University of Wisconsin-Madison

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University of Wisconsin-Madison
Motto:	Numen Lumen The divine within the universe, however manifested, is my light or God, our light.
Established:	1848
Type:	Flagship Public State University
Endowment:	US $1.425 billion [1]
Chancellor:	John D. Wiley
Faculty:	2,053
Students:	41,466
Undergraduates:	28,462
Postgraduates:	13,004
Location:	Madison, WI, U.S.
Campus:	Urban 933 acres (3.77 km²)
Sports:	Wisconsin Badgers
Colors:	Cardinal & White
Mascot:	Bucky Badger
Website:	wisc.edu

The University of Wisconsin-Madison (also known as UW-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin, or UW) is a public research university in Madison, Wisconsin. Founded in 1848, the total enrollment is around 41,000 students, of whom approximately 29,000 are undergraduates.^[1]

A public, land-grant university, UW offers a wide spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs, and student activities. The school is frequently called a "Public Ivy" and in 2007 U.S. News & World Report ranked UW as the eighth-best public university in the United States.^[2] UW-Madison ranked second in a list of top national research universities for the 2006 fiscal year, generating more than $900 million in research, according to statistics by the National Science Foundation.

From 1848 to 1956, the university was part of the higher education system in Wisconsin that included the current Madison campus, 10 freshman-sophomore centers and the statewide extensions.^[3] Between 1956–1971, it was part of the then-University of Wisconsin. It became a part of the University of Wisconsin System in 1971.

Wisconsin's NCAA Division I athletic teams are called the Badgers. They compete in the Big Ten Conference in all sports except ice hockey, where they participate in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association. Wisconsin's football team won the Rose Bowl in 1994, 1999, and 2000. Its men's basketball team won the NCAA National Championship in 1941 and made it to the Final Four in 2000. Both the men's and women's hockey teams won the national championship in 2006.

[edit] History

The university had its official beginnings when Wisconsin was incorporated as a state in 1848. Article X, Section B of the Wisconsin Constitution provided for "the establishment of a state university, at or near the seat of state government..." On July 26, 1848, Nelson Dewey, Wisconsin's first governor, signed the act that formally created the University of Wisconsin. The board of regents held their initial meeting in the library room of the Capitol on October 7, and provided John W. Sterling a $500 per-annum salary to become the university's first professor (mathematics). The first class of 17 students met at Madison Female Academy on February 5, 1849. Regents continued to discuss the construction of the university and soon a campus site was selected. It was an area of 50 acres (200,000 m²) "bounded north by Fourth lake, east by a street to be opened at right angles with King (later State) street, south by Mineral Point Road (University Avenue), and west by a carriage-way from said road to the lake." Building plans called for a "main edifice fronting towards the Capitol, three stories high, surmounted by an observatory for astronomical observations." This building, University Hall, now known as Bascom Hall, was finally completed in 1859. A fire later destroyed the building's dome, which was never replaced. North Hall, constructed in 1851, was actually the campus' first building. Finally, in 1854, Levi Booth and Charles T. Wakeley became the first graduates of the university. Academics continued to improve at Wisconsin, and in 1892 the university awarded its first Ph.D. to future university president Charles R. Van Hise.

[edit] The Wisconsin Idea

Students, faculty and staff are motivated by a tradition known as the Wisconsin Idea, first started by UW President Charles Van Hise in 1904, when he declared that he would "never be content until the beneficent influence of the university [is] available to every home in the state."^[4] The Wisconsin Idea holds that the boundaries of the university should be the boundaries of the state, and that the research conducted at UW should be applied to solve problems and improve health, quality of life, the environment, and agriculture for all citizens of the state. The Wisconsin Idea permeates the university’s work and helps forge close working relationships among university faculty and students, and the state’s industries and government.^[5] Together with Wisconsin's populist history, the Wisconsin Idea has evolved to this day to describe "The Wisconsin Experience:" that the work of the faculty, staff, and students aims to solve real-world problems, and that these solutions benefit from working together across disciplines and demographics.

[edit] Student activism

In the years 1966 through 1970, UW was shaken by a series of student protests, and by the use of force by authorities in response. The first major demonstrations protested the presence on campus of recruiters for the Dow Chemical Company, which supplied the napalm used in the Vietnam War. Authorities used force to quell the disturbance. The struggle was documented in the PBS documentary Two Days in October, as well as the book, They Marched Into Sunlight. Among the students injured in the protest was future Madison mayor Paul Soglin.

Another target of protest was the Army Mathematics Research Center (AMRC), clearly identified and centrally located on campus in the Sterling Hall physics building. Director J. Barkley Rosser, an eminent logician, publicly minimized any practical role and implied that AMRC pursued only pure mathematics. But the student newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, obtained quarterly reports that AMRC submitted to the Army. The Cardinal published a series of investigative articles making a convincing case that AMRC was pursuing research that was directly pursuant to specific US Department of Defense requests, and relevant to counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam. AMRC became a magnet for demonstrations, in which protesters chanted "U.S. out of Vietnam! Smash Army Math!"

On August 24, 1970, near 3:40 AM, a van filled with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil mixture was detonated next to Sterling Hall. Despite the late hour, a post-doc was in the lab; that man, physics researcher Robert Fassnacht, was killed in the explosion. The physics department was hit worse than the intended target, the AMRC. Karleton Armstrong, Dwight Armstrong, and David Fine were responsible for the blast. Leo Burt was a suspect but was never apprehended or tried.

[edit] Timeline of notable events

Other notable historical moments in Wisconsin's first century include:

• On April 4, 1892, the campus's first student-run newspaper began publishing The Daily Cardinal.
• In 1894, the state Board of Regents rejected an effort to purge Professor Richard T. Ely for supporting striking printers, issuing the famous "sifting and winnowing" manifesto in defense of academic freedom, later described as "part of Wisconsin's Magna Carta". [2]
• 1898 saw UW music instructor Henry Dyke Sleeper write Varsity, the university’s traditional alma mater song.
• In 1904-1905, the UW Graduate School was established. The "Wisconsin Idea" becomes a living doctrine. Voiced by President Charles Van Hise, the idea sought to make "the beneficent influence of the University available to every home in the State."
• The Wisconsin Union was founded in 1907, fourth among U.S. universities after Pennsylvania's Houston Hall (1896), Dartmouth's College Club (1901), and Harvard's Union (1901).
• William Purdy and Paul Beck wrote On, Wisconsin in 1909, which became the fight song for UW athletic teams.
• The Single-grain experiment ran from 1907 to 1911 run by Stephen Moulton Babcock and Edwin B. Hart. This experiment would pave the way for modern nutrition as a science.
• In 1925, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation was chartered to control patenting and patent income on UW inventions.
• The UW Arboretum dedicated itself to restoring lost landscapes, such as prairies, in 1934.
• 1966 through 1970, UW-Madison was shaken by a series of student protests, and by the use of force by authorities in response. The first major demonstrations protested the presence on campus of recruiters for the Dow Chemical Company, which supplied the napalm used in the Vietnam War.
• 1969 The Badger Herald was founded, debuting as a conservative voice on campus. Born to cover and combat the turmoil of the Vietnam protests, the Herald maintains its maverick spirit, though to some extent it has shed the “conservative” reputation. The University of Wisconsin is to this day the only American university with two daily student newspapers.
• 1970 In one of the first major acts of modern domestic terrorism, a bomb was set to explode outside the Sterling Hall physics building, killing post-doctoral researcher Robert Fassnacht (see Sterling Hall bombing)
• 1988 The Onion was founded by two UW juniors, Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson; they would sell it to colleagues the next year.
• December 10, 1993, the popular computer game, Doom, was uploaded to the University's servers. The initial popularity of the game caused the servers to crash, due to the number of simultaneous downloads.

[edit] Academics

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System, is divided into twenty associated colleges and schools. In addition to traditional undergraduate and graduate divisions in business, engineering, education, agriculture, and letters and sciences, the university also maintains professional schools in pharmacy, medicine, veterinary medicine, environmental studies, urban and regional planning, public affairs, journalism, library science and law.

The largest university college, the College of Letters and Science, enrolls approximately half of the undergraduate student body and is made up of thirty-nine departments and five professional schools^[6] that instruct students and carry out research in a wide variety of fields such as biology, astronomy, history, geography, linguistics, and economics.

[edit] Rankings

Wisconsin has been one of the leading public universities in the United States since the beginning of the Twentieth Century and ranks as one of the great research universities of the world.^[7]

According to the National Research Council there are over 70 programs at UW ranked in the top 10 nationally. In the Academic Ranking of World Universities, published by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University,^[8] the University of Wisconsin-Madison is ranked 17th best university in the world. In the Gourman report on undergraduate programs, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was ranked the third-best public university, after the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan. Additionally, it was ranked the seventh-best university in the United States for overall strength of the undergraduate programs. In a 2004 study by Bloomberg Market News, researchers found that UW-Madison tied Harvard for producing the most CEOs at Standard & Poor’s 500 companies.^[9] UW-Madison is second only to Harvard in the number of alumni receiving doctorates, and leads the nation by numbers of alumni in the Peace Corps.^[10] The University is one of 60 elected members of the Association of American Universities.

In U.S. News & World Report's 2007 ranking of US colleges, Wisconsin ranked 38th in the "national universities" category.^[11] Among U.S. universities, UW-Madison is frequently listed as one of the "public Ivies"—publicly-funded universities providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.^[12] In addition to being a top-ranked school in education, geography, history, journalism, and sociology, the university was recently ranked the second-best college at which to earn an education degree, and the overall seventh-best public university in the United States.

Washington Monthly's 2007 college rankings placed Wisconsin eighteenth, based not only on academic measures, but also student research, public service and social mobility.^[13]

[edit] Research

Since its founding as a land-grant university, Wisconsin has been at the forefront of research. In 2007-2008, the school allocated $832 million towards research on campus. This meant UW-Madison ranked as the 2nd largest research university in the country behind Johns Hopkins University, and ahead of other rival universities in research such as, University of California Los Angeles, and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.^[14]

The University is considered a major academic center for embryonic stem cell research. UW professor James Thomson was the first scientist to isolate human embryonic stem cells. This has brought significant attention and respect for the University's research programs from around the world. The University continues to be a leader in stem cell research, helped in part by the funding of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and promotion of WiCell.^[15]

The University is also well know for its graduate mechanical engineering and industrial engineering programs. It is highly ranked in the area of nuclear engineering. Its center for research on internal combustion engines, called Engine Research Center, is known for its leadership role in research in the field of combustion technologies in automotive applications. ^[16]

In January, 2008, The Badger Herald Newspaper, a student publication, reported that in June, 2007, the US Department of Agriculture cited the University of Wisconsin Research Animal Resource Center with multiple violations of the Animal Welfare Act including not using painkillers for animals used in painful procedures, improper monitoring of animals and not reporting medical problems to staff veterinarians.^[17]

[edit] Letters & Science Honors Program

The L&S Honors Program serves over 1,700 students in the College of Letters and Science (the UW's liberal arts college) with an enriched undergraduate curriculum. Students in the program pursue the Honors in the Liberal Arts, Honors in the Major, or Comprehensive Honors Degrees. The program was begun in response to a petition by students in 1958 seeking more challenging work for outstanding students.

In addition to its curriculum, the program offers professional advising services; grants, scholarships, and awards, particularly for introductory and Honors Senior Thesis research; and numerous academic, social, and service opportunities through the Honors Student Organization.

The Honors Program also supports several student organizations, such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison Forensics Team.

[edit] Campus

The university is located in Madison, slightly more than one mile from the state capitol, and is situated partially on an isthmus between two lakes, Lake Mendota and Lake Monona. The main campus comprises 933 acres (3.77 km²) of land, while the entire campus, including research stations, is over 10,600 acres (42.9 km²) in area. The campus includes many buildings designed or supervised by architects J.T.W. Jennings and Arthur Peabody. The main hub of campus life is the Memorial Union. The campus has its own police force, food service, hospital, recreation facilities, power facilities, and an on-campus dairy. The campus also owns the UW Arboretum, which is home to many plants and wildlife.

The campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison was featured in the 1986 movie Back to School (starring Rodney Dangerfield),^[18] although in the movie the school is called "Grand Lakes University." Portions of the campus (Bascom Hill, the Union Terrace) are also featured in a few scenes of the 2006 movie The Last Kiss, starring Zach Braff, which was set in Madison but filmed primarily in Canada.^[19]

[edit] Bascom Hall

As one of the most recognizable buildings on campus, Bascom Hall,^[20] at the top of Bascom Hill, is one of the icons of the UW campus and is often considered the "heart of the campus." Built in 1857, the structure has been added to several times over the years although a decorative dome atop the structure was destroyed by fire. The building currently houses the office of the university's chancellor and vice chancellors. Bascom Hall is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing building within the Bascom Hill Historic District.^[21]

[edit] Music Hall

This Victorian Gothic building, built in 1878, was initially named Assembly Hall and was designed to house an 800-seat auditorium, a library, and a clock tower. Dedicated on March 2, 1880, the building originally held conventions, dances, and commencement ceremonies, along with its primary purpose of a library. After the library moved to different buildings on campus, a portion of the hall was assigned to the School of Music in 1900. Shortly after renovations in the early 1900s, the building was officially named Music Hall in 1910, where it still remains an important music venue and home to the university opera.^[22] This building also is home to the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, with part of the building being used as office space and classrooms.

[edit] The Wisconsin Union

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, unlike many schools, is home to two student unions. The first, Memorial Union, was built in 1928. The Memorial Union, also known as the Union or the Terrace, has gained a reputation as both one of the most beautiful and rowdy student unions or student centers on a university campus. Memorial Union is located on the shore of Lake Mendota, and it is a popular spot for socializing among students, as well as the public, while gazing at the lake and the sailboats that are often present. The union is known for the "Rathskeller," a German pub that directly connects to the lake terrace. Political debates and backgammon games are common among students over a beer on the terrace. The Rathskeller serves "Rathskeller Ale", a beer brewed expressly for the Terrace. Memorial Union is home to many arts outlets, including several art galleries, a movie theater, and the Wisconsin Union Theater, and the Craftshop, one of the first in the nation. The Memorial Union is also home to the only solely student run and owned business on campus, ASM StudentPrint. Students and Madison community members alike congregate at the Memorial Union, which honors American war veterans, for the films and concerts each week. An advisory referendum (advising the Chancellor, but lacking official power) to renovate and expand Memorial Union has been approved by the student body, and the university is currently in the planning phase for the expansion.^[23]

Union South, the second campus union, is at the southwest end of campus. It was built in the 1960s, to alleviate the pressure for space on Memorial Union, on an ever-growing campus. Union South has mainly served students, faculty, staff, and other users of the UW-Madison's many science related buildings, but has also become a home for many activities including weekly dances by student groups, weekly music and film series, and several bowling leagues. Plans to knock down and build a new "green" Union South have been approved by the student body and are currently in the planning phase.^[24]

The Wisconsin Union also provides a home for the Wisconsin Union Directorate Student Programming Board (WUD). Since the opening of Memorial Union, students have actively participated in programming on campus. WUD provides programs nearly every day of the year, for both students and community members.

[edit] Charter Street Power Plant

Located 2 blocks south of the busiest part of campus is the University's coal-burning heating plant. The 9.8 MW power plant opened in the mid 1950's, and produces a little over 50 million kilowatt hours of electricity every year.^[25] On May 3, 2007, the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit accusing the university of violating the Federal Clean Air Act.^[26] The plant does not use modern pollution controls such as scrubbers, catalytic reduction, or carbon injection.^[27] In 2006-2007, the editorial boards of local papers began calling for the elimination or phasing-out of the coal power plant.^[28]

In June 2007 it was reported that runoff from the coal pile behind the Charter St. Plant may be draining into the stormwater system and that the pollutants could contain arsenic and other heavy metals.^[29]

[edit] George L. Mosse Humanities Building

The George L. Mosse Humanities Building, located just outside Library Mall, is perhaps the strangest structure on campus.^{[citation needed]} Opened in the late 1960's and designed in the Brutalist style, campus myth has it that the building (with its poor ventilation, narrow windows, inclined base, and cantilevered upper floors) was designed to be "riot-proof" by designing it in such a way as to be both inescapable for protestors and easily penetratable by a SWAT Team. Its seven floors house the History, Art, and Music departments. The most recent Campus Master Plan calls for it to be demolished and replaced with two other buildings.

[edit] Libraries

Wisconsin has the 10th largest research library collection in North America, according to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries in 2004-05.^[30] Memorial Library, the largest library in Wisconsin, along with more than 40 other professional and special-purpose libraries, serve the campus.^[31] In 2004, the campus library collections included more than 7.3 million volumes representing human inquiry through all of history. In addition, there are more than 55,000 serial titles, 6.2 million microfilm items, and hundreds of thousands of government documents, maps, musical scores, audiovisual materials and other items housed in libraries across campus. Nearly 1 million volumes are circulated to library users every year.^[32] Memorial Library serves as the principal research facility on campus for the humanities and social sciences. It houses the largest single library collection in the state of Wisconsin—-more than 3.5 million volumes. This library also houses an extensive periodical collection, a large selection of domestic and foreign newspapers, Special Collections,^[33] the University Archives,^[34] a music library,^[35] a letterpress printing museum,^[36] and the UW Digital Collections Center.^[37]

Undergraduates can also find many of the resources they need at the College Library.^[38] Specialized collections include a college catalog collection, women's and minority studies materials, art slides, music and literature tapes and recreational reading paperbacks. College Library also hosts an extensive Media Center with over 200 computer workstations available for student use. The Kurt F. Wendt Library^[39] serves the College of Engineering^[40] and the Departments of Computer Sciences,^[41] Statistics,^[42] and Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences.^[43] Designated a Patent and Trademark Depository Library, Wendt Library maintains all U.S. utility, design, and plant patents in various formats, and provides reference tools and searching assistance for both the general public and the UW-Madison community. Additionally, Wendt Library houses books, journals, standards, and over 1.5 million technical reports in print and microfiche.

The online catalog for UW-Madison Libraries is MadCat.^[44] MadCat includes bibliographic records for books, periodicals, audiovisual materials, maps, music scores, microforms, and computer databases currently owned by over 30 campus libraries. It also contains records for most of the items which are still on order. It also includes an increasing number of important World Wide Web resources either licensed for UW use or openly available on the World Wide Web.

[edit] Museums

The Geology Museum features rocks, minerals, and fossils from around the world. Highlights include a blacklight room, a walk-through cave, and a fragment of the Barringer meteorite. Some noteworthy fossils include the first dinosaur skeleton assembled in Wisconsin (an Edmontosaurus), a shark (Squalicorax) and a floating colony of sea lilies (Uintacrinus), both from the Cretaceous chalk of Kansas, and the Boaz Mastodon, a found on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin in 1897.^[45]

The campus art museum, formerly the Elvehjem Museum of Art, was renamed the Chazen Museum of Art in 2005, in recognition of a $20 million donation to fund an expansion.^[46]

[edit] Athletics

Main article: Wisconsin Badgers

The school's mascot is Buckingham U. Badger, who is commonly referred to as "Bucky Badger". The University of Wisconsin sports teams participate in the NCAA's Division I-A. With the exception of men's and women's hockey and rowing (Wisconsin Crew), University of Wisconsin athletic programs compete in the Big Ten Conference. Both hockey programs compete in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, while the traditionally highly ranked men's and women's crew programs compete in the Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges. In 2006, both the men's and women's hockey teams won the national title, making Wisconsin only the second school to win national championships in both the Men's and Women's division of a sport in the same year (Connecticut Huskies Basketball 2004). The school's fight song is On, Wisconsin!.

2005-06 marked the first time in school history that four Badgers teams brought home national championships in the same academic year. In the fall, the men's cross country team won its fourth national championship, after finishing second the previous three years. The winter season was highlighted by the men's and women's ice hockey teams both bringing home national titles. The year was capped off in the spring with the women's lightweight crew winning its third straight Intercollegiate Rowing Association national crown.

[edit] Football

Main article: Wisconsin Badgers football

One of the most popular sports at Wisconsin is college football. Playing at the 80,000-plus capacity Camp Randall Stadium, the Badgers have always drawn large crowds and a loyal following. After every game, win or lose, the University of Wisconsin Marching Band plays popular songs during the famed Fifth Quarter. The 2005-06 season was the last for the beloved Badgers' head coach Barry Alvarez. He is now a full-time athletic director; Bret Bielema took over as head coach. The Badgers won three Rose Bowl Championships under Alvarez in 1994, 1999, and 2000. In the 2006 season, Bielema led the Badgers to an eleven-win regular season and to 12 overall wins, both firsts in school history. The Badgers' final win of the season was against SEC runner-up Arkansas at the Capital One Bowl.

[edit] Men's basketball

Main article: Wisconsin Badgers men's basketball

After decades of mediocrity (notwithstanding a 1941 national championship), the men's basketball team has enjoyed success in recent years. They are now a perennial attendee of the NCAA Tournament, reaching the Final Four in 2000. Bo Ryan, a four-time division III national championship coach at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, has coached the team since 2001 after the retirement of venerable Dick Bennett. The Badgers play at the Kohl Center, where the students are known as the Grateful Red. In the 2006-2007 basketball season, the Badgers attained their highest AP ranking (#1) (Feb. 19-25) in school history, as well as garnering 35 first-place votes.^[47]

[edit] Women's basketball

Main article: Wisconsin Badgers women's basketball

The women's basketball team is led by Head Coach Lisa Stone and Frances Pomeroy Naismith Award winner Jolene Anderson. The Lady Badgers also play at the Kohl Center since their move from the Wisconsin Field House in 1998. The 2006-2007 season was a record-setting year as the Badgers won a record 23 wins, recorded 17 home wins, and were the WNIT Runner-Up Champions.

[edit] Ice hockey

First approved as a men varsity sport in 1922 by the UW athletic council, Badger Ice Hockey has been highly competitive over the years. The sport was dropped after the 1934-35 season before becoming a varsity sport for the 1963-64 season. That first team was coached by John Riley until Bob Johnson, nicknamed 'Badger Bob' by the fans, took over the reins in 1966. The men's team played in the Dane County Coliseum for many years until they moved to the Kohl Center (capacity 15,237) in the fall of 1998. The first game played at the Kohl Center for Ice Hockey was the Hall of Fame game against the University of Notre Dame. During the 2005-06 season, the team set an NCAA attendance record averaging 13,511, surpassing the record they had set in 1998-99. The tradition gained another dimension with the addition of a women's team that began play during the 1999-2000 season. The women's team coached by Mark Johnson, son of the legendary Badger Bob and member of the men's 1977 title team, won their first national championship on March 26, 2006. On April 8, 2006 the men's team coached by Mike Eaves, Johnson's teammate on that same '77 title team, won their sixth national championship. The 6 National Championships rank 4th in NCAA Ice Hockey History. The men's team had previously won NCAA titles in 1973, 1977, 1981, 1983 and 1990. It marked the first time that both the men's and women's titles were won by the same school in the same year for Division I NCAA hockey. The women's team repeated as national champions in 2007 with a 4-1 victory over the University of Minnesota-Duluth on March 18 at Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid, NY. Both teams play in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, the men's team becoming members in the 1969-70 season and the women's since their inception.

[edit] Rivalries

The Wisconsin Badgers football team is very competitive in the Big Ten Conference. Their most notable rivalry is the annual college football game between the Wisconsin Badgers and the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers for Paul Bunyan's Axe, the longest-running rivalry in NCAA athletics. The two universities also compete in the Border Battle, a year-long athletic competition in which each team's win is worth a certain number of points for their university.

The long standing football rivalry between the University of Iowa and Wisconsin was finally recognized beginning in 2004. The winner of the annual football game between the schools is awarded the Heartland Trophy. Wisconsin also has a major non-conference basketball rivalry with Marquette University, located in Milwaukee. That rivalry is also driven by the public-private divide between the two leading schools in the same state. In more recent years, an intense rivalry has developed between Wisconsin and Ohio State University.

Wisconsin Football has also developed a "border battle" with Illinois. It is not an official rivalry but the games always get rowdy. The reason for this mini-rivalry may be because of the rivalries that other Wisconsin teams have with other Illinois teams, such as the Bears-Packers rivalry.

The Wisconsin Badgers hockey team is also very competitive in its conference, the WCHA. They are continually engaged in their own 'border battle' with the Minnesota Golden Gophers. Many other teams hold a grudge against the Badgers including the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux.

[edit] Mascot

The signature mascot is an anthropomorphized badger named Bucky who dons a sweater affixed with the UW-Madison athletic logo (currently the red "Motion W"). Beginning in 1890, the university's first Bucky Badger was a live, temperamental and unruly badger who was quickly retired. Although the nickname of the Wisconsin teams remained the "Badgers," it was not until Art Evans drew the early caricature version of Bucky in 1940 that today's recognizable image of Bucky was adopted. In 1949, a contest was held to name the mascot, but no consensus was reached after only a few entries were received. In reaction, the contest committee chose the name Buckingham U. Badger, or "Bucky," for short.

The team's nickname originates not from the state animal (also the badger), but from the state nickname. In the 1820s, many lead miners and their families lived in the mines in which they worked until adequate above-ground shelters were built and thus were compared to badgers.^[48]

[edit] Student Life

[edit] Media

[edit] Student newspapers

UW-Madison is the only American university to have two competing daily student newspapers: The Daily Cardinal, founded in 1892 and The Badger Herald, founded in 1969. In addition, students also produce the liberal Madison Observer, founded in 2003, and the conservative Mendota Beacon, founded in 2005. The Onion was founded in 1988 by two UW-Madison juniors, and was published in Madison before moving to New York City in 2001.

[edit] Campus radio

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Campus Radio Station is WSUM 91.7 FM.^[49] Historically, UW has been home to a collection of student run radio stations, a number of which stopped broadcasting after run-ins with the FCC. The current radio station, WSUM, started out in 1997 in a webcast only format because of the prolonged battle to get a FCC license and construct a tower. This lasted for five years until February 22, 2002, when the station finally started broadcasting over FM airwaves at 91.7 from its tower in Montrose, Wisconsin. The radio station currently has around 150 volunteer DJ's and 8 paid managers. All UW-Madison students as well as a limited number of community members are eligible to participate in running the station. They are trained over the course of a semester, after which they are required to produce an "air check tape" and submit a show proposal form. Though not all volunteers are guaranteed a show, the majority receive one. Unlike many other college radio stations, WSUM remains entirely free format, which means that the on-air personnel have the ability to showcases a large variety of music and talk programming at their discretion with very little limitations. There are very few radio stations that give their on-air personnel this freedom. Despite being one of the newest and most eclectic student radio stations in Wisconsin, WSUM has garnered many awards from the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association for their news and unique public service announcements.

[edit] Moped use

Due to their high mile per gallon rates and the spread-out layout of the campus, mopeds are a popular form of transportation among students. Madison has one of the highest number of registered mopeds per capita in the nation.^[50] On campus, since 2006, mopeds riders are required to purchase parking permits^[51] and are required to park in designated moped parking areas or risk a ticket.^[52]

[edit] "Party school" image

Wisconsin has recently held the distinction of being rated one of the nation's top "party school", according to the 2005 Princeton Review's annual survey and the number one "party school" according to the May 2006 issue of Playboy magazine.^[53] In the 2006 Princeton Review's survey, Wisconsin dropped to fourth place, but was ranked first for the most beer. UW has long held a reputation for academics, political activism, and drinking; the last of these is easily understood when considering the state's traditionally high level of alcohol consumption in general.^[54]

The festive mentality is most notably displayed with the annual Mifflin Street Block Party (which started in the 1960s as a counterculture event, is today a spring semester finals week kickoff) and the State Street Halloween Party. Both of these events are commonly attended by tens of thousands of partiers, including many who come from out-of-state to attend. Following a (non-political) riot that developed at the 1996 Mifflin Street Block Party, it was forcibly canceled by the city; since then, the city has permitted resumption of a Mifflin Street event.

[edit] Notable people

Main article: List of University of Wisconsin-Madison people

[edit] UW-Madison Alumni

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007)

Living alumni: 372,100

Addressable alumni: 343,319 (92%)

International alumni 14,550 (4%)

Alumni in Wisconsin: 132,949 (39%)

U.S. cities by alumni populations:

City	Alumni
Madison	49,315 (14%)
Chicago	22,447 (7%)
Milwaukee	19,038 (6%)
Twin Cities	16,143 (5%)
New York	11,159 (3%)
San Francisco	9,579 (3%)
Washington, D.C	7,779 (2%)
Los Angeles	5,423 (2%)
Total	140,883(41%)

17 Nobel Prizes and 24 Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded to UW-Madison alumni or faculty.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Big Ten Conference
• Camp Randall Stadium – the Badgers' home stadium for football
• Kohl Center – the Badgers' home arena for basketball and hockey
• Undergraduate Projects Lab – organization associated with the Department of Computer Sciences that provides undergraduates the resources to pursue self-motivated research projects.
• University of Wisconsin (former)
• University of Wisconsin Law School – It is the only public law school in Wisconsin, located on the UW-Madison campus.
• University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum
• University of Wisconsin Marching Band
• University of Wisconsin Forensics Team
• University of Wisconsin System
• UW-Madison Geology Museum – Museum located on UW campus
• UW Hybrid Vehicle Team – Hybrid Vehicle Team, one of a number of competitive engineering teams on campus.
• Western Collegiate Hockey Association – The Badgers' conference for ice hockey.
• Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation – The W.A.R.F. is a significant source of research support, independent of government grants.
• Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship
• Wisconsin Badgers
• Wisconsin Badgers football
• Wisconsin Badgers men's basketball
• Wisconsin Idea – The boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state.
• Wisconsin Hoofers

[edit] External links

• Wisc.edu - official site
• UW Badgers.com - athletics - official site
• University of Wisconsin Digital Collections: Contains UW Collection, History of UW-Madison, Badger Yearbook information, Alumni Directory, Alumni Magazine, history of women at UW-Madison, images, cultural landscape of UW campus, The Badger Chemist, and art department catalogs.
• University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives - online exhibits
• Wisconsin Electronic Reader - History of the University of Wisconsin.
• The William J. Meuer Photoart Collection The William J. Meuer Photoart Collection is an outstanding visual history of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and its surrounding community. The collection was compiled by renowned local photographer William J. Meuer who with his brother, Roman, opened the Meuer Photoart House on State Street in 1916. Dating from 1888 to 1935, 25 large bound albums contain nearly 27,000 individual prints that document student life, athletics, greek houses, social events and other campus activities during the early 20th century.

• University of Wisconsin-Madison is at coordinates 43°04′30″N 89°25′02″W / 43.075000, -89.417222 (University of Wisconsin-Madison)Coordinates: 43°04′30″N 89°25′02″W / 43.075000, -89.417222 (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

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