Bryce Richter

Below are some of the thank-you letters from students who received scholarships through the All Ways Forward Comprehensive Campaign. Their gratitude shows just one of the ways that the campaign has made a difference — changing not only students’ lives, but the lives of their families as well.

I come from a low-income family, and without scholarships from donors like you, I wouldn’t be able to get my degree without swimming in debt. I want to change the world of food science, and your help gets me closer to that goal.

— Bea Sutton x’24

I cannot thank the donors enough for their financial support. If I wasn’t [receiving financial assistance], there is no way I could be attending UW–Madison. I grew up in a single-parent, low-income house- hold and wasn’t expected to go far in life. Being a first-generation college student at this prestigious university shows I am beating the odds stacked against me. I am so thankful for the education I am gaining and will not take it for granted.

— Melanie Spencer x’23

This [scholarship] has certainly changed the course of my life, and without it, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college. This [gift] has made it possible for me to get my education and one day change my family’s life. Once I graduate and am able to start making more money, I can then provide more for my family as well.

— Anthony Yang x’25

First and foremost, I am thankful. It has been a mission for me to help my family financially (specifically my mom, who’s in Puerto Rico), after graduating college and getting a job. I first moved to the U.S. back in middle school because I wanted to pursue higher education. … It is something that not many see happen back in Puerto Rico.

— Elliot Lopez-Henriquez x’25

Support for an artist is extremely vital; a lot of people don’t understand how expensive artistic pursuits can be. The scholarship will allow me to change each of my cello strings and bow hairs without struggling to find the funds to do so. Receiving the scholarship validates my purpose and studies in college, and I am forever grateful.

— Ivan Xiong x’24

Most people don’t understand the effects of generational poverty or the immense pride that comes with breaking out of it. To provide someone with that ability is beyond incredible.

— Kora Zoe Quinn x’23

I would say that people who … give like this understand what it is to help other people. They understand that there is a world out there and there are lives beyond their own, and that you don’t have to know or meet someone to be kind to them. They make the world a better place in their own wonderful way, and I hope they know what this means to the people who receive their help.

— Leah Morley x’24

Worrying about finances has been a part of my life since I was a toddler, and even though I believe because of it I am a more responsible, independent person, I do not enjoy continuously thinking about money, or lack thereof. I know that my education has been improved as I have more attention to give it; I know my life has been improved because I’ve seen the struggles of my sisters and my mother with massive student debt. Receiving this scholarship has been monumental, and I appreciate it every single day in some aspect.

— Lowell Harwell x’23

The moment I found out about the scholarship is still one of the best moments of my life.  This opportunity literally changed my life.

— Matthew Dwyer x’23

I want to personally thank the donors for this scholarship, because I come from a generation of immigrants. My parents work their hearts out every day for my brother and me. Therefore, all the help I can get so that my parents don’t have to worry about my college expenses means the world to me.

— Vy Lu x’24

But of course the $4 billion is not in a single pile, either in coins or bills. Some is in the university’s endowment, where it’s invested to provide support in perpetuity. About a fourth of the sum is promised but not yet delivered — some pledged and some as part of “planned gifts”: included in wills, bequests, or estates. But also, a lot of that money has already been spent: it’s supporting scholarships, research projects, buildings and facilities, and faculty positions right now.

The effects of the All Ways Forward campaign touch nearly every part of university life, and so they’re a little harder to picture than a billion baskets of socks and T-shirts. But follow the career of a current UW student, and you’ll see those effects just about everywhere.

FRESHMAN YEAR: 2018–19

Eryne Jenkins x’22 hails from Magnolia, Delaware, just south of Dover. She wasn’t looking toward Wisconsin as her top choice for college, or even as her second or third choice. Her first choice was Spelman, a historically Black college in Atlanta. “I was so excited to go there because I was looking for that community, that support really,” she says. “And I applied and got into their honors program, but it was going to be full price.”

She then applied and was accepted into Dartmouth, Cornell, and Syracuse, and she found much the same story. It was her father and his love of sports that made Jenkins think of the UW. “My dad was watching Big Ten Network,² and they had done some commercial on research, and he was like, ‘What about Wisconsin?’ ” Jenkins applied, though she had never been to the Midwest and wasn’t sure that the UW could offer the sort of community she was looking for. Not only did she get in, however, she was also offered a Chancellor’s Scholarship.³ Her father told her to look on that as a lottery ticket:⁴ “You just won, and if you don’t take it, then you just threw it in the trash,” he told her. So she enrolled. It wasn’t Spelman. The UW couldn’t offer the same kind of community that a historically Black institution would. But it could offer something different, and the price was hard to pass up. Interested in eventually attending medical school, Jenkins decided to major in biochemistry⁵ in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS).⁶ She signed up for CALS’s QuickStart⁷ summer program for incoming freshmen, to connect with her classmates and get an early jump on courses. Within that program, she met student mentors who helped her get direction for her academic career — not just advice on classes, but also connections with organizations such as AHANA-MAPS, the African, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American⁸ Minority Association of Pre-Medical Students. QuickStart also gave her tours of campus buildings⁹ and an introduction to UW traditions, such as Babcock Dairy¹⁰ ice cream — she soon discovered her favorite flavor is Badger Blast. SOPHOMORE YEAR: 2019 –20

Convinced that QuickStart had given a vital beginning to her UW career, Jenkins volunteered to be a student instructor¹¹ as a sophomore, helping with the Connect to Campus program — guiding freshmen in their transition to university life.

“I remember a student who didn’t understand financial aid,” she says. “We sat down and made an appointment with the financial aid adviser,¹² because it’s so important to know what you don’t know. [Because of] QuickStart, I understood that even if you don’t know the answer, someone else might, and they are here to help you.”

Jenkins got involved with the Wisconsin International Scholars Program, and she studied abroad¹³ in Denmark. She explored her academic options, changing her major from biochemistry to microbiology,¹⁴ and eventually switching to biology.¹⁵ Just before her senior year, she landed on a double major in biology and environmental studies.¹⁶ Her spring semester was interrupted by the arrival of COVID-19, which shut down in-person instruction in March 2020 and would have a major impact on her next semester.

JUNIOR YEAR: 2020 –21

Jenkins’s time working with freshmen in QuickStart inspired her to take on another job that is deeply involved with helping new students: house fellow¹⁷ at Sellery Hall.¹⁸ “We were friends more than just colleagues,” she says of the house fellows and staff. “That has been a big part of my community.” But the role of house fellow in fall 2020 was far from easy: campus experienced a September surge in COVID-19 cases,¹⁹ and Sellery ended up quarantined.

“It was a lot of time spent indoors,” she says.

Still, COVID-19 didn’t entirely define her experience. With encouragement from her former QuickStart adviser, she landed a position in the research lab of obstetrics and gynecology professor Aleksandar Stanic-Kostic, where she studied reproductive immunology:²⁰ “preeclampsia,” she says, “which is hypertension while you are in gestation; preterm birth; and things like that.”

Jenkins also received an On Wisconsin Society scholarship²¹ from the UW’s Homecoming committee, and she became more deeply involved with a sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of the Divine Nine²² historically Black Greek-letter organizations. By the end of the year, she’d become the chapter’s president. She joined a religious group, Impact, and took on a summer internship with Madison’s Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness, run by fellow Badger Lisa Peyton-Caire ’96, MS’99. By the end of her junior year, she was deeply involved in Madison life, both on and off campus.

SENIOR YEAR: 2021–22

In her final year, Jenkins is trying to take life a little easier. She moved into an apartment off campus, and she has a lighter course load. Sort of.

In her first three years, she says, she would pack her schedule with classes, aiming to get as much done as she could. But this year, she wants a little bit of time to smell the roses, or perhaps the begonias in front of Humanities.²³

“I’m just trying not to be as stressed,” she says. “If I have a question after class, I want to be able to go ask it. If I want a break from study time, I just want to do that. My schedule now is a lot more spread out so that I can just break up my time a little bit and take a leisurely walk somewhere if I want.”

This doesn’t mean her schedule is easy: it includes Environmental Studies 460²⁴ and Biochemistry 510²⁵ and Zoology 360²⁶ and a senior thesis with Stanic-Kostic, and she’s toying with the idea of ObGyn 710, a graduate-level class, as her ambition now is not just medical school but to get into an MD/PhD program. “I would like to do medical education,”²⁷ she says. Jenkins is hoping that a more open schedule will give her time to appreciate the community she’s built in Madison over the previous three years: time for sorority meetings, which may take place in Memorial Union’s²⁸ new National Pan-Hellenic Council Room; time to grab a bite at Union South whenever she wants. “I do love Union food,” she says.

And she isn’t entirely giving in to relaxation. “I signed up for a gym membership this past week,” she says. “I don’t know why.”

But there’s one more development for Jenkins in her senior year, and it promises connection with the most important part of her community: with the assistance of a Chancellor’s Scholarship,²⁹ Jenkins’s sister, Sydne x’25, became a Badger and will study engineering.³⁰ And for this new community member, Jenkins is ready to give support as fully — and fiercely — as she received it.

“There’s no Y on the end of Sydne’s name,” Jenkins warns. “Don’t put one there. She’ll be mad.” •

On his deathbed, Lipo was comforted by the fact that his legacy would continue. Courtesy of WEMPEC

When Professor Thomas Lipo PhD’68 lay on his deathbed at his home in Middleton this past May, he learned that some of his former students had set up a UW–Madison fund in his honor to support electrical engineering faculty.

Lipo teared up at the news, according to his daughter, Emily Pink. “He was so touched.” Lipo, who was the emeritus W. W. Grainger Professor of Power Electronics and Electrical Machines in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, “loved his work and worked every day of the year, including holidays.” Pink says that none of his four children had followed his path into engineering, and “it kind of bothered him. It certainly comforted him, as someone who had given so much to his profession, to know that [the fund] would empower other teachers to carry on his work. Knowing that his legacy would continue … was part of his accepting his death. You could see him relax when he heard that.”

Lipo supervised more than 120 graduate students, wrote 700 papers and five books, earned upwards of 50 patents, and amassed more than 50,000 professional citations. An expert in solid-state AC motor drives, he cofounded WEMPEC (the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium) along with Professor Don Novotny.

Dan (Dinyu) Qin MS’96, PhD’00 and his wife, Lian Zhao Qin MS’98, gave the lead gift for the fund. When Dan shared the fund idea with fellow members of the WEMPEC China Alumni and Friends group, more than 20 of them contributed to the fund, including five who made major gifts. Qin now wishes they had told Lipo about the initiative earlier. But he’s happy that “at least he knew we were very grateful” for all the professor had done for them.

“He was a great person from [a professional] perspective,” says Qin, “and another reason to honor him is that he was such a good human being. He was fair to his students, and he treated them very well in terms of really caring about their careers and prospects.”

Qin says that Lipo was a pioneer in accepting students from China at a time when the country was less advanced in technology than it is now, and that “really made a huge difference in the lives of those students.” Almost all of them had research assistantships that included free tuition and living expenses or teaching assistant positions.

“We greatly benefited from this system,” says Qin. “By giving back, we are making some contribution to help the UW and the students. We were very happy to do this. In my mind, it could be the most meaningful thing I did in my life.”

If you’d like to donate to the fund in honor of Professor Lipo, click here.

Lorraine Hansberry poses with her typewriter at her Greenwich Village apartment in 1959, the year that “Raisin in the Sun” opened on Broadway. David Attie/Getty Images

The play that brought fame to Lorraine Hansberry x’52 during her much-too-brief life came from a place within.

When she wrote A Raisin in the Sun, she was evoking her own family’s harsh experiences as black people moving into an all-white Chicago neighborhood. Hansberry was raised in a culture of activism: her father pushed back against restrictive covenants that spawned segregated housing areas until a Supreme Court ruling led to the end of such practices.

She became the first African American female playwright to make it to Broadway when her play opened in 1959.

Hansberry majored in art when she first enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, and her desire to speak out never wavered. A classmate remembered her as “the only girl I knew who could whip together a fresh picket sign with her own hands, at a moment’s notice, for any cause or occasion.” She thrived in her humanities classes but struggled with the sciences, and she left campus for New York City after two years. She worked for a progressive black newspaper and contributed letters to a lesbian magazine, although, fearing a backlash, she signed them using only her initials.

Not content to be a lone voice in the fight for equality, Hansberry once said, “The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.”

Hansberry’s play is named for a line in a Langston Hughes poem: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” It sparked attention on opening night — and long after. “Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage,” James Baldwin wrote. Raisin reached broader audiences in 1961 when a film version starring Sidney Poitier hit theaters. Later it was produced twice for television, and it returned for two runs on Broadway.

Hansberry died of cancer at age 34. The singer Paul Robeson spoke at her funeral, his deep voice captivating the 600-plus people who packed the church. “As an artist, Lorraine reflected the life and struggles of our day in her work, and she leaves a precious heritage,” he said. “Her soul has grown deep like rivers.”

Katie Vaughn ’03, a senior university relations specialist for the College of Letters & Science, shares her spirit during April’s Day of the Badger. Joelle Stewart

The university celebrated its inaugural spring day of giving on April 9, as the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association (WFAA) encouraged alumni and friends to go online and make gifts to the school, college, or UW cause of their choice. Billed as Day of the Badger, the event featured 1,848 minutes of pure fun, spirit, and generosity summed up in the call to “give back, wear red, and stay connected.” (The 1848 figure is a nod to the year of the university’s founding.)

“People from all across the globe used this day to get connected to the UW,” says John Grice, WFAA’s director of annual giving. He added that donors could choose from more than 140 areas, academic departments, and causes, such as preventing student food insecurity and enhancing scholarships.

The day generated lots of positive energy, as well as:

• more than 5,000 gifts
• more than $1.8 million
• upward of $369,000 in matching gifts
• gifts from every state, more than 14 countries, and four continents

Many campus units shared their excitement as they watched totals grow online in real time, providing friendly competition as momentum built. And more than 16,660 social media engagements using the hashtag #dayofthebadger demonstrated alumni pride, including messages from former student-athletes Michael Finley ’14, Carey Lohrenz ’90, Mark Tauscher ’99, MS’03, and Melvin Gordon x’14. Gordon tweeted: “Blessed to have been able to go to the best university in the country!!! So so so proud to be able to call myself a badger.”

Donors posted thank-yous to academic departments for opening doors, to the vet school for saving pets’ lives, and to retiring band director Mike Leckrone. Other comments were more general, such as “I can’t believe I got to go to school here!” and “Thanks so much for helping all of us Badgers pay it forward.”

Jeff Miller

For years, overcrowding and long lines have been the norm at the SERF (Southeast Recreational Facility), built in 1983 to give students a place to exercise. So it’s no surprise that in a 2014 student-government referendum, 87 percent of students voted to dedicate more of their fees to improving recreational facilities on campus. Work will begin this fall on a new facility with more space for students and staff to work out, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and an expanded track. Unlike the old SERF, it will have central air-conditioning and more natural light. The new building, scheduled to open in summer 2019, is part of a master plan that also includes replacing the Natatorium and overhauling the near west and near east playing fields.

Paula Bonner

After just a year of teaching phys ed to eighth graders in her native South Carolina, Paula Bonner moved to Madison for graduate school and began a 40-year relationship with the UW. She helped lead the evolution of the Badger women’s intercollegiate sports program, and then in 1989 joined the staff of the Wisconsin Alumni Association (WAA). She led the organization from 2000 until her retirement this fall.

What were alumni relations like when you assumed leadership of WAA?
The new millennium welcomed Rose Bowl championships, but also a drumbeat of reduced state support of UW–Madison — and all UW public colleges and universities. WAA [had to] invest in resources and new people as well as marketing and public relations in order to further support and advocate for this university.

Where did your work begin?
In 1998, WAA had decided to distribute the alumni member magazine, Wisconsin Alumnus (now On Wisconsin) to all alumni households in the U.S. No longer would the magazine be an exclusive benefit to dues-paying members of WAA. Indeed, this led to a new strategy of engaging all alumni. In 2000, when I assumed the WAA presidency, we had to develop a top-notch marketing, communications, and creative team that not only created a new and more powerful brand for WAA, but also provided expertise and additional resources to UW–Madison.

What were the keys to your work at WAA?
Everything we’ve done and accomplished is because of relationships — with alumni and with campus and with others. And one of the joys of this job has been building the staff that we have. I’ve been able to work with and for some amazing people. It’s those relationshps that have made things happen.

Things like what? What are you proudest of?
A hallmark of this time was a commitment to providing alumni with a new level of academically based lifelong-learning programs. WAA partnered with UW offices to offer Alumni University, Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, Made in Wisconsin, and the now-legendary Grandparents University.

One of your biggest projects in recent years has been the creation of Alumni Park. What makes it so special?
Alumni Park isn’t just a park — it’s an effort to tell a story. I want to convey meaning, to symbolize what’s iconic about Wisconsin. Madison is a special place, and the ideas and principles that students learn while they’re here and carry out into the world as alumni — that’s what this park is meant to honor.

Learn more about the award winners. The deadline for 2017 Distinguished Alumni Award nominations is December 16.

John Daniels Jr. was the first African American lawyer in the United States to start as an associate in a major law firm and become chair.

John Daniels Jr. MS’72

John Daniels Jr. is chair emeritus at the national law firm Quarles & Brady. As chair, he grew the law firm significantly during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. A nationally recognized expert in real estate and business law, he has been involved in some of the nation’s most complex real estate redevelopment projects. He is the former national president of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers and has represented major corporations such as General Electric, Kraft Foods, and Xerox.

After earning his MS in education, Daniels received his JD from Harvard University. Over the years, he has been a major force for civic good in Milwaukee. He has worked as lead lawyer on many signature downtown projects. He also helped organize an annual golf tournament, the Fellowship Open, that raises money to support children in need, and he has worked with his brother, a Milwaukee clergyman, on a number of community housing and education projects.

Judith Faulkner, who earned her MS in computer sciences, serves on the department’s board of visitors, and the company she founded, Epic Systems, has endowed three computer sciences faculty positions.

Judith Greenfield Faulkner MS’67

Judith Faulkner is the founder and CEO of Epic Systems, which she launched in 1979 in an apartment-house basement. Epic has since grown to become a leading provider of integrated health care software, with clients that include the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Cedars-Sinai, Kaiser Permanente, CVS Health, and Walgreens. More than half of the U.S. population has medical information in an Epic system. Faulkner has kept the company privately held and has built a sustainable corporate campus in Verona, Wisconsin, with 9,900 employees.

In 2013, Forbes magazine called her the “most powerful woman in health care.” Faulkner has pledged to donate 99 percent of her assets to philanthropy. UW–Madison awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2010, and she is a member of the National Academy of Medicine’s Leadership Roundtable. She also served on the Health Information Technology Policy Committee, a federal advisory group that helps to shape IT-related health care policy, and its Privacy and Security subcommittee.

Doris Weisberg serves on the Memorial Union Building Association and is helping to position the Wisconsin Union to use locally grown products in its food-service operations.

Doris Feldman Weisberg ’58

Doris Feldman Weisberg was part of the team that launched the Food Network, where she produced numerous shows and was the managing editor of food news. She has also produced cooking shows for Lifetime Television. Prior to that, she was on the faculty of City College of the City University of New York, where she taught for 26 years. She was director of the Speech and Hearing Center and retired in 1992 as chair of the speech department.

Weisberg earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and went on to receive her MS and PhD from Columbia University. She serves on the political science department’s board of visitors, and she is also on the board of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association and is a member of its Women’s Philanthropy Council. She and her husband have created a planned gift to establish the Doris Feldman Weisberg and Robert Weisberg Center for Progressive Political Thought. They also established the Doris and Robert Weisberg Current Issues Symposium Fund at the Memorial Union to bring relevant and timely speakers to campus.

With a chorus of “Varsity,” Chancellor Rebecca Blank sent the new campaign into high gear at a launch party in October. Above (from left, flanked by members of the UW Band) are John Morgridge, Blank, Tashia Morgridge, and Mary Sue '81 and Mike '80 Shannon.

Former Badger football player Mark Tauscher ’99, MS’03 served as one of the event’s emcees. Mary Sue Shannon ’81 looks on.

It’s possible you aren’t familiar with All Ways Forward — not yet, anyway. This is the name for the comprehensive campaign for UW-Madison, publicly launched last month at an event in the Kohl Center.

It’s certain that you should, at least in a small way, know who Colonel William F. Vilas 1858, MA1861 was. Most of you have been to Vilas Zoo (named for his son Henry). Many have spent time in Vilas Hall. (If you studied journalism or mass communication, you spent a lot of time there.)

But Vilas was much more than the building and zoo that carry his name. He was a lawyer and a Civil War hero and a lumber baron. He served the UW as a professor and as a regent, and he served the nation as secretary of the interior, as postmaster general, and as a U.S. senator.

Still, that’s not what makes us think he’d support All Ways Forward. The key piece of his legacy is what he did when he died: in 1908, Vilas left his entire estate, $1.8 million, in trust to the UW for the purpose of funding distinguished research professorships.

Vilas was the first alumnus to put serious money behind enhancing UW teaching and research, and his gesture inspired followers (although the trust didn’t begin paying to the UW until after Vilas’s daughter died in 1960, so some of his followers’ gifts actually preceded his). Still, it was a slow-burning trend. Between Vilas’s death and November 2014, the UW built up 142 fully funded, endowed chairs and professorships: an average of 1.3 per year.

That slow burn sparked to high flame last November, when John ’55 and Tashia ’55 Morgridge offered $100 million in matching funds to support faculty chairs and professorships. Over the next seven months, donors responded, and the Morgridges upped their offer to $125 million, so that the university will receive $250 million. That more than doubled the number of fully funded chairs and professorships, so the total tops 300.

Vilas wanted to see the UW become a leading institution in perpetuity, and that’s what the campaign is about: creating large-scale change to ensure the university’s stature.

All Ways Forward, notes UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank, is “only the fourth comprehensive fundraising campaign in our history — and by far the biggest,” with a goal of bringing in $3.2 billion by the end of the decade.

Though the university has been through a rough year with Wisconsin’s legislature — swallowing a big budget cut and changes to tenure that made faculty more than a little unhappy — Blank insists that the campaign isn’t about patching holes in state support. It’s about building on UW-Madison’s excellence.

“We are, and we intend to remain, a top-ranked, world-class university,” she says. “There’s not a single institution of higher education in the United States that doesn’t increasingly depend upon its friends and alumni. Gift dollars don’t replace other funds, but they help us leverage them.”

The campaign’s public launch during Homecoming week in October was a moment of pomp and fanfare. Blank announced the goal to a crowd of nearly a thousand students, faculty, staff, and members of the Madison community. The event included presentations that highlighted four strategic priorities:

• providing student support
• improving the student experience
• maintaining faculty excellence
• supporting research and innovation

But though the launch was last month, the campaign has actually been underway (in a “quiet phase”) for more than two years. Since July 1, 2013, the UW Foundation (which is UW–Madison’s official fundraising and gift-receiving organization) has received more than $1.2 billion, about 38 percent of the final goal. That includes the Morgridges’ gift, as well as a $50 million matching gift for scholarships from Albert ’52, MBA’55 and Nancy ’55 Nicholas; two gifts from The Grainger Foundation, adding up to $47 million, to support the College of Engineering; and a $28 million gift of art and funds for art education from Jerome ’48 and Simona x’49 Chazen.

“These are the kinds of gifts that transform a campus,” Blank says. “They strengthen our ability to attract top-notch teachers and researchers, who in turn make us more competitive for federal research dollars and help us to attract the best faculty, staff, and students.”

And they’re the kinds of gifts that Colonel William F. Vilas would understand.

John Allen is senior editor of On Wisconsin. For more about the campaign, see allwaysforward.org.