Mason Muerhoff

Nomen est omen, said the ancient Romans, who liked their maxims to rhyme: one’s name is one’s destiny. And while there’s little empirical evidence about this aphorism, put Anna Pidgeon PhD’00 down on the side of support. The professor with the columbiform name has taught Birds of Southern Wisconsin for the last three years.

“I get a bit of office guff,” she says.

Birds of Southern Wisconsin is offered each spring, and most of its students are undergrads studying biology or wildlife ecology. In addition to class work, students take field trips around Dane County and southern Wisconsin on Saturdays through the semester. By the course’s end, students are expected to be able to identify 235 bird species by sight and 145 species by sound alone.

Pidgeon says students also discover how Wisconsin’s landscape is changing. From the 1850s to the 1950s, logging cleared away a lot of the state’s forests, sending arboreal birds into retreat. But in the last 60 years, the forests have been returning; forest and urban birds have returned, while grassland birds are in decline.

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More than one-third of Wisconsin’s 72 counties do not have an ob-gyn physician.

Through the development of its Rural Residency Program, UW–Madison’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology is working to build up this workforce, says Jody Silva, program manager. The program, which is beginning its second year, is the nation’s first to offer specific resident training for rural women’s health.

The shortage, as documented in a 2014 report from the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is the result of several factors, such as rural hospitals closing obstetrics units and the number of retiring physicians outpacing the number of new physicians.

“Ultimately, what that means is a lot of rural women are having to drive really long distances just to seek [obstetric] care,” Silva says.

The department’s Rural Residency Program recruits residents with a commitment to rural communities and helps them gain the confidence they need to work in settings that typically do not have the same resources as urban and academic health centers.

The program offers a four-year training track and accepts one resident per year, with that resident spending about 20 percent of his or her time practicing in rural Wisconsin. Its inaugural resident, Laura McDowell MDx’21, was one of more than 100 applicants. She says her first year in the program has given her a realistic idea of what to expect while also affirming that she wants to work in a rural community.

“I feel really blessed and humbled to be the first one,” McDowell says. “I couldn’t have asked for a better residency match.”

Rich Hartel (left) explains the finer points of ice cream production to Paula and Stephen ’81 Pipp of Green Bay. Mike Roemer

In February, UW–Madison’s Teaching Assistants’ Association called for a “teach out” and marched up State Street to protest against a bill that would remove their collective-bargaining rights. Photo: Jeff Miller

The future of UW–Madison’s governance is the subject of debate in the capitol and around the state as Wisconsin’s legislature and Governor Scott Walker attempt to deal with an expected $3 billion structural deficit.

In February, Walker proposed a budget bill that includes a $250 million cut in funding for UW System, with half falling on UW–Madison. To ease the burden on the university, the bill offers to grant UW–Madison public-authority status — effectively splitting the Madison campus from the rest of the UW System and putting it under a separate governing body, a board of twenty-one trustees.

UW–Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin PhD’85 has expressed support for the proposal, arguing that it would give the university increased flexibility, particularly in personnel and purchasing matters, and in setting tuition. That flexibility would enable UW–Madison to absorb losses in state funding, she says, and improve its ability to compete with other research institutions around the world.

However, the UW System leadership and members of the board of regents have opposed public-authority status for UW–Madison, expressing concern for how the split would affect the other UW System campuses.

The discussion of university governance falls at a contentious time, due to heated politics in Madison this year. In February, protesters — including members of UW–Madison’s Teaching Assistants’ Association, the union representing graduate-student employees — descended on the Wisconsin legislature. Demonstrations continued for weeks while the assembly and senate considered and ultimately passed a law stripping state workers of many collective-bargaining rights.

The Wisconsin legislature was still debating the budget bill and UW–Madison’s possible public-authority status at press time.