University of Wisconsin-Madison
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is an important public research university with an enrollment of over forty thousand students and a budget of over two billion dollars. It is located in the state capital, Madison, Wisconsin, on a sprawling lakeside campus.
It has one of the smallest minority enrollments among major schools, with only 11.5% of its student population being African American (2.7%), Asian American (5.2%), Native American (0.6%) or Hispanic (3%).
It is academically ranked among the top fifty U. S. universities, and among the ten best public universities [1].
Aldo Leopold wrote his classic 1949 work, A Sand County Almanac, while a professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin.[2]
The University of Wisconsin was a pioneer in the patenting and commercial licensing of university research. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) was founded in 1925 to license professor Harry Steenbock's process for fortifying milk with vitamin D.[3] Another important WARF patent involved the blood anti-coagulating agent, dicumarol. The substance was discovered at the university in the 1933 by Karl Paul Link, after Ed Carlson—a farmer from Deer Park who was confident that the university would be interested in his problem—arrived unannounced on Link's doorstep bearing a milk can of blood from a dead calf and a hundred pounds of spoiled sweet clover. The drug was used first as a rat poison under the name Warfarin, then in human medicine under the name Dicoumadin. In 1999 it was the eleventh-most-prescribed drug in the United States.[4][5][6]
In North America, limnology was founded by E. A. Birge and Chancey Juday at the University of Wisconsin, which remains prominent in the field.[7]
Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College, inaugurated in 1927, was a short-lived but very influential educational experiment at the University of Wisconsin. It was one of a number of attempts to present the liberal arts as a unified whole, with emphasis on the direct reading of original sources. It can be broadly consider as part of the "Great Books" movement, which lives on in its purest state today at St. John's College in Annapolis, and in an attenuated form at WIsconsin as the Integrated Liberal Studies program.[8]
The university's radio station, WHA, was an important pioneer in broadcast radio, and claims to be[9] "the oldest station in the nation"[10][11] The physics department began experimental transmissions in 1900, received experimental license 9XM in 1915, began voice transmissions in 1920, and received its current call letters, WHA, in 1922.
During the late 1960s, students at the University of Wisconsin became radicalized by the Vietnam war, and the university was a center of campus unrest. One protest focussed on the presence of Dow Chemical Company job recruiters—Dow being singled out as a manufacturer of napalm, a weapon thought to be particularly cruel. Others centered on the military-funded Army Mathematics Research Center (AMRC) which performed a mixture of published and secret research, with the university emphasizing its theoretical studies, while campus radicals suggesting it also did work with direct, practical military use. In 1970, Karleton Armstrong and three other students constructed what would now be called a "car bomb," filling a stolen van with a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, a home-made explosive familiar to farmers, and exploded it outside the Sterling Hall building which housed the AMRC.[12] The explosion killed a graduate student. The ensuing shock and revulsion, and the winding down of the Vietnam war, brought a steep decline to the period of campus radicalism.[Citation Needed]
It has long been one of the most liberal institutions in the United States.[Citation Needed]
It is the birthplace of the the Critical legal studies[13] movement.
It is one of only 15 U.S. Universities found to require a course in Shakespeare in order to receive a degree in English.[14]
References
- ↑ National Universities: Top Schools U. S. News and World Report
- ↑ Biography of Aldo Leopold - He became professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin in 1933 where he worked until his death. This book was written during that time.
- ↑ Our History, WARF website
- ↑ Ask Abe Archives - People, UW website
- ↑ Controlling Blood Clotting, photograph of historical plaque.
- ↑ Biographical Memoirs of Karl Paul Link, uncorrected OCR at National Academy of Sciences: pp. 183-4, "Farmer Carlson's multiple evidence was a dead heifer, a milk can containing blood completely destitute of clotting capacity, and about 100 pounds of spoiled sweet clover.
- ↑ The History of Limnology, University of Wisconsin website
- ↑ Meiklejohn's Experimental College, University of Wisconsin ILS website
- ↑ The rival claimant is Pittsburgh's KDKA. Randall Davidson, WHA announcer and author of a book on 9XM/WHA, was said in 2007 to be "pretty convinced that, if you're talking about a station broadcasting by radio, for the public, on some sort of regular schedule, Pittsburgh's KDKA wins the prize by going on the air on Nov. 2, 1920. The official record says 9XM didn't start its regular weather forecasts until about two months later." Madison Capital Times, Feb. 28, 2007: "History On The Air"
- ↑ "The Oldest Station in the Nation", photograph of historical marker
- ↑ [The Wisconsin Idea—In Broadcasting]. At the plaque dedication ceremony "When Mr. [C. M.] Jansky, Jr. was asked about the facts in the WHA 'oldest station' claim, he remarked, 'Not only do I think this is correct in respect to WHA; but since it is well recognized that regular broadcasting started in the United States, WHA may also be credited with being the oldest broadcasting station in the world.'
- ↑ Sterling Hall Bombing, Madison library website
- ↑ http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/index.php/Critical_legal_theory
- ↑ http://www.goacta.org/press/Press%20Releases/4-19-07PR.htm
