“We can improve the standard of living by ensuring that students don’t have a lot of student loan debt,” says Hess. Bryce Richter

As America — and Wisconsin — try to navigate a deepening shortage of K–12 teachers, the UW–Madison School of Education is working to inspire more people to enter the profession. The Wisconsin Teacher Pledge gives students a chance to have their tuition waived if they promise to spend several years teaching at Wisconsin schools.

The National Education Association estimates that the United States has 300,000 fewer teachers than it needs, and in Wisconsin, 74 percent of school districts report being unable to fill positions. In August 2020, the School of Education announced the Teacher Pledge as part of its Impact 2030 campaign: tuition forgiveness for all students who promise to teach in the state for at least four years, or three years in high-need subjects or school districts.

“Salaries in Wisconsin are very low for teachers,” says Diana Hess, the dean of the School of Education. “We can’t do anything directly to improve the salaries, but we can improve the standard of living by ensuring that students don’t have a lot of student loan debt.”

To be eligible for tuition forgiveness, students make the pledge when they’re admitted to a teacher education program, usually after their sophomore year or when they enter as graduate students. The school gives those students a loan that covers tuition and then forgives a percentage of that loan as the students fulfill each year of teaching after they graduate. Hess believes that, after at least three years of working as a teacher, people are likely to commit to the profession for much longer.

But Hess says that the pledge is about more than attracting people into the teaching profession. It’s also a live study to see if the loan forgiveness program really does keep teachers in the profession long-term.

“We’re trying to find out, essentially, does it work and does it work to hit those goals?” Hess says. If the data back that up, she hopes to see the pledge program expand.

Currently about 500 students have taken the Teacher Pledge, and Hess is seeking funding to continue the program into the future.

UW Marching Band director Corey Pompey ushers in a new era for the Badger Bash at Union South. Bryce Richter

Fifty years ago, Badger Bash — the ultimate pregame festivity for Wisconsin football fans — was born.

When the original Union South opened in 1971, former Wisconsin Union manager Merrill “Corky” Sischo noticed a sea of Badger fans passing through the building for food and drinks before home football games. He connected with Mike Leckrone, then the fresh-faced director of the UW Marching Band, and together they threw the first official Badger Bash outside Union South in 1972.

The event started as a low-stakes opportunity for the marching band and pompon squad to warm up in front of a small audience. But by 1974, more than 3,000 fans were packing Union South’s grounds. They came for increasingly razzle-dazzle performances as well as brats and beer. In the early years, the event extended to after the game, with polkas and jazz by the Doc De Haven ’58 band in the Carousel room.

“As the crowd continued to grow, the performance became more ‘formulated’ but was still very relaxed,” Leckrone said shortly before his retirement in 2019.

Today, Badger Bash’s recipe largely remains the same. The free tailgate begins two and a half hours before every home football game, hosted by local celebrity emcees. Classic Wisconsin tailgate fare is still served, alongside more than 100 food and beverage options. (Bloody Mary bar, anyone?) The marching band, UW Spirit Squad, and Bucky himself take the stage around 90 minutes before kickoff with a preview of the halftime show and a plentiful helping of hip-swinging UW hits. The event is rounded out with kid-friendly activities and rivalry-related competitions. And fans without a ticket to the game can stick around and watch on the big screen at The Sett.

Badger Bash has become so beloved that the new Union South was practically built for it. The southwest plaza is roughly double the size of its predecessor, and architects specifically designed the space to accommodate the band’s staging needs.

In 2019, Corey Pompey made his public debut as the marching band director at the home-opening Badger Bash. The band delighted the crowd with the usual Badger hits, including the “Beer Barrel Polka.” But Pompey also introduced contemporary songs from the likes of Adele, The Killers, and Cardi B. Welcome to the new era of Badger Bash.

“When you slide over those 18 inches [on the bench] … all hell may break loose,” Gard half-joked during his introductory press conference.

It’s a saying that has proven true several times over during his seven-year tenure as head coach of the Badgers. Adversity has become a fact of life for Gard: his father’s death from brain cancer, an unimaginably tragic car accident involving an assistant coach, a confrontation with a rival coach that led to a slap heard ’round the basketball world, a pandemic, and a leaked locker room recording that threatened the program’s viability.

It’s ironic that drama follows Gard these days. His personality is measured and understated. He prefers a low profile. For more than two decades, he served quietly in the background for Ryan, following his mentor from UW–Platteville to UW–Milwaukee to Madison. Despite opportunities to seize the spotlight elsewhere, Gard stuck around as college basketball’s most loyal soldier. Loyalty runs in his DNA. So do his addiction to hard work and his close attention to detail, traits that trace back to his hog-farming childhood in rural Wisconsin.

Through it all, Gard’s ever-steady approach has helped the Badgers sustain nearly unmatched success in the NCAA under his leadership: five March Madness appearances, two conference championships, two Big Ten Coach of the Year awards, and a 144–78 record.

“I tell my players, ‘If you haven’t faced any adversity, you will,’ ” he says. “You can read all the books you want. You can have the greatest mentors. But the best lessons in life come from experience in adversity.”

And in that regard, Gard may be the most experienced coach in college basketball.

Feeling the Pressure

As I sit down with Gard in his Kohl Center office, he points to a large white pillar across from his desk. It’s peppered with decals chronicling the program’s achievements: a national title, four Final Four appearances, 20 conference championships. It also lists the school’s NCAA Tournament bids, with Wisconsin earning a spot 22 out of the last 23 occasions. Something of a perfectionist, Gard admits the missing year — 2018 — still bothers him.

“You talk about pressure on the job? I stare at this every day,” he says.

This past year, Big Ten media picked the team to finish 10th in the conference. But the underdog squad led by emerging star Johnny Davis x’24 and fifth-year guard Brad Davison ’21, MS’22 scrapped its way to a 25–8 record. They became Big Ten cochampions, earning a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

“We’ve embodied what Wisconsin is — blue collar, hard hat, lunch pail, put your best foot forward,” Gard says. “You don’t get bonus points for how a victory looks. I always told them, just keep that same fight, that grittiness, that togetherness, that will, that look in your eye. And it will serve them well for the rest of their lives.” Fans will remember an ugly incident from a February game, when Wisconsin and Michigan came to blows over a late time-out with the game already decided. With 15 seconds left and a 15-point lead, the Badgers’ bench players were struggling to break Michigan’s full-court press. They had just turned the ball over the previous possession, so Gard took a time-out to realign his untested players and reset the half-court clock. Michigan coach Juwan Howard was visibly upset with the move.

“Those guys deserve to be coached with my same intentions and effort as my starting five do,” Gard explains. “He has every right to coach his team. I felt my guys deserved that, too. That means they deserve to get every opportunity to have success. Success was getting the ball across half-court without another turnover.”

When Gard approached Howard in the handshake line, Howard pointed at him and said, “I won’t forget that.” A heated confrontation between coaches and players ensued. Howard swung and hit Wisconsin assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft ’09 in the face, which resulted in a five-game suspension and a $40,000 fine. Gard was fined $10,000 but not suspended.

When I ask Gard whether he’s spoken to Howard since, he offers a one-word response: “No.”

It’s little wonder that Gard’s players have bought into his hard-nosed style. Their coach, after all, has become living proof of the power of grit in the face of adversity.

A Maturity beyond His Years

The village of Cobb, Wisconsin, 60 miles west of Madison, has a population of 400. Growing up, Gard and his two younger brothers got their hands dirty at their grandparents’ farms, with humbling tasks such as scooping out hog manure from the stalls. Any job not done perfectly had to be repeated. Hard work and attention to detail were simply the ways of life in Cobb.

“You understand what it’s like to get up early in the morning before the sun and work until it’s dark. And then, hey, guess what, we’re doing it again tomorrow,” Gard says.

His parents also modeled loyalty. From the age of 18 to her retirement 44 years later, his mother, Connie, served as a secretary at the county high school. His father, Glen, worked for the same agricultural loan company for more than four decades, helping local farmers keep their operations running through increasingly difficult conditions.

It’s no coincidence, then, that their son has shown such loyalty to Bo Ryan and the UW. Gard first met Ryan as a college student at UW–Platteville, where he helped to run the coach’s summer basketball camps for extra cash. After Gard was cut from the college baseball team as a sophomore, he responded to a local newspaper ad seeking a junior high basketball coach.

“The teaching, the competitive nature of it, all those things came very natural to me,” he says.

Before long, Gard was recruited to help coach the varsity teams at Southwestern High School and Platteville High School. Still a college student, Gard made an outsized impression with a maturity beyond his years and a farmer’s work ethic. Observing him stay late at camps and take on increasing responsibilities with ease, Ryan asked Gard to join his college coaching staff as a student assistant. When Gard graduated in 1995, Ryan convinced him to stay on at Platteville despite opportunities elsewhere. He would stay with Ryan for 23 years, following him to Milwaukee in 1999 and Madison in 2001.

“His ideology of how to play the game aligned a lot with what I was learning and believed in,” Gard says. “He kept things simple, but you had to do it right.”

Gard’s reputation grew alongside the Badgers’ success. After Wisconsin upset previously undefeated Kentucky in the 2015 Final Four, Ryan told the media: “Greg Gard had an incredible scouting report. If he isn’t the best assistant in the country, I don’t know who is.”

Gard had plenty of chances to defect. He went deep into the head coaching interview process with several schools, but it never felt like the right time to leave. When he was recruited by Wayne State College in Nebraska, his now-wife, Michelle, told him: “If you go to Wayne State, you’re going alone.”

Family — both off the court and on it — always came first.

“Bo told me 100 times when I was working with him at Platteville, ‘Make the job you have the best one.’ And I’ve always been able to see the value of that,” Gard says. In July 2015, a few months after the Badgers lost the national championship game to Duke, Ryan announced that he was going to coach one more season and then retire. In his statement, he noted that he was doing so with the explicit “hope that my longtime assistant Greg Gard eventually becomes the head coach at Wisconsin.”

But on December 15, with a rebuilding Badgers team scuffling to a 7–5 record, the winningest coach in Wisconsin history decided to step down early and give Gard an extended job audition.

Ryan’s reciprocation of loyalty proved to be the ultimate validation for Gard, who’d lived out his favorite coaching and life mantra: Be where your feet are.

“I never worried about being a head coach by 35 or 40,” he says. “There were more things to enjoy as part of this journey than worrying about where I wasn’t. I tell our players all the time, ‘Enjoy your time here in college. If you’re thinking about what’s next all the time, you’re missing the best part.’ ”

For Gard, the best — and worst — was yet to come.

The Opportunity of a Lifetime

Before his first game as interim head coach against UW–Green Bay, Gard tucked a folded-up piece of paper into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. It was his father’s funeral program. Glen Gard, 72, had passed away six weeks earlier from brain cancer.

For six months, Gard had stayed up late poring through treatment literature and had accompanied his father on flights around the country in a desperate search for the best cancer treatments.

Still grieving the loss of his lifelong role model, Gard threw himself into the career opportunity of a lifetime. One of his first official moves as head coach was to fill his own vacancy. He convinced his old colleague Howard Moore ’95 to leave a broadcasting gig at the Big Ten Network and join him as an assistant. Moore’s familiarity with the program — having played for the Badgers from 1990 to 1995 and served as an assistant from 2005 to 2010 — proved to be a luxury for a midseason hire. After the Badgers stumbled to a 1–4 conference record, Gard made a key adjustment: getting back to the basics with an inexperienced roster. At practice, he drilled fundamentals. He also reintroduced core tenets of the swing offense, an equal-opportunity system that he and Ryan first perfected at Platteville.

“We gave the guys tracks to play on,” Gard says. “It gave them a plan. It gave them some absolutes.”

The changes worked, and the team won 11 of its last 13 games. As the No. 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament, the Badgers advanced to the Sweet 16 on a buzzer-beating Bronson Koenig ’17 three-pointer that remains one of the most memorable plays in Wisconsin sports history. Gard became the second rookie coach to win the Jim Phelan National Coach of the Year award.

“I’ve had an extra assistant coach all year — my guardian angel,” Gard told USA Today after the season, referring to his father and the funeral program in his jacket pocket. On March 7, 2016, Gard was named the permanent head coach of the Badgers. For the first time in his career, he received a multiyear contract. He promptly confirmed the wisdom of that decision by leading the Badgers to another Sweet 16 appearance in 2016–17.

But the good times did not roll forever. The 2017–18 team finished 15–18 and missed the NCAA Tournament. The following year, the Badgers bounced back to a 23–11 record but were upset by No. 12 seed Oregon in the first round of the Big Dance.

And in May 2019, tragedy struck the program.

The Worst Day

In the early morning of May 25, 2019, Howard Moore and his family were driving to the Detroit area to visit his in-laws. A wrong-way drunk driver collided with Moore’s vehicle at high speed. His nine-year-old daughter, Jaidyn, died at the scene. His wife, Jennifer, was in critical condition and taken off life support at the hospital later that day. Moore suffered severe burns on the left side of his body. His 13-year-old son, Jerell, escaped with minor injuries.

Gard still gets emotional discussing the incident. One of the hardest conversations of his life was telling his children that their friend Jaidyn was gone. He also had to console his players about an unspeakable tragedy.

“We cried together and prayed together,” says Davison, who had just finished his sophomore season. “It was a very dark and sad day.”

A month later, the situation went from bad to worse when Moore suffered a major heart attack. Still in recovery, he returned to his Madison home this past December from a long-term rehabilitation facility. During our conversation, Gard has his cell phone face up next to him. I notice him tap it periodically, checking notifications with an almost obsessive impulse.

“I tell my players all the time, I have an open-door policy,” Gard says. “You can come in here — this door never locks. And my cell phone never shuts off. I had my phone off the night of Howard’s accident. And then I vowed, it never goes off. So it’s by my bed, on, 24/7.”

The 2019–20 Badgers dedicated their season to Coach Moore and welcomed his son as an honorary member of the team. They won their final eight games and a share of the Big Ten regular season championship.

“Tragedy and adversity can either draw you apart or draw you together,” Davison says. “That was one of those cases where it really brought us together. We were playing for something bigger than ourselves.”

Coming Apart

But before one of the hottest teams in the nation could prove its mettle in March, COVID-19 shut down the country. The Big Ten and NCAA tournaments were canceled.

And the pandemic wasn’t done wreaking havoc on the program. After sending his players home, Gard didn’t see them in person for five months. The 2020–21 season eventually tipped off with strict pandemic protocols. Players had to eat meals alone in their rooms. There were no off-court team activities.

“Everything we did was anti-team,” Gard says. “You agree with the protocols to keep everyone safe, but looking back, you see the erosion that it created within a team.”

After starting the season ranked No. 7 in the nation, the Badgers had fallen to 9–7 in conference play by mid-February. The day after a blowout loss at home to Iowa, the team’s seven senior players asked for a closed-door meeting with the coaching staff. What followed was an emotional two-hour discussion. The players aired their grievances. The word “disconnect” came up often. They told Gard that they felt he didn’t care about them off the court and didn’t have their backs on the court.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever talk to you again after this [season],” one player said.

Gard listened to the players vent without interrupting and later addressed their concerns.

“It was a very healthy meeting, and it was beneficial for all parties,” Davison says. “Everyone got criticism, everyone got encouragement, everyone got coaching. And when we left that meeting, everyone was feeling good.”

The Badgers responded with some of their best basketball down the stretch, and it seemed that the meeting had achieved its purpose. The only problem was that someone had secretly recorded it.

Restoring Trust

On June 23, 2021, the Wisconsin State Journal published a story with excerpts from the previously private meeting. An anonymous email account had sent the reporter an audio recording that was edited down to 37 minutes, cutting almost everything but the criticisms of Gard. The source of the recording is still unconfirmed.

“I felt hurt and betrayed,” Davison says. “The locker room is supposed to be a safe place where you have tough conversations.”

Gard immediately worked to restore trust in the program, reaching out to all players and recruits individually and holding a team discussion about it. And he adapted, too, with an assist from his college-age children. He knows that students today seek more frequent communication and closer relationships with parental figures.

“I had a coach tell me a long time ago, ‘You’ll become a better coach the day you become a parent.’ He was right,” Gard says.

“I’m Here for You”

When I ask Gard how he’d like to be remembered, his mind goes back to Cobb and the core values that his parents passed down to him.

“That he was a guy who gave his best every day, and he tried to help a lot of people, and he made it better for the people coming behind him. He did it the right way. Didn’t take any shortcuts. Prepared people for what was going to be next. And they always knew they had somebody they can lean on.

“I tell our players all the time, ‘Hey, I’m here for you. Until they shovel dirt on me, I’ve got your back.’ ” •

In reality, Holley’s thoughts about UW–Madison are mixed. He met terrific friends on campus and received a great education, he says, but he also remembers regularly being called racial slurs on State Street at bar time and watching a fellow Black student pack up and leave school after being aggressively harassed because of his race while walking to his dorm. The administration, he says, didn’t seem to care very much.

Recently, when a researcher with UW–Madison’s Public History Project contacted Holley to discuss his time at the university, he agreed to sit for an oral history interview, intrigued by the prospect. As he shared his experiences as a student of color on a predominantly white campus, he appreciated the opportunity to have an extended discussion about complex issues.

“They really wanted to hear from me in an in-depth way,” says Holley, a Chicago attorney. Since fall 2019, researchers with the Public History Project have completed 140 oral history interviews with alumni and current students. They’ve dug deep into the university’s archives, scoured decades of media coverage, and read 168 volumes of the Badger yearbook and the Daily Cardinal.

The effort is intended to give voice to those who experienced and challenged prejudice on campus. Over the past three years, the project’s researchers have shared their findings through campus presentations, special events, and blog posts.

The project will culminate this fall with an exhibition at the Chazen Museum of Art and a companion online gallery and archive. Spanning more than 150 years, Sifting & Reckoning: UW–Madison’s History of Exclusion and Resistance (September 12–December 23) will make space for the university’s underrecognized and unseen histories. The title plays off “sifting and winnowing,” the iconic phrase that has come to represent the fearless pursuit of knowledge at UW–Madison.

“Reckoning is an active, participatory process, and that’s so important when thinking about this project,” says Kacie Lucchini Butcher, the project’s director. “We have to know this history and grapple with it — even if it’s uncomfortable and hard to face — because that’s part of making the university a more equitable place.”

The challenge was to figure out how best to approach this sensitive subject.

A Clean Break

The project has roots in the university’s response to the 2017 white supremacist rally that turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia. In the wake of the tragedy, UW–Madison chancellor Rebecca Blank denounced the ideologies of all hate groups and said it was time to confront racist elements in the university’s past and make a clean break with them. She appointed a study group to look at two student groups that bore the name of the Ku Klux Klan around the 1920s.

One of the groups, a fraternity house, was found to be affiliated with the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The other, an interfraternity honor society composed of student leaders, had no documented connection to the national KKK and no known racist ideology. Its name remains inexplicable.

In compiling its report, the study group identified a broader pattern of exclusion. It concluded that the history the UW needed to confront was not the aberrant work of a few individuals or groups but a pervasive campus culture of racism and religious bigotry that went largely unchallenged in the early 1900s and was a defining feature of American life in general at that time. Blank commissioned the Public History Project as one of several responses.

“The study group’s findings pointed to a need to build a more inclusive university community through an honest reckoning with our past,” Blank said at the time. The project comes as the university seeks to make sure all members of the campus community feel welcome and respected. A first-ever campus climate survey in 2016 found that historically underrepresented and disadvantaged groups, while reporting generally positive experiences on campus, consistently rated the climate less favorably than students from majority groups. The survey was repeated last fall with similar findings. Both surveys also revealed that students value diversity and that it’s important to them that the university does, too.

The Public History Project is uniquely suited to advance this goal.

Putting History to Use

Lucchini Butcher describes public history as an approach that seeks to elevate the stories of community members — especially those previously ignored or discounted — and share them in accessible, pragmatic ways.

“I think of history as a tool, and I’m always trying to think about how we can put it to use for people,” she says.

UW–Madison is far from alone in scrutinizing problematic parts of its history. The University of Virginia, for example, leads a research consortium of more than 80 higher education institutions with historic ties to slavery. Harvard University, one prominent consortium member, announced in April the creation of a $100 million fund to study and redress its early complicity with slave labor.

Even amid this widespread reckoning, UW–Madison’s effort stands out, says Stephanie Rowe, executive director of the National Council on Public History. While many such projects focus on a particular strand of a university’s past, UW–Madison is employing a broader lens. And while many begin as faculty-initiated research projects, the UW created a public history project and hired a full-time director to see it through. The project is expected to cost $1 million and is being paid for with private funds, not taxpayer money.

“We don’t often see a university initiate and support a public history project of this design and this magnitude,” Rowe says.

Sifting & Reckoning: UW–Madison’s History of Exclusion and Resistance makes space for the university’s underrecognized and unseen histories. Capital Times / UW Archives; Daily Cardinal / UW Archives (2)

Wrongs and Rights

In the Chazen exhibition, the Public History Project unflinchingly faces the university’s past.

Visitors will see the large “Pipe of Peace” used by students a century ago at ceremonies that parodied Native American life. They’ll view posters for campus minstrel shows and watch an undercover film from the 1960s that documents housing discrimination in Madison. The film was thought to have been destroyed by the university but actually sat for decades out of view in UW Archives.

They’ll meet Weathers “Sonny” Sykes ’50, the first Black man to enter an otherwise all-white fraternity at UW–Madison when he joined the Jewish fraternity Phi Sigma Delta in 1949, and Liberty Rashad, one of the organizers of the 1969 Black Student Strike.

They’ll learn about law student Brigid McGuire JDx’96, who in 1994 contested the physical inaccessibility of UW classrooms by removing a portion of a desk with a circular saw to create room for her motorized wheelchair — amid applause from her fellow classmates. And Mildred Gordon, a Jewish woman, who sued the owners of the private Langdon Hall dormitory after arriving in 1929 and being told her room had been given to a non-Jewish person.

Other components of the exhibition explore fraternity and sorority life, Badger athletics, student activism, and prejudice in the classroom. There are deeply shameful incidents, like the campus “gay purges” between 1948 and 1962, but also stories of bravery and resilience as marginalized groups claimed their rightful place on campus.

The exhibition also captures times when UW–Madison as an institution, and especially its students and employees, landed on the right side of history. The Groves Housing Cooperative, founded by the university in 1944, had no racial or religious restrictions and was the first interracial housing cooperative on campus. In another example, many UW–Madison professors and students fought to admit Japanese American students to the university during and immediately after World War II, against stiff government opposition.

“We share in the legacy of what our university has been in the past, whether we realize it or not,” says Joy Block PhDx’23, a doctoral candidate in history who researched Japanese American Badgers for the project. “What I really like about this project is that you get a fuller picture of that history. Sometimes that reveals our failures, sometimes our successes. And sometimes it just reveals our humanity.”

Essential Discussions

Supporters of the Public History Project anticipate criticism, expecting that some will question its value or view it as unnecessary or revisionist history.

John Dichtl, president of the American Association for State and Local History, says it may be helpful for people to view history as a form of detective work.

“To think critically, you need all the information, the full sweep of the past,” he says. “The term revisionist history is often held up as bad, but this is what historians are always doing. Like detectives, they build their cases step by step over time, then revise and update their conclusions based on new evidence, questions, and perspectives.”

It is especially important that institutions of higher education do this work, Dichtl says.

“How can a university call itself a center of learning if it is not fully honest about its own past and its own history?” he asks. “Engaging students in critical thinking about these issues is important for its own teaching mission.”

UW–Madison history professor Stephen Kantrowitz, who chairs the Public History Project Steering Committee, says the project is providing curricular materials to instructors and encouraging them to tour the exhibition with their students.

“My hope is that all of these things the project has identified and collected — the research, the analysis, the interviews, the archives — will enable generations of students and teachers here to use the university’s own history as a laboratory for their study of how people have lived and interacted, how they’ve resolved conflict, and how they’ve worked to change society,” he says.

Kantrowitz likens the project to sitting down with an elder and learning the full sweep of your family’s history, including the worst parts.

“All those painful silences around the dinner table suddenly make more sense,” he says. “That’s what we’re doing here. We’re collectively sitting down with the family photo album and trying to figure out why we have these ongoing conflicts — conflicts over questions that are not unique to the campus but are fundamental American struggles, about race, about gender, about sexuality, about disability, about all sorts of questions that continue to be socially difficult for us.”

LaVar Charleston MS’07, PhD’10, the university’s chief diversity officer, views the project as a beginning, not an end. Its findings will provide a common starting point for essential discussions about how the university addresses or redresses these long-standing issues.

“We have a tendency as a society to act like things didn’t happen, to sweep things under the rug,” says Charleston, who leads the Division of Diversity, Equity, & Educational Achievement. “This is the opposite of that. This is the university taking the initiative and confronting the ghosts that have haunted this campus for decades. Of course, we’re going to unearth some things that may look bad, but I’m proud that we’re being proactive about understanding our history. It’s the only way to make the necessary adjustments so that the impact from discrimination doesn’t continue to happen.”

Finally Being Heard

Charles Holley’s name will be familiar to many alumni. As an undergraduate in the late 1980s, he chaired the UW–Madison Steering Committee on Minority Affairs. The committee’s final document, which became known as the Holley Report, was a forerunner of 1988’s Madison Plan, the university’s first formalized diversity plan.

Holley says the histories of institutions like UW–Madison are often told by those with money, power, and influence. The Public History Project serves as a needed corrective. To those who may criticize the university for “airing its dirty laundry,” Holley has a response.

“It’s already out there. It’s certainly out there in the communities that I care about. If you haven’t heard about it before, you might ask yourself why not.”

By interviewing current students and recent alumni, the project underscores that prejudice remains an issue today on campus. Ariana Thao ’20, who is Hmong, says other students sometimes taunted or mocked her as she walked down State Street. They’d yell “Ni hao” — Chinese for hello — or loudly joke that she probably didn’t speak English.

Thao shared these anecdotes with a researcher and says the experience proved cathartic. “It felt so good to finally be heard,” she says.

Geneva Brown ’88, JD’93, a campus activist in the late 1980s as a member of both the Black Student Union and the Minority Coalition, hopes the Public History Project exhibit will inspire current students to keep working to improve the campus.

“There’s never a past tense to racism and discrimination,” says Brown, a faculty lecturer in criminology at DePaul University. “When students hear, especially nowadays, that we acknowledge the past and understand how it impacts our future, we’re creating an atmosphere where we’re not just giving lip service to diversity, we’re trying to do something about it. I think UW–Madison, with this project, can take the lead on that.”

When Lucchini Butcher gives presentations on campus about the Public History Project, she sometimes reminds people that UW–Madison bills itself as a world-class institution. Ultimately, the project can elevate, not diminish, UW–Madison’s reputation by making sure it lives up to its promise, she says.

“None of this means you have to love UW–Madison any less. You can critique the things you love. You can love something enough to want it to live up to your standards and your expectations.” •

Vaughan: “I believe that reading about other people is the best way to gain empathy.” Bryce Richter

For calendar year 2021, UW student Kyla Vaughan ’22 set a seemingly impossible goal for herself: read 365 books — one per day.

On December 3, she finished book 365.

Then she just kept going. By December 31, she’d read 392 books, an average of 7.5 per week.

“I guess I did it partly for the bragging rights, but also because I believe that reading about other people is the best way to gain empathy,” says Vaughan, who graduated in May. “It was a joy to live the lives of so many characters this past year.”

Vaughan, a double-major in English and history, attributes her accomplishment to being a naturally fast reader and making reading a priority. She once timed herself and found she could cover 50 pages in about 15 minutes, though she doesn’t consider herself a speed reader. (She doesn’t skim.)

To make time for reading, she put television, movies, and social media on the backburner. “When people asked me if I saw the latest movie, the answer was always no.”

Vaughan worked two customer-service desk jobs on campus, both of which allowed employees to read or do homework during downtime. Her text-heavy majors also helped. She read 30 of the books for classes, although that still left more than 360 other books. Most of those came from her favorite genres of fantasy, romance, and science fiction.

Vaughan rated all 392 books on a scale of one to five stars. Her favorite: As If on Cue, a young-adult novel by Marisa Kanter.

Vaughan’s father remembers his daughter setting a class record in first grade for reading the most books in one year — more than 1,000.

“I think her love of books comes from the fact that her mother read to her while she was still in the womb,” says Jim Vaughan, “and we read to her every day while she was very young.”

Vaughan’s goal for 2022 is a departure.

“I want to read less,” she says. “I want to focus more on quality and less on quantity.”

Bryce Richter

On March 31, the UW–Madison community gathered on Library Mall to hold a vigil for peace in Ukraine. The event was presented by the UW Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia and the Associated Students of Madison, which passed a resolution condemning the Russian invasion and calling for a “democratic, peaceful solution.” Amen.

Some rules stand firm throughout generations; others don’t age quite as well. You’ll find both in Wiscetiquette. UW Archives

Wiscetiquette got its start after a May 1936 issue of the campus humor magazine the Octopus published a feature article under the same name. There’s no author attached to the original piece or in the series of handbooks that followed, but the Octopus lists Helen Savage ’36 as the chair of the Wiscetiquette section. She was savage, indeed, in her advice to incoming students. On blind dates, for example, the Wiscetiquette team writes: “Should your date turn out to be a first-class baby scarer, don’t show that you are afraid of it. Goons often have good connections and quite possibly know the right people.”

The board of the Women’s Self-Government Association (renamed the Associated Women Students in 1953) clearly enjoyed Savage’s work. The group partnered with the Wisconsin Union’s Women’s Affairs Committee and gained permission from the Octopus to reprint the advice in the form of a guidebook for freshmen and transfer students.

The first few issues maintained an Octopus sense of humor and gave readers an informal but informative look at classroom etiquette, dating protocol, and campus culture. Later issues became more respectable, albeit a bit boring. In 1959, Wiscetiqueditors traded the dating advice for messages from the deans and introductions to student organizations and honor societies.

The Associated Women Students dropped the Wiscetiquette title altogether in the 1960s and instead began sending out a student handbook called On Wisconsin — unrelated to the magazine you’re currently reading.

If you were to publish Wiscetiquette in 2022, dating, drinking, and dress codes on campus would look rather different. Thankfully, women can now ignore the advice to stay out of the Rathskeller or to take their red nail polish off so as not to look garish on Monday morning. Men no longer have to feel pressured to foot every bill or wear a button-up to class every day. The following truism has also since expired: “Like the breath goes with the onion, so the chaperone goes with the party.”

Today’s students should, however, continue to follow Wiscetiquette’s advice on some matters. “Why not practice a little individuality and meet the light of your life somewhere else between classes beside the steps of Bascom Hall? In the first place you haven’t any privacy, and then it seems a shame that only those with football experience should be able to get to class on time.”

We’re sure you never met up at Bascom Hall or cribbed in class, but did you commit another major campus faux pas? If so, we’d love to hear your stories in the comments below.

Watts displays unmatched creativity and calm on the ice in “the best women’s hockey program in the world.”

It’s not often that a world-class athlete is simultaneously at the peak and the end of a playing career. But Badger hockey hero Daryl Watts x’22 has spent her fifth college season confronting that reality.

After scoring the game-winning overtime goal in the NCAA Championship last spring, Watts tried out for Team Canada over the summer. But the national program couldn’t find a roster spot for one of college hockey’s all-time greats. The snub effectively ended Watts’s Olympic dreams and future playing career.

“I learned that it’s time to hang up the skates,” the Toronto native says. “I feel like I’m at my peak performance, 22 years old. [But] I don’t see a future for myself in women’s hockey.”

It will be the sport’s loss. The formidable forward has twice led the NCAA in season-long scoring. As a freshman at Boston College, Watts led the country with 42 goals in 38 games and became the first underclassman to win the Patty Kazmaier Award (the women’s hockey equivalent of the Heisman), for which she was also a finalist last year. By the end of her second season, she had lost her passion for hockey and hoped to rediscover it by transferring to the UW. She promptly set a program record with 49 assists in 2019–20 and paced the NCAA in points from the first game.

“It was a no-brainer to go to Wisconsin,” Watts says. “Mark Johnson is an incredible hockey coach but an even better person. … There are so many little nuances on the ice that he’s taught me, like strategy, positioning, and skill moves. And his temperament is always the same. He’s so positive.”

Watts’s unmatched creativity and calm on the ice were on full display with her championship-clinching goal last year — her fifth game-winner of the season. Three minutes into overtime, Watts found herself all alone behind Northeastern’s net. She noticed the goalie leaning to the left of the net and a defender to the right. She slapped the puck off the side of the defender, and it ricocheted into the net. It was a circus shot that she hadn’t even attempted since high school.

“It felt too good to be true,” Watts says of the moment. “I remember just being like, ‘Am I dreaming?’ ”

Being cut by Team Canada — along with the pandemic adding an extra year to her NCAA eligibility — allowed Watts to return to Madison for an epic swan song. She’s within striking distance of the all-time NCAA scoring lead (in fifth place as of press time), and the Badgers are contenders to three-peat as national champions.

Watts hopes to stick around the school that reignited her love of hockey and allowed her to go out on her own terms. She plans to eventually apply to the UW’s highly ranked master’s program in real estate.

“I couldn’t be happier to be ending my hockey career at Wisconsin,” she says. “It’s the best women’s hockey program in the world.”

UW–Madison’s six-year graduation rate is now 89.2 percent, putting it in the top 10 among public research universities. Bryce Richter

More UW–Madison undergrads than ever are graduating, and they’re taking less time to complete their degrees.

The university’s six-year and four-year graduation rates are at record highs. The six-year rate is now 89.2 percent, up from 88.5 percent the prior year — putting it in the top 10 among public research universities. The four-year rate rose to 71.8 percent, up from 71.2 percent.

The gap in six-year graduation rates between underrepresented students of color and the overall rate has been cut by two-thirds over the last 10 years, from 18 percentage points for the 2006 entering cohort to 6 percentage points for the 2015 entering cohort.

The average time-to-degree for 2020–21 bachelor’s degree recipients has also shortened again, to 3.89 years, setting another UW–Madison record. Undergraduate retention rates have remained robust, and the total number of degrees conferred, including bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, rose to 11,663, the highest ever.

“It’s impressive that all of these metrics continue to be so strong despite the impacts of a global pandemic,” says Provost Karl Scholz. “This could not have happened without the extra efforts of our faculty and staff and the hard work of our students during this exceptionally challenging time.”

Reconnecting with people and their individual passions: Botanist Ken Cameron examines Vanilla orchids. Bryce Richter

As you read through the spring 2022 issue of On Wisconsin, you may be struck by how many faces you see. More than most issues, this one includes a lot of profiles of individual alumni and faculty members: botanist Ken Cameron, Jeopardy! champion Matt Amodio MS’17, historian Margaret Rossiter MS’67, author Kevin Anderson ’83, journalist Michele Norris x’83, and even the students who came to UW–Madison thanks to Bucky’s Tuition Promise. Each of these stories introduces you to people more than to programs or issues. And that’s intentional. Mostly.

As these articles came in, we slowly came to see how person-centered they all are, and we realized that there was a reason why this appealed to us. After two years of COVID-19 restrictions, we’re a bit lonely. We hunger for human contact: to sit for interviews, to hear someone’s story, to see faces that aren’t half-obscured by KN95 masks. We thought you might like a little more human contact, too.

True, when you read about a person in a magazine, you’re about as socially distant from that individual as you can be. And you’ll still see masks on a lot of pages. We can’t make the pandemic go away, and journalistic integrity demands that we show the world as it is. Any current photo of campus is likely to show faces from the eyes up, whether those faces belong to volleyball players lining up before winning a championship or seniors getting ready to graduate.

Still, we hope your souls will be lifted by making a few connections. Ours were.