much it resonated with her. It taught her to question everything and made her feel like she could “leap and pursue higher.”

Lorya, donning her cap and gown in 2012 as she stands with her husband and children, graduated from the UW with her bachelor’s degree in legal studies and sociology. Courtesy of the UW Odyssey Project

To Corey Saffold, who graduated from the Odyssey Course in 2006, the class’s humanities focus was critical.

“You really begin to find your voice in those moments because you’re inspired by [them],” he says of the times the class read Plato, Shakespeare, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King Jr. He believes everyone needs the humanities, even if one plans to become a mechanic or a nurse. “[A humanities education] gives you an appreciation for diversity, for other people, and appreciation to think differently; to think broadly.”

Saffold learned how much his words mattered after Auerbach encouraged him to submit his article “Education Must Trump Prison Time” to the Wisconsin State Journal just prior to his graduation from the course in 2006. The piece, which opens with a quote from Frederick Douglass, associates the state’s increasing incarceration rate of Black men with the population’s high rate of high school dropouts. “Why is Wisconsin ranked number one in locking up Black men and nearly last in graduating them from high school?” Saffold wrote. “Can you see the connection? It seems as if there’s a systematic plan in place for Blacks, especially Black men, to fail rather than succeed.” Many people responded to the article, including the late Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Shirley Abrahamson DJS’62.

“That let me know that I had a very significant voice; that I could gather my thoughts, put my voice into writing, and then have it be seen on a large scale,” Saffold says. “Odyssey didn’t just help me find my voice, but I physically saw what finding my voice meant and what finding my voice could do.”

Braxton found her power in a UW–Madison English 100 class offered through Onward Odyssey, where she took the opportunity to raise the topic of sexual abuse within families. The course was taught by Assistant Professor of Continuing Studies Kevin Mullen PhD’14, who also serves as codirector of the Odyssey Project. He gave the class an assignment to write about an object. Braxton chose a cup of coffee, writing in part, “A good cup of coffee brings happiness, great taste, and smells, and flashbacks at times of an ugly incident that required my forgiveness. Coffee is part of who I am; I drink it daily, and my skin color is caramel-salted coffee brown. … That morning I was the cup of coffee that my stepfather was eyeing with flavor, arousal, and gratification.”

After reading Braxton’s poem, Mullen asked if she would share it with the class. “That was a big step for me, but I knew I needed to do it,” Braxton says. “I was in the middle of the classroom and tears were just flowing down my eyes as I read it, but I knew that it was a part of me going forward and that I was no longer in this prison.” By sharing her experience, Braxton not only helped heal herself, but she also helped others heal by creating space to talk about a painful subject. Now, she reads the full poem to groups in the community, such as women’s groups and UW medical students. She also read a portion of the poem in an interview with StoryCorps, a partner of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress with a global reach.

“It’s the fact that I can put a part of me into someone else’s life that they can relate to. They know that they can walk forward, and they can break out of that invisible prison that either we’ve created for ourselves or that society has [created], and we can be okay with speaking up and confronting sexual abuse and systemic racism,” Braxton says. “My voice will be heard! The Odyssey Project helped me to reinvent myself and rewrite the narrative.”

Creating Change, Breaking Cycles

Graduates leave the Odyssey Course ready to ignite change in their lives, their families’ lives, and the community.

Today, Lorya is a mother of four who has passed along the importance of speaking up and asking questions to her children. Her four-year-old doesn’t even take her mother’s word for it when hearing they’re out of ketchup. Rather, she needs to check the fridge for herself, Lorya says.

Lorya has now earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, as well as U.S. citizenship, and is a social worker. She hasn’t visited South Sudan since moving to the U.S. but is hoping to do so eventually, with her family and Auerbach. While there, she wants to help install the Little Free Libraries she raised money for during her UW graduate studies in an effort to promote reading and education in the community.

Meanwhile, Benford decided to give back to Odyssey by working full time as its success coach, ensuring Odyssey students get the resources they need. He believes the project epitomizes the Wisconsin Idea and notes that, as a person of color, he didn’t feel welcome through most of his UW education outside of Odyssey. He’d like to see all of UW–Madison follow the project’s model.

“We could end racial disparity gaps. We could do so much as a society if UW–Madison really looked at Odyssey as a model and let in nontraditional students, and it wasn’t tied to money as much as it was to your abilities and your desires,” he says.

In 2020, Benford ran for the Wisconsin State Senate with the goal of being a voice for the community. Although he did not win, he is proud of his and his team’s people-first approach.

“Not only during the pandemic, but for decades prior, people were struggling in our community. Madison is often described as a tale of two cities, those with privilege and those without. It’s a wonderful place for people with privilege, but it’s a horrible, dismal place for those that are struggling,” he says. “So, as I was looking around at the current candidates that were running for the particular seat, I felt — and I still feel — that I was better prepared to provide a voice for those that I serve.”

Now, Benford is prepared to use his voice this spring, when he’ll start a new term as a Madison alderperson. He also plans to become a licensed therapist and provide free mental-health services to marginalized populations and Odyssey students who are referred to him. Additionally, his niece Sarina will complete the Odyssey Course in spring. “I look forward to where the future will take her,” he says.

Saffold, too, has seen family take part in Odyssey. His daughter Natia was in Odyssey Junior and has since graduated from the Odyssey Course, and his grandson has also participated in Odyssey Junior.

“That’s the thing about Odyssey; it’s generational,” he says. Saffold has spoken for the Wisconsin Humanities Council about being a Black police officer, utilizing public-speaking skills he gained through Odyssey. Today, he is the director of safety and security for the Verona Area School District, and he is pursuing his bachelor’s in criminology at UW–Whitewater with plans to attend law school. He also serves on the UW System Board of Regents, where he hopes to expand the Odyssey Project across the state.

“Coming from a place where college was not talked about … to then accomplishing and getting all these degrees and then using them in your community, is truly phenomenal. It’s a testament to the change that the Odyssey Project is doing in the community,” Saffold says. “That’s why we need more of the Odyssey Project spread throughout the state.”

Since graduating from the Odyssey Course, Braxton earned a special-education program aide license from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and has worked as a substitute teacher. She is now an ambassador and a part-time classroom assistant for Odyssey, serving as a tutor and mentor. She is also studying at Madison College, where she has made the dean’s list each semester, with plans to transfer to UW–Madison and double-major in Chinese and creative writing. After graduating, she intends to travel to China to teach English and create a cultural exchange program with the Odyssey Project upon her return.

Braxton continues to use her voice to heal. She recently read one of her poems, written to the high school guidance counselor who said she wasn’t college material, at an Odyssey fundraising event. She envisioned the counselor in the audience as she delivered the piece.

“I am taking Chinese college courses,” she recited in both Chinese and English. “One day, I will travel to China and teach in Beijing! Dear Mr. Guidance Counselor: I invite you to come with me.”