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!

Sheffield invests in the development of his players as people whose lives extend beyond volleyball.

This may come as a surprise: Kelly Sheffield, the winningest volleyball coach in UW history, has never played the game himself. While Sheffield may never have stared an opponent in the eyes through the weave of a net, he makes up for it with more than 30 years of an arguably more valuable perspective.

Sheffield joined the UW as the head coach of the volleyball team in December 2012, just as the Badgers were coming off one of the lowest slumps in the program’s history.

“I thought that this was a place that could be great in this sport,” Sheffield says. “I thought that with the fan base, and the location, and the academics here, it could be a place that people would want to be a part of — that this could be a monster.”

Today, he’s led the team to four Big Ten Conference championship titles and nine consecutive NCAA tournaments, including three of the program’s four appearances in the NCAA championship, the latest of which resulted in the Badgers’ first national title in 2021. At this point in his career, turning fledgling teams into forces on the court is Sheffield’s signature play.

Sheffield assumed his first head coaching position at the University at Albany in 2001. His first team ended its season 4–20. By the time he left in 2007, the Great Danes had won three regular-season and three conference-tournament championships. He then spent five years as head coach at the University of Dayton before joining UW–Madison, where the Badgers had spent their last five seasons failing to qualify for the NCAA tournament, left out of the American Volleyball Coaches Association’s (AVCA) Top 25 Poll, and ranking in the bottom half of the Big Ten.

Enter Sheffield. In his first season, the Badgers tied for fourth in the Big Ten, were ranked second by the AVCA, and became the lowest NCAA seed to ever qualify for the championship when they made the program’s first appearance in the tournament since 2007 and first championship appearance since 2000.

The secret to these turnarounds, Sheffield says, is no secret at all: shared goals, strong players, and sheer passion.

“You’ve got to give everybody a vision of where it is you want to go. Then, every single day, you’re just working toward it, trying to find ways to get better,” he says. According to his players, he conveys that vision in no uncertain terms.

“[He] tells you how it is whether it’s what you want to hear or not,” says middle blocker Danielle Hart ’21, MSx’24. “In Kelly’s mind, to be anything but honest is to not care enough about that person and their improvement.”

But there’s a little more to it than that for the coach. As much as Sheffield invests in the success of his team on the court, he invests more in the development of his players as people whose lives extend beyond volleyball.

“If it’s just about volleyball, to me, that’s boring,” Sheffield says. “We’ve got the opportunity to teach life skills through sport and through competition. Finding ways to help make a connection between these things won’t only help you become a better volleyball player or a better team, but it will help you through challenging times of your lives.”

In his 10th season with the Badgers, Sheffield’s goals haven’t changed much since his first: be elite and remain elite. (Check and check.) His coaching philosophy also remains the same, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in favor of changing it.

“I want [players’] time here to catapult them toward their future,” Sheffield says. “I want them to know that I care about them more as a person than what they can do as an athlete. I care about who they are right now, and also about their future. … And along the way, hopefully, we teach them a thing or two about the game of volleyball.”

Ng’s imagery might suggest that she went unwillingly, but she follows with a burst of warm laughter. Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, just across the street from Ng’s childhood home in central Missouri, was a center of joy and community. As a young girl, Ng helped her parents keep the church clean. She’d go with her mother to choir rehearsals, and her dad was a member of the deacon board. These daily visits to church while growing up led Ng on a path to continued service as an adult: religious, family, community, and military.

They also led her toward shattering a glass ceiling: becoming the first Black female pilot in the United States military.

Mount Olive didn’t only form Ng’s faith; it gave her a space to form a thick skin. In the church’s large lot, she liked to play football with her older male cousins, though they didn’t usually welcome her participation. In fact, the boys often played with the intent of making Ng cry so that she’d stop bothering them. It wasn’t uncommon for her to run the ball and end up at the bottom of a heavy pileup of bigger cousins. “But you don’t dare cry,” she’d tell herself. “If you do, it’s game over.”

Game over was not something Ng wanted to hear — ever. She spent her childhood roughhousing with cousins, climbing trees, and ignoring her father telling her, “Go on, girl, get out of here,” as he worked on engines. She remembers one of the church ministers saying that the sky was the limit: “And if you shoot for the stars and you don’t reach them, at least you’ll hit the moon by some chance.”

As a young Black girl growing up in the 1960s, Ng wasn’t going to let anyone shoot her down. Although she had a number of very good childhood friends in her hometown of Centralia, she also encountered unkindness and hateful names. She switched to a school in the neighboring university town with a more welcoming community. At Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri, Ng loved going to the football games — not for sport, but to revel in the uniformity and regimen of her high school marching band. She didn’t know it at the time, but studying the band’s formations and precision would serve her well.

In her senior year, Ng buckled down to focus on her grades and made the National Honor Society. She focused her college search on three schools: the University of Missouri, the University of Kansas, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. None of them required an application fee: “If they decided that I was not worthy of going to their college,” she says, “I couldn’t stand the thought of paying for rejection.”

Ng returned to campus this fall for her induction into the ROTC’s Badger Battalion Hall of Fame. Bryce Richter

All three schools accepted Ng. She settled on the UW for two reasons. First, a pair of her high school teachers had done a training at Madison the summer before, and they told her how great the campus was. “If you go far away and it doesn’t work, you can always come back home,” they advised her. “But if you never leave, you may never break out of this cycle.”

The second thing that swayed Ng toward the UW was a daytime call from the ROTC department. She was impressed that an organization had called her during daytime hours when phone calls were charged at a higher rate.

“All I could think — this naïve kid — ‘They must really want me,’ ” she recalls. “ ‘They’re calling during daytime hours. This is high dollar, man.’ ”

Lady Hayes

Ng arrived on campus in the fall of 1974. During spring semester, she began training in the ROTC program — and she excelled. In 1976, she was chosen as one of only two women to participate on the ROTC’s Tri-Service Exhibition Drill Team at the UW. With a competitive nature and experience literally tackling whatever came her way, she was a standout.

In 1977, Ng was selected for advanced camp in Fort Riley, Kansas, where she continued to impress. In a physical training test involving five different events, Ng earned 497 out of 500 possible points. But when she heard that some of the men at camp were complaining that the few women there were showing them up, Ng considered pulling back. Her master sergeant noticed her change in demeanor and learned what the men had said. “Lady Hayes,” he told Ng, “if you back off, I’m going to drop you like a hot potato. What makes you think that if you slack off and don’t give your best that they’re going to step up the ante?”

Ng didn’t wait to see if anyone else would step up. She decided to compete against herself instead and committed to doing her best. She took on leadership positions and seized opportunities that had only recently been opened to women. After ROTC advanced camp, she took army airborne training at Fort Benning, Georgia, to learn how to “jump out of perfectly good airplanes.”

One of her ROTC advanced camp instructors, Lt. Col. Bobby Pedigo, encouraged Ng to apply to flight school, another new opportunity for women in the military. She hadn’t had any previous ambitions to fly, but Ng looked at it like every other adventure she’d already taken on, thinking, “Oh, well, that sounds cool — something new to try.”

After graduation, Ng was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army, and she headed off to flight school at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in 1979. The first woman to graduate from flight school in the U.S. military, 2nd Lt. Sally Murphy, had reached that milestone only five years earlier. When Ng showed up for processing, the mail clerk did a double take and exclaimed, “You’re the first one of you guys I ever seen come through here!” Ng didn’t believe him until a member of the base’s public affairs office approached her with a photographer and informed Ng that she really was the first Black woman to go through flight school.

Instructors at the base quickly stopped public coverage of Ng’s training to protect her privacy and prevent any animosity from her peers. She notes that, while there were a couple of classmates who still gave her sideways glances, she and the one other woman in her class were largely accepted. One classmate, Dennis Ng, became her husband; they’ve now been married for 42 years.

For everybody coming through behind you

In 1979, Ng completed her flight training and qualified as a helicopter pilot, becoming the first Black female aviator in the U.S. military. Once it was a sure thing, the public affairs specialist was welcomed back to talk to her about her historic achievement. The barrier was never something Ng set out to break, but she’s grateful for the opportunity and humble about her accomplishment. “It’s just where God allowed me to be.”

Ng (middle row, left) pictured in 1989 at Fort Ord, California. Courtesy of Marcella Ng

The newly married Ng next set out to a post in Germany with her army aviator husband on the Married Army Couples Program. Assigned to the 394th Transportation Battalion, she was the first Black officer, the first female officer, and the first female aviator within her unit in Germany. She had a personal first, too, albeit less joyous: she came up against a subgroup within her unit known as “No Blacks, No Broads” and faced similar sentiments from a few of her superior officers. She lost her flight status in Germany and repeatedly fought to get back in the air, but to no avail.

While it hurt Ng deeply to have flying unfairly taken away from her, her friends comforted her. “Marcy,” they explained, “you’re going through those doors. And you are encountering the hard times. And the hurtful times. If it did nothing else, it caused it to be a little bit easier for everybody else who has to come through behind you.”

Mililani

After moving from base to base in the United States and South Korea, Ng eventually became the commander of the 49th Transportation Battalion at Fort Hood, Texas. She retired from the military as a lieutenant colonel in 2000 after 22 years of service and stayed in the area with Dennis and their three children.

Of course, Ng hasn’t really stopped serving. During her transition to civilian life, her next career move was decided by her youngest daughter’s unplanned pregnancy. Ng was no stranger to such things — her biological parents had been in the same position when she was born, and her grandparents legally adopted her when she was eight years old. While looking for ways to support her daughter and new grandchild, she discovered a local pregnancy resource center and was inspired to get involved. She joined the organization as a peer counselor and served for seven years as its director until retiring in 2013. Ever the thrill seeker, Ng and her husband took up motorcycling in the 1990s and are still active with the Christian Motorcyclists Association, a religious organization aimed at ministering to bikers and spreading the faith. Ng explains that evangelizing doesn’t always require words — sometimes she’s just along for the ride, with the simple goal of showing where her joy comes from. “Sometimes you got to use words, but most times it’s just you, living your life, and people being able to see what makes you different,” she says.

Ng’s latest adventure is taking place right on her own lawn in Nolanville, Texas. In 1998, she and her family started putting together a large Quonset-style building on their property. It was a project aimed at family bonding more than anything else — they didn’t have a specific use planned for the building until Ng’s oldest daughter married. Ng decorated it as a reception hall and saw that they could be putting their land to better use.

It formed the basis of the Ngs’ next venture, Mililani Woods, which provides an inexpensive venue for weddings, community meetings, and outdoor photography. The name bridges Dennis’s Hawaiian upbringing with the couple’s faith. Mililani comes from the Hawaiian translation of Psalm 100:4 and is posted on the venue’s website: “E komo ‘oukou i loko a kona ‘īpuka me ka mililani!” In English: “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving.” And for Ng, there’s every reason to be thankful.

“All 11 acres — it belongs to him. We’re just stewards of the vineyard.” •

Keyes’s favorite character is Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who fought for women’s right to vote. Robert Kaplafka

Laura Keyes MA’07 has wonderful personalities — six, to be precise. Since 2008, Keyes has given more than 750 presentations as acclaimed 19th-century women, mostly as Mary Todd Lincoln, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her other characters include Charlotte Brontë, the fictional Irene Adler (the only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes), and Lincoln’s daughter-in-law Mary Harlan Lincoln.

In real life, Keyes heads the public library in Dunlap, Illinois, a role that meshes well with her passion for accurately re-creating the past. “I’m an extraordinarily well-organized person,” says Keyes, who earned her master’s degree in library science at the UW. “I am careful in what I say, and I’m careful in my research as well.”

That research extends to the period clothing she wears as she works with seamstresses to ensure that apparel — from Lincoln’s silk ballgowns to Wilder’s cotton day dresses — is as authentic as possible. The costumes help her get into the mind-set of her characters. Some of her dresses weigh 10 pounds, and she wears three layers of underclothing. “You move and think differently,” according to Keyes. “You gesture differently — not only because of the corset, but because of the [restrictive] cut of the dress.”

Her avocation began when she was cast as President Lincoln’s widow in a local play. Newly graduated from UW–Madison, Keyes dove into studying the tragic First Lady. A newspaper noticed her scholarship. Soon other libraries asked her to appear.

“Mary Lincoln was a complicated person who lived a very hard life,” says Keyes. Besides her husband’s assassination, Mary suffered the deaths of three sons. Her surviving son had her committed to a mental institution. Keyes offers five different Lincoln presentations, each at a crucial moment in her life, and shares stories of her compassion as well as of her selfish, petty behavior. Keyes acknowledges Lincoln had symptoms that match bipolar disorder. “I share different perspectives of her,” she says.

Wilder has proven to be a challenging persona as well. In recent years, her books have been attacked for racial insensitivity. “They are still good teaching tools,” says Keyes. “But as one tool in a series of other books.”

Keyes’s favorite character? Stanton, who fought for women’s right to vote. “Her words are timeless. I use a lot of passages from her writings, letters, and autobiography. Some of her arguments are very, very relevant today,” says Keyes.

People often ask her characters to comment on news events or current First Ladies. Perhaps mercifully, she gets to dodge those questions. Says Keyes: “Mary Lincoln says she doesn’t know who those people are, but people still ask.”

Robinson helped lead Badger volleyball to the program’s first national championship in December 2021. Julia Kostopoulos

If you ask Devyn Robinson x’24 to describe herself at the outset of her time as a Badger, she uses words like “quiet,” “shy,” and “reserved.” If you know anything about Robinson now, this may be hard to believe.

The right-side hitter and middle blocker made a name for herself on the court, joining Dana Rettke ’21, MA’22 and Anna Smrek x’25 to form the Badgers’ nearly impenetrable block last season, attacking the ball with the ease of swatting away a fly (and with far more finesse).

Off the court, she’s notorious for hamming it up on TikTok, where she shares behind-the-scenes volleyball tidbits and snapshots of life as a student-athlete with more than 11,000 followers. Visibility is important to Robinson, and it’s a spotlight she’s seeking to grow and share, though she picked up hard-learned lessons while getting there.

Robinson graduated early from high school in January 2020 to start training with the Badgers. At 17, she had already won several national and world volleyball championships before arriving at the UW. She was also the team’s youngest player.

“I’d never been in a position where I wasn’t the best in the gym. I automatically had that respect from people [in high school], so I felt like I just always had a voice,” Robinson says. “Then I come here, and everybody’s good. I’m playing with Dana Rettke. I was like, ‘I’m just going to sit back and watch and maybe speak up if I have the chance.’ ”

That chance was cut short by a pandemic that sent all Badgers home. Three months later, the team returned to campus to give training a tentative go. Around the same time, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. Age was no longer the most salient part of Robinson’s identity.

“I couldn’t just separate what was going on outside of volleyball from volleyball,” Robinson says. “It gets to the point where it actually affects how I’m feeling and how I’m playing.”

In a meeting convened by head coach Kelly Sheffield, the Badgers discussed the gravity of the news and their respective roles within the growing Black Lives Matter movement. Robinson, Sydney Reed x’24, and Jade Demps x’24 led the conversation, encouraging their teammates to get involved.

“It gave me a voice that I feel like I didn’t have initially,” Robinson says. “It was a chance for me to speak up, and the way [my teammates] responded made me feel like they do care what I have to say. There’s no point in being small when everyone is respecting everybody.”

Instead of kicking up their feet after practices, the Badgers traded their jerseys for poster board and joined the thousands of people marching on Madison’s streets. Afterward, some of the players, including Robinson, painted murals on boarded-up shop windows.

Gone were her days of holding back. When the Badgers got the green light to play their delayed 2020 season during the spring of 2021, Robinson made a strong debut: her performances in her first matches were featured among NCAA Women’s Volleyball’s top plays of the week, and she went on to be named to the all–Big Ten first team. Later that year, their 2021 season culminated in a historic win for Wisconsin volleyball with the program’s first national championship title.

“I was on the sidelines when we won, and I literally couldn’t breathe,” she says. “I don’t think I took a breath until the game was over.”

Robinson’s post-Wisconsin career is never far from her mind. Sure, she’d love to play professionally — maybe in Spain or Brazil — but when her time on the court comes to an end, she’d rather pick up a microphone than a clipboard and a whistle.

“I want to be a sportscaster because I don’t see enough representation of women’s sports on TV, especially volleyball,” Robinson says. “I want to be someone little Black girls can look up to and see that, ‘Oh, if she can do it on TV, then I can do it.’ ”

Fortunately, Robinson is with the Badgers for a few more years. You should catch a game while she’s here. If she’s not on the court, you’ll surely spot her on the sidelines. She’ll be the one dancing like no one’s watching, though all eyes are on her. She didn’t wait this long or work this hard for them to be anywhere else.

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.” •

Fortunately, the former Badger football star and native of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, seems up to the task. Measured and even-keeled, McIntosh isn’t fazed by change. He welcomes it.

“I’m really proud of the way our staff and our administration have worked through this change,” says McIntosh, who returned to the UW in 2014 after a successful business career and quickly rose through the administrative ranks. “I’m even more proud of the way our student-athletes have dealt with it. They’re the ones who are the most inspiring out of this.”

What has been your approach to dealing with all the uncertainties?

Our focus is to embrace the change. Don’t resist it. Advocate for what we think is most important, which is education. And then seek opportunity to enhance our program in ways that we couldn’t have prior to this change.

The graduation rate of student-athletes is more than 90 percent. What is the department doing to maintain that level of academic success?

We talk about coming to the University of Wisconsin as a 40-year decision, not a four-year decision. The experience that our student-athletes have here within their sport and within the classroom are two major components of it. But then there’s this other dimension, which is the human being. And we’ve got an incredible team of people who help position our student-athletes to be successful in the long game, in their lives and in their careers.

Last year was a difficult one for men’s basketball coach Greg Gard, culminating in a leaked locker room recording of senior players criticizing him. You stuck by him in the aftermath. Why was that the right decision?

I’ve been on some successful teams that have had difficult conversations throughout the year. I think it’s a healthy thing when players feel comfortable having real conversations. Those are closed-door meetings, meant for the team and for the coaches. It was an incredible breach of trust that those conversations were shared. And I thought it was important to support Coach Gard through that. He’s done a great job turning that experience into something that has helped this team achieve their success.

In December, the women’s volleyball team won its first NCAA title. How did you feel watching that five-set championship match?

My short answer is that it was torture. I’m kidding, obviously, but there were very few moments of those games that were comfortable. And that’s because it was competition at its highest. It was everything you could have asked for in a volleyball match. I was so happy for the players and for the coaches and for our staff. There have been so many sacrifices made, so many decisions over the course of years and years that have led to the culmination in winning a national championship. And I was just moved to be there and to witness the joy they experienced.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Title IX legislation. What do you see as its lasting impact on college athletics?

It would have been impossible for me, a long time ago as a student-athlete, to appreciate the impact of Title IX. It’s not impossible for me now as a father of three, including two daughters. My oldest is going to go play college volleyball next year [at Colorado State]. My youngest daughter, who’s a sophomore, aspires to do so. And my wife, Deann [’99], was an athlete here in our rowing program. So it’s personal to me. I’ve talked a lot about what access to a world-class education did in terms of developing me as a person and what it meant for the trajectory of my life. And Title IX has made that opportunity available to tens of thousands of women athletes here who are just as deserving.

In your introductory press conference, Chancellor Rebecca Blank talked about the Wisconsin way and the charge to maintain that culture here. How do you define that phrase?

In its simplest form, it’s about being successful in the classroom and competitive in our sport programs. And it’s as much about doing it the right way. That means doing it with integrity as an extension of this university. It’s shepherding a program that has been here for a long time before I came along and will be here for a long time after I’m done.

How do you think the NCAA’s new NIL policy has played out here?

I think it’s been very healthy, and I’m really supportive of it. It’s been a great opportunity for our student-athletes to capitalize on these new flexibilities. It’s a great learning experience for them, one they can take with them once they leave here. We continue to enhance our programming so that they can both be successful and avoid some of the pitfalls that may exist.

You’ve helped to develop the new Department of Clinical and Sport Psychology. Why is supporting the mental health of student-athletes important to you?

Mental health is just as important as physical health. It’s only been relatively recently that it’s been treated that way. And it’s the right thing to do. I’ve been public about my own experience here as a student-athlete. It was taboo to admit [mental health issues]. If you were talking to somebody or seeking help, you didn’t want it to be found out. And I’m proud of the fact that’s not the case today.

Did you receive any advice from former Athletic Director Barry Alvarez that sticks with you today?

Barry has always been there for me, in different ways, in different roles. All I have to do is pick up the phone and give him a call. The first question that Barry would always ask in every decision is, “What’s best for the kids?” And I don’t think that asking that question will ever serve us wrong.

Nobles says that “a large share of the population have long or highly irregular cycles and could not reasonably learn about their pregnancy in time to seek a legal abortion” under laws in effect or under consideration. Destiny Schaefer

More than one in five women experience irregular menstrual cycles that could keep them from learning they are pregnant until it’s too late to access an abortion under some state laws in effect or under consideration.

Researchers from UW–Madison and the National Institutes of Health analyzed anonymized data on 1.6 million menstrual cycles provided by more than 267,000 adults to a cycle-tracking app. Twenty-two percent of the people in the study had irregular menstrual cycles that differed in length from one cycle to the next by seven or more days.

“For almost everyone, the first symptom of a pregnancy is a missed period,” says UW sociology professor Jenna Nobles, coauthor of the study. “But a large share of the population have long or highly irregular cycles and could not reasonably learn about their pregnancy in time to seek a legal abortion under laws that set limits at detectable fetal cardiac activity or six weeks.”

The age group most likely to have cycles of irregular length is 18- to 24-year-olds — also the ages with the highest abortion rates in the United States.

Experts in reproductive health know that variation in menstrual-cycle length is common, according to Nobles, but the new study is remarkable for demonstrating how short the window can be between a missed period and fetal cardiac activity.

Milligan-McClellan is as much influenced by her environment as it is by her. Growing up in the Inupiat community of Kotzebue, Alaska, she was intimately aware of her Indigenous heritage and of the disdain with which she was conditioned to regard it. After spending her adolescence rejecting her Indigeneity in pursuit of whiteness, she found herself on a campus perfectly suited to the latter identity. She also found herself miserable. Science couldn’t explain the painful disconnect between her spirit and her surroundings, but it played a crucial role in resolving it.

Milligan-McClellan — known to students and colleagues as “Dr. Kat” — is a microbiologist and assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut. She was previously an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Alaska–Anchorage and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon. And before she was a Duck, she spent her undergraduate and doctoral studies falling in love with microbiology at UW–Madison. It’s a journey that has brought her about as far as one can get from Kotzebue — literally and, at times, figuratively. But it’s also led her back there.

Like any good research endeavor, Dr. Kat’s started with asking the right questions.

The price of parasitology

Milligan-McClellan’s early career plans put her not behind a microscope, but at a front desk. She attended hotel-administration school at Cornell University with the intention of running Kotzebue’s local tourist mainstay. After quickly realizing that hospitality was not her calling, she traded lobbies for laboratories and headed to UW–Madison, encouraged by friends and family who assured her that she was destined to become a medical doctor. At the UW, she realized that there was still room to contribute to a field of scientific discovery that she once considered finite.

“I didn’t know that the things we learn about in our textbooks came from research labs and that people are actively doing research,” she says. “When I started working in a research lab and we were discovering new things, I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’ ”

A series of jobs working in labs ranging from plant pathology to studying malaria in mosquitoes brought Milligan-McClellan to her first scientific infatuation: Staphylococcus aureus, an infection-causing bacterium. Later, in her doctoral studies, she switched to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Her newfound excitement over microscopic life was less contagious back home, where toxoplasmosis — the infection caused by T. gondii — is an uncommon disease and an even less common term.

“When I was doing all this work, I thought it was very important, and everybody at the university was saying that this is important work. But I would go home, and I would tell my dad and my mom, and they’d [go], ‘Staph-what-now? And toxo-huh?’ ” she says. “I was studying these things that they didn’t know, and it had no impact on their life.”

The disconnect with home wasn’t exclusive to her research. At the same time that Milligan-McClellan was making breakthroughs in the lab, she was struggling to recognize herself. Years of being taught in school and by missionaries that traditional Inupiat lifestyles were backward had conditioned her to reject hallmarks of her heritage. “When I first started out in research, I was very much into assimilating into Western science and Western culture,” she says. “I didn’t wear my traditional clothes. I only spoke fluent and ‘eloquent’ English. I was just thinking, ‘I am white, and I am going to behave white, and I am not going to pay attention to all of these things my ancestors took 10,000 years to learn.’ ”

But what Milligan-McClellan once saw as the price of acceptance in “lower-48 culture” quickly proved too high a cost.

“That’s really hard on your psyche. I was pretty dang depressed,” she says. “By the time I got into grad school, crying in the microscope room was no big deal to me because I just felt so isolated, and I didn’t know why.”

Stickleback Solution

According to Aaron Bird Bear MS’10, Milligan-McClellan’s feelings of isolation are devastatingly common among Indigenous students. Bird Bear, the UW’s director of tribal relations, is a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Diné nations and is enrolled in the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota’s Fort Berthold Reservation.

“The United States only decriminalized Native American language and culture in 1975 [with the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act], but just because the United States decriminalized Native American language and culture didn’t mean public institutions or broader society suddenly embraced it,” he says. “Native students have to kind of reconcile that at least 80 percent of their peers know little to nothing about Native Americans.”

Milligan-McClellan found the people who did. Through involvement with student groups such as Wunk Sheek and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), she surrounded herself with people who encouraged her to embrace elements of the culture that she’d long rejected.

Bird Bear was the American Indian student academic services coordinator in the College of Letters & Science when he first met Milligan-McClellan, then a new graduate student.

“Eagle feathers are the highest award Indigenous people can receive in their own communities, so we would invite students to come pick up an eagle feather to take home and bead it for a few weeks, and we would gift it to our graduates upon graduation,” he says. “Kat came in to pick up an eagle feather and wanted to contribute to recognizing the graduating class of that year.”

He recalls one AISES retreat during which Milligan-McClellan led attendees in Alaska Native winter games, a series of traditional challenges like seal-hops and one-legged kicks. While competitive and amusing, the activities also reflected the skills necessary for surviving in the Arctic north.

“It wasn’t until I started talking with [other Indigenous students] that I started recognizing that I’m ignoring 10,000 years of knowledge,” Milligan-McClellan says. “How does that benefit anybody to ignore that amount of knowledge? To turn my back on a history of strong people who have survived in the world’s harshest conditions for that long — it can only do me a disservice.”

Her newfound campus community was also a reminder of what she missed from Kotzebue. Ever the researcher, she began reaching out to family back in Alaska, asking questions and searching for answers that could strengthen her ties to her ancestral home.

“My aunt Lovie was very gracious and would answer all these questions that I had, and that made me understand that there was somebody in my family who would answer. I wasn’t going to be ostracized for [not knowing more about my heritage],” she says. “She told me, ‘You don’t know this because we were told not to know this. Now you’re learning it, and I think that’s beautiful, and I’m going to welcome you back in.”

But while Milligan-McClellan was in grad school, Aunt Lovie died in a house fire.

“Losing that one person who had so much knowledge … made me realize that it shouldn’t be on one person,” she says. “There should be multiple people who are holding onto that knowledge, and it’s my responsibility to my community to start regaining that.”

Milligan-McClellan began relearning her Inupiat language and incorporating traditional foods back into her diet, but she found that her postdoctoral studies offered a road home as well, and another opportunity to contribute to an existing body of knowledge — this time about her own people. She turned her attention from parasites to beneficial microbes and began studying interactions between host organisms and gut microbiota in wild threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), a species of fish found across the Northern Hemisphere, from Connecticut to Kotzebue and beyond. Studying a host organism’s gut microbiome offers insight into both how the host’s genetics predispose it to certain immune responses to microbiota in the gut and how the organism responds to microbiota introduced into its external environment. MilliganMcClellan intended to study the variations in these relationships across populations in zebrafish under microbiologist Karen Guillemin at the University of Oregon until she agreed to collaborate with Guillemin’s colleague, who was studying stickleback. Initially, she was put off by the complexity of the organism — too many variables to consider. However, the intricacy of the fish proved to be one of its greatest assets, and it’s part of what makes Dr. Kat’s work unique.

Most researchers work with model organisms — think of inbred lab mice, whose diet and environment are meticulously controlled. This is useful for testing one variable at a time, but it doesn’t reflect the unbridled variety of nature. Stickleback allow for a holistic analysis of a complex organism sourced directly from its natural habitat. Thanks to their ubiquity in bodies of water throughout the country, Milligan-McClellan’s lab has been able to assess how each population’s respective environment, available food supply, and stress levels influence its microbiota.

“We were doing collections on Cheney Lake, which is in Anchorage,” she says, “and because we were physically at that lake every month, we could see how clear the water was at different stages. We could see how thick the ice was. We could see that there were bears and moose that wander, but there’s also a lot of people with dogs, and they don’t always pick up the poop. So how is that species of microbe getting into the water, and how is that changing the fish’s microbiome?” Stickleback also gave her a regular excuse to head back home. Toxoplasmosis may have been a mystery to her family, but fish guts had an immediate relevance. After all, it’s only a short evolutionary jump between stickleback and Homo sapiens. “Billions of years ago, there were microbes,” Milligan-McClellan says. “Then some small things happened, and then there were fish, and then a couple of really insignificant things happened, and then there were humans.”

Blood cells such as B cells, T cells, neutrophils, and macrophages — all of which are crucial to a functioning immune system — are conserved from fish all the way to humans. In Milligan-McClellan’s research, these evolutionary links may indicate that interactions in the gut microbiomes of stickleback are conserved to humans, too. The findings could assist in the research and treatment of diseases such as stomach and gastric cancers, which are common among Alaska Natives.

“There are so many diseases that affect Alaska Natives and Native Americans that are correlated with changes in the microbiome. I thought if I study the impacts of changing the microbiota — and also what changes the microbiota — I might be able to identify something that would be important for people back home,” she says.

Studying stickleback in Alaskan ecosystems also means studying the ecotoxins that permeate what is some of America’s most polluted water: the area around Kotzebue has contaminants such as crude oil, microplastics, and antibiotics. Milligan-McClellan’s lab is identifying microbes that could degrade and reverse the effects of those pollutants in a host’s microbiome.

“These contaminants are in the water that my family uses and that our animals come from and use,” she says, “so these ecotoxicants are potentially harming us, the people of Alaska.”

Now when she returns home with research to share, it’s work that directly impacts her community.

“When I talk to people back home about the research I’m doing, they’re not like, ‘Toxoplasma? Who’s ever heard of that?’ Now, they’re like, ‘Oh, crude oil. Yeah, we’re getting more oil in our waters because of increased boat use or snowmobile use. How do you think that affected the waters?’ ” she says. “The only way we’re going to move past this idea that science only belongs to a specific group of people is if we bring everybody into it.”

LESS LONELY

Milligan-McClellan’s research appreciates a living being for what it is, with all of its nuances and complexities. She appreciates nuance and complexity in people, too — even in herself.

After she arrived at the UW, her loneliness was crippling. By the time she left, Dr. Kat was the first person from her village to receive a doctorate in biological sciences. She’s believed to be the first Indigenous person to receive a doctorate in her department and the 10th Indigenous person to receive a doctorate in a STEM field at the UW. They’re feats that have set her apart in her field, but she takes great comfort in knowing she’s not the “only” anymore. “When I started, I was the only Native STEM person that I knew for a while,” she says. “Now, I’ve got all these people I can talk to about this, and it feels really good to know there are so many of us out there. It’s also awesome because I can tell people, ‘Yeah, you’re Native. This is how you can use your Native voice.’ ”

Milligan-McClellan’s work has also caught the attention of some big names in research. The National Institutes of Health is interested in stickleback for their utility as a model for human diseases and human-microbe interaction. The National Science Foundation has taken an interest in her work as a means of studying the evolution of host-microbe interaction in stickleback, which may offer insight into this evolution in other ecosystems.

“Kat’s really fulfilling all the promises we hope for [regarding] Indigenous scholarship,” Bird Bear says, “being grounded in cultural values and advancing the scientific realm with her unique perspective on how she understands the universe to function through the Inupiat universe that she grew up in.”

While relatively linear when traced on a map from start to finish, the arc of Milligan-McClellan’s journey frequently circles back to Kotzebue. Her research excursions have even come to serve a dual purpose: adding to her data on fish guts and deepening her connection to a place that’s been home to many Inupiat for centuries, and will continue to be for more to come.

“We have been on those lands for over 10,000 years. What does that mean? How does that change the way that I think of the tundra?” she asks. “It changes the way I think of the ecosystem there, which influences the way I think about science, which influences the way I think about people back home. All of it interconnects now. It took me going back as a scientist to see that connection.” •

President Richard Nixon signed the bill into law on June 23, 1972. It was a momentous development for women’s college athletics that was not widely realized as such at the time. Other parts of the Education Amendments of 1972 — busing, financial assistance — received more attention. Title IX landed with a whisper.

Still, it was noted in Madison by Kit Saunders MS’66, PhD’77, who, as women’s sports coordinator for the UW club sports program, had been trying with scarce resources to get a women’s athletics program going.

“I can remember first hearing about Title IX being passed and thinking, ‘Oh, boy, somebody finally did something,’ ” Saunders recalled. “ ‘This is probably going to help us.’ ”

And Saunders needed help. She described the landscape for women’s athletics on campus, pre-Title IX, in a UW Oral History Program interview.

“We were not able to pay our coaches very much at all. … Students did have to pay some of their expenses if there were overnights. Male athletes even in non-income sports were getting their ways paid completely.

“We had no priority on facilities,” Saunders continued. “If a facility was available, wasn’t being scheduled for something else, including intramurals and in some cases open basketball shooting, then we could get it. We were practicing in Lathrop Hall, which had no regulation-size [basketball] courts. Our swimming practices — we had one evening a week in the Natatorium.

“We had very limited uniforms. We had about two dozen warmup suits, and with 11 teams going at once, we called it ‘musical warmups.’ We’d have to try to launder them quickly and get them to the next team. We didn’t have any kind of laundry service. The coaches frequently were doing the laundry, or the athletes were doing it themselves.”

As women’s sports coordinator, Saunders had to go in front of the intramural recreation board each year to request funding. The passage of Title IX in 1972 may have emboldened her — for 1972–73, the women’s program received $8,000, four times the previous year’s budget, if still a pittance in comparison to the men.

“These meetings were frequently harrowing experiences,” Saunders noted. “The women’s program was wearing out its welcome in the club sport program as it became more expensive and more closely resembled an intercollegiate program.”

For 1973–74, when Saunders requested $25,000 to run her growing program, she was allocated only $18,000.

“So I went to the chancellor [Edwin Young PhD’50] and told him I was short,” she recalled. “He came up with that for us.”

Presumably with Title IX on his radar, Chancellor Young, in July 1972, appointed a committee to study women’s athletics and make recommendations on how they might be better served on campus. But the committee included no UW women student-athletes. And Young seemingly erred in his choice of Athletic Director Elroy Hirsch x’45 as committee chair. Hirsch called only two meetings between July 1972 and March 1973, and the second meeting was canceled.

This so infuriated a member of the committee, Muriel Sloan PhD’58, chair of the women’s physical education department, that on March 2, 1973, she sent Hirsch a blistering letter, threatening to resign from the committee.

“For me to remain on this inactive committee,” Sloan wrote, “is to continue the illusion for women students and interested faculty groups that the problem of facilities for women is being seriously considered. … You can see, therefore, that my membership on this nonfunctioning committee and its nonfunctioning status is untenable. I would prefer that the committee begin to function rather than resigning from it. If, however, you as chairman and other committee members are not equally devoted to pursuing the committee charge, then all should disband. A new committee could then be appointed by the chancellor, or existing groups concerned with equal opportunity on campus can follow up on their expressed interest in the issue.”

A poster for a 1974 panel discussion that descended into boos, hisses, and angry shouts. UW Archives 2017S00257

Sloan was formidable, a New York native who came to Madison for graduate school and stayed. She also served as vice president of the International Association of Physical Education and Sport for Girls and Women. Equally formidable on the Madison campus in 1973 was Ruth Bleier, who joined the UW’s department of neurophysiology in 1967, embarking on a career that included a deep dive into gender biases in science. Bleier was a founding member of the Association of Faculty Women at UW–Madison, and it was in that role, two weeks after Sloan wrote her letter to Hirsch, that she followed with one of her own.

Bleier began her March 16 letter by noting the antidiscrimination law that now existed under Title IX, and then wrote:

“Consequently we demand immediate and equal use of all facilities: tracks, fields, courts and pools, locker rooms, and showers. This means that all facilities be available to women and women’s teams at times that are no more inconvenient for them than for men, such as dinner time for the tennis courts and after 5:30 p.m. for the track team, the periods currently allowed women.

“We demand adequate and equal (as needed) funding for all women’s sports teams,” Bleier continued, “including salaries for coaches with full-time academic appointments and expenses for training and competition. Anything less than this must be negotiated with us and other women in athletics and justified to our satisfaction. We do not want to hear again about inadequacy of facilities, space, and time. If they are inadequate, we will share equally with men in the inadequacy. The burden is no longer ours to wait. We have waited too long. The moral and, now, the legal burden is yours.”

Hard to mistake a gauntlet being thrown down there.

One can imagine Saunders finding herself in a somewhat delicate circumstance. While she no doubt sided with Sloan and Bleier, she was also operating inside the athletic administration umbrella. Vitriol would not serve her purpose and was not her style, in any case.

“I remember after [Title IX passed], trying to explain it to the athletic board. I’d really learned about it and what it stood for — what we were going to have to do,” Saunders recalled. “People had refused to act because they didn’t have enough information. The women who had become versed in it were trying to tell [various administrators] what it was. And they were saying, ‘This can’t be.’ ”

Bleier: “We do not want to hear again about the inadequacy of facilities, space, and time. … We have waited too long.” UW Archives S05706

On April 3, 1973, a complaint against the University of Wisconsin was filed with the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Office of Civil Rights.

“The University of Wisconsin, Madison campus, is in flagrant violation of Executive Order 11246 [a 1965 nondiscrimination order issued by President Lyndon Johnson] and of Title IX … in its continued provision of unequal facilities and funding for athletics programs for women students and employees and unequal compensation for the coaching of its women’s teams.” In Madison, Saunders and her colleagues were grateful for signals from Washington that Title IX would be enforced.

“The sort of sad thing about Title IX,” she said, “is that most schools began to comply not because it was the right thing to do and had gotten started anyway, but because they were worried about the teeth that were in it and what the federal government could do. Like take away their federal funding and lots of other types of programs.” On April 19, Chancellor Young stepped in and replaced Hirsch as chairman of the Committee on Women’s Athletic Programs and Facilities with Murray Fowler, from the Department of Linguistics. Young wrote a letter to Fowler stating his hopes.

“This committee,” he wrote, “is charged with advising me of the most appropriate ways to achieve equity in men’s and women’s recreational, intercollegiate, and intramural athletic and physical education programs and facilities on the Madison campus.”

Unlike Hirsch, Fowler moved quickly. By May, the committee had passed a recommendation requiring that “all physical recreation facilities administered by the University of Wisconsin should be made available for use by both men and women.”

The most likely home for an intercollegiate women’s program was inside the UW athletics department. The athletic board took a step in that direction in September 1973, during a meeting that the Wisconsin State Journal reported “opened the door to women’s intercollegiate athletic competition within the framework of the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics.”

“The board did not immediately invite the ladies inside,” wrote State Journal sports editor Glenn Miller in his inimitable way. “Still, it was a historic step.”

What the board did was insert the following into its policy book: “It is the policy of the athletic board to make intercollegiate athletic competition, facilities, finances, administrative resources, coaching, and ancillary personnel available to all qualified undergraduate students without regard to race, creed, religion, national origin, or sex.”

1974-75 women’s basketball. UW Athletics

The Fowler committee was meanwhile formulating its own recommendations. The women members — who included Saunders and Sloan — presented a proposal to the full committee in December 1973. The committee accepted the proposal in its entirety, with Fowler saying that it would be up to Chancellor Young to act on it. A highlight among the committee’s recommendations was this:

“We believe that combining athletic programs [men’s and women’s] will be beneficial from the outset for women’s athletics and in the long run also for men’s athletics in the educational setting of the university.”

And this:

“That a woman whose title shall be director of intercollegiate athletics for women shall be responsible directly to the director of intercollegiate athletics.”

Chancellor Young took the Fowler committee’s recommendations and handed them to the athletic board, telling board chairman Fred Haberman to develop a plan of action, which some saw as the chancellor punting the issue, to use a sports metaphor. Haberman responded by appointing a committee to study it.

Vitriol would not serve Saunders’s purpose and was not her style. UW Archives

It was contentious, and Saunders, as ever, was a voice of calm. She gave an interview to the State Journal, stressing how well she got along with Otto Breitenbach ’48, MS’55, Hirsch’s top assistant.

“Our philosophies are similar,” she said.

The uncertain status of Title IX nationally couldn’t have helped. It had taken months to wake up, but the male college sports establishment — exemplified by the executives who ran the National Collegiate Athletic Association — was sounding a five-alarm alert. In numerous interviews, these men predicted doom if the Title IX regulations were enforced.

On March 11, 1974, an extraordinary panel discussion took place at the UW’s Wisconsin Center. Its stated purpose was to review the progress of women’s athletics on campus.

Members of the panel included Saunders, Hirsch, Fowler, Sloan, assistant to the chancellor Cyrena Pondrom, and four women student-athletes.

That the evening would be lively was assured by the moderator: Ruth Bleier, whose letter to Hirsch a year earlier had demanded equity for women’s athletics.

Fred Milverstedt ’69, a young sports columnist for the Capital Times, didn’t mince words when it came to the reaction to Hirsch’s comments: “Most everything he said subsequently was greeted with hissing, boos, some subdued cursing, and occasional angry shouts.”

Somehow — quite possibly owing to Saunders’s unflappable, behind-the-scenes work — the campus went from that raucous affair to another, vastly different gathering less than two months later.

On May 3, 1974, a news conference was held in which Hirsch and Haberman announced the first director of women’s intercollegiate athletics at the University of Wisconsin.

It was Kit Saunders.

That it could hardly have been anyone else did not lessen the excitement.

Saunders told reporters that while there was “a great deal of work to be done,” women’s athletics at the UW had “an exciting future.”

As usual, Saunders wasn’t wrong. She started her new job on July 1, 1974. Within a year, she had a national championship in women’s rowing. •