The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents is on the cusp of having its first American Indian board member. Gov. Jim Doyle has appointed Eau Claire attorney Ed Manydeeds as its newest regent, pending confirmation by the state Senate...

The average welder makes about the same amount of money as the average professor. It pays more to be a faculty member at UW-La Crosse than it does at UW-Stevens Point. Nine of the top 10 highest-paid employees in the University of Wisconsin System are men. These are some of the Wisconsin State Journal’s findings from the UW System Redbook, the university’s budget document...

This database contains budgeted salaries for all UW employees for the fiscal year 2009-10, released annually by the university as part of its Redbook budget publication. You can use it to find the budgeted salary and funding source for any staff member in the whole UW System...

Documents from the UW System revealed that the highest paid UW-Madison official makes over three times as much as the governor. According to UW System’s annual budget documents, UW-Madison Athletic Director Barry Alvarez made $500,000 in 2008, which is the highest salary among all UW System employees...

Each year, universities must fend off attacks from poachers — outside institutions looking to pick off underpaid or underappreciated faculty members. There were 148 such offers made at UW-Madison in the last academic year, and the university kept about 80 percent of them by making counteroffers. The university also took a more offensive posture than in past years, making 54 “preemptive moves,” increasing the pay or benefits for faculty who are perceived at risk of leaving...

More documents a pair of pro-life groups have uncovered using freedom of Information Act requests show the University of Wisconsin may be illegally funding internships for medical students at abortion centers. The new documents obtained via an open records request by Pro-Life Wisconsin and the Alliance Defense Fund reveal that, since 2007, UW has spent more than $58,878 paying for abortion training...

Materials scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have designed a way to harvest small amounts of waste energy and harness them to turn water into usable hydrogen fuel...

University of Wisconsin–Superior students are spending their spring break giving back to others. Ten students packed their bags and left campus Friday afternoon for the 28-hour drive to Portland, Maine. During their Alternative Spring Break, the students will help build affordable housing as part of the Habitat for Humanity Collegiate Challenge...

Piezoelectric materials that create energy when flexed might go beyond recharging our smart phones and help make hydrogen fuel. Scientists have harnessed piezoelectric energy from nanocrystal fibers to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas. "This is a new phenomenon, converting mechanical energy directly to chemical energy," said Huifang Xu, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and his colleagues have dubbed it the piezoelectrochemical (PZEC) effect...

UW-Madison played host to a major debate over an ethical dilemma in primate research and testing Monday night. The school had to defend its stance on testing for different human ailments and illnesses...

It's unlikely anyone had an epiphany during Monday night's Primate Research Debate at the Memorial Union on the UW-Madison campus. Although the event -- which was sponsored by the Society and Politics Committee -- got the mind churning, was well run and surprisingly civil, little new ground was covered for those who have been paying close attention to this topic over the past several months...

Primate research is not new -- the first primate dissection dates back to 1699. And yet, it's the modern medical research using monkeys at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that routinely makes headlines. That research and the question of whether animals should be used was the focus of a debate on campus on Monday night...

Faculty and academic staff members at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point have taken the first steps toward creating their first union, beginning to pull together a committee that would organize a vote. Creating a union would give the unit an equal seat at the table to negotiate contracts. That power would give faculty and academic staff members more of a say in how the UW System and each university is run, and likely would lead to more competitive salaries and benefits, long a bane of the System when it comes to recruiting and retaining faculty and staff members...

For 40 years, Gloria Toivola has waited for this moment. The political science professor and her fellow faculty members at the University of Wisconsin-Superior are perched on the edge of forming a union...

Call it "Vietnam Redux." Taking a page out of the old teach-ins on campus about the Vietnam War, UW-Madison professors are organizing a teach-in on campus this upcoming weekend to teach students about the conflict in Afghanistan...

...The fact that Brenholt, 40, is a physically fit and skilled martial arts instructor makes this story ironic. The fact he was attacked by a pair of seemingly accomplished UW-Stout seniors has more than a few people scratching their heads and wondering how this could have happened...But is that really what happened, or is there more to the story? Joan Thomas, dean of students at UW-Stout, seems to think so. “I’ve met with both students,” Thomas said. “From my perspective, this situation is quite unfortunate for them.” Thomas said she couldn’t go into specifics because of privacy laws, but said the university was investigating the matter and following procedure under the UW System administrative code. Thomas added that the university takes such matters seriously...

The Joint Southeast Campus Area Committee met Monday to discuss further redevelopment plans for Gordon Commons...

Sometimes a little exercise can go a long way. That's especially true for the participants in UW-Eau Claire's Cancer Recovery&Fitness Program...

Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn stopped by UW-Milwaukee on Tuesday, March 9 courtesy of the Criminal Justice Student Association (CJSA), who organized the event. CJSA Vice President David Jacobs introduced Flynn, who spoke for about 45 minutes concerning community policing, successful traits of Milwaukee Police Department officers and some personal career history before taking questions from the audience...

Wisconsin companies have a new resource for marketing their services and products overseas, through a partnership announced between the state Department of Commerce and UW-Whitewater. The agreement lets the UW-Whitewater’s Global Business Resource Center refer companies to the Commerce department for export development training and support. Commerce officials in turn, will help the Center develop grants and projects for students, faculty, and local businesses...

Biology professor Michael Pickart manipulated a needle under a microscope Thursday at UW-Stout and injected GloFish DNA into a bead about the same size as a zebra fish embryo...Pickart's lab in the Jarvis Hall Science Wing was one of many stops for groups of eighth-graders as part of DeLong Science Day. About 300 students from the Eau Claire middle school were on campus...

A ground-breaking program in the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh's College of Nursing has received a major grant with hope that the program might serve as a national model. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Evaluating Innovations in Nursing Education (EIN) program has allocated $298,720 for a two-year evaluation of the college's Accelerated Online Bachelor to BSN (ACCEL) program, a unique online teaching strategy that relies upon advanced technology, novel course scheduling, and a combination of on-campus and remote sites for classroom and clinical education...

...We are recognized around the world as an R&D center led not only by UW-Madison and WARF, but also by the expanded UW System that includes the two-year campuses and the county-based UW Extension, our outstanding technical colleges and private colleges, and many leading private sector technology businesses. We have innovation capacity and commercialization infrastructure, technology councils and convening infrastructure to discover new advancements and directions. Very simply, this opportunity is about a regional innovation system. We would become a global center-point for convening on topics that connect to our innovative capacity. This will help foster and connect to ideas, talent and resources for the region, proactively connect our businesses to new ideas and technologies, and ultimately grow markets to export globally. Our Entrepreneur and Inventors clubs could function more as a network, connecting with each other, and with researchers and business leaders to bring more ideas to market. The concept is rooted in the university and "Wisconsin Idea"...

For the first time in 100 years, no coal is being burned at Downtown Madison's Capitol Heat and Power Plant, said David Helbach, Wisconsin's director of state facilities...The switchover is part of a court agreement between the state and the Sierra Club calling for the elimination of coal at two state-owned plants: UW-Madison's Charter Street Heating Plant and the Capitol plant. Converting the Charter Street plant from coal to biomass is expected to cost $251 million...

...The Wausau area is blessed with three dynamic, quality-based medical systems in the Marshfield Clinic, Aspirus and Ministry Health Care -- and each of these have an articulated relationship with the University of Wisconsin System, giving our region a research component akin to a land grant college... (Author: Dean Zuleger, village administrator of Weston)

...For years, drug companies sought out influential university doctors with impressive credentials to bring their message to other doctors and persuade them to write prescriptions for their products. But companies have been forced to back away from that approach as a growing number of medical schools, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have developed conflict-of-interest policies that ban such talks. So much money is at stake that in January one academic doctor resigned his job at Harvard rather than give up his speaking income. The problem: While medical schools can restrict biased speaking and require doctors to fully inform patients of their ties to drug companies, there are no such restrictions or requirements on private doctors...

The Racine Unified School Board on Monday approved a new partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison that will allow the district to identify which specific schools and teachers advance student achievement...

Dean Amhaus, the president of Spirit of Milwaukee, has been selected to become the first executive director of the Milwaukee Water Council. The Water Council is a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to align the regional freshwater research community and water-related industries to further establish the Milwaukee region as a world hub for water-related research and economic development...

A state lawmaker wants to require public buildings be constructed to green standards despite fears by project owners that the law would bust their project budgets. State Rep. Louis Molepske Jr., D-Stevens Point, has introduced a bill requiring new public buildings or major building additions of at least 10,000 gross square feet achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design silver certification. The bill also extends those standards to local governments and public school districts...

...Shortfalls in California, which faced the largest budget gap in the nation this year, have grabbed much of the attention as tens of thousands of students were turned away from public colleges and tuition rose by more than 30 percent. But other states' public higher-education systems are getting hit just as hard or harder...Where will those trends leave public higher education? Some college leaders say institutions' base lines of state support will simply be reset to lower levels, with the new fiscal reality leading institutions to narrow their missions, limit course offerings, and require students to pay increasingly greater shares of the cost of their education. But other college experts worry that, without more-fundamental changes in how institutions operate, the budget trends that have been accelerated by the economic downturn of the past two years will lead public higher education down a path to mediocrity...

Debbie Crave once assumed that all of her children would go to college. Then she had kids. Son Patrick is a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Debbie's alma mater, and plans to one day help manage the family's 1,700-acre, 1,000-cow dairy farm here...The case is compelling: As good jobs increasingly require more education, college is widely seen as the ticket to personal economic security and to global competitiveness. And the message has gotten through: The percentage of students who went on to college or trade school within a year of high school climbed from 47% in 1973 to 67% in 2007, Census data show. And yet, there's an undercurrent of concern about a group of students — sometimes called "the forgotten half," a phrase coined 22 years ago by social scientists studying at-risk young people — who, for whatever reason, do not think college is for them...

The United States and its higher education systems are on the verge of a "new paradigm" in defining the roles of colleges and universities in promoting state and regional economic development, says a report being issued today. "The old paradigm rests largely on the traditional mix of business attraction and retention incentives," such as tax breaks or infrastructure, says the report, by the Rockefeller Institute of Government of the State University of New York. "Research, technology transfer, management assistance, and/or worker training are often thrown in among the incentives -- but sometimes as a kind of afterthought.... Perhaps there is now an opportunity to flip the old model around -- adopting a new, 'knowledge first' paradigm in which higher education systems explicitly take a leading role"...

...AGI, originally a part of the larger Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009, would invest more than $12 billion in the nation’s community colleges during the next 10 years, and calls for 5 million more two-year graduates by 2020. But as Democratic lawmakers continued to work Monday to craft a combined health care and student aid measure that would meet budget targets and reduce the deficit enough to meet a Congressional mandate, the initiative was among the many priorities that the administration and its Congressional allies appeared to sacrifice...

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to consider a higher education case that has largely been seen as pitting the rights of gay students against the rights of religious students. But on Monday, the deadline for various groups to file briefs in the case, major higher education associations entered the dispute, arguing that the case should really be seen as about academic freedom.Led by the American Council on Education, 14 higher education organizations backed the right of the Hastings College of Law (part of the University of California) to deny formal recognition or funds to student organizations that violate the law school’s anti-bias policy...

...But after several intense days of behind-the-scenes negotiations, a few things have become clear(er) about the stripped-down student aid bill that Congress may consider in the coming days...

In the blueprint for overhauling federal education policy that President Obama sent to Congress on Monday, his administration seeks to confront some of the major educational challenges that have developed during the eight years that President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law has been a powerful influence on the nation’s public schools...But this ambitious agenda presents striking challenges of its own, both political and in terms of implementation...

Minnesota lawmakers might change the rules surrounding tests that measure skills students are expected to know before graduation. A bill due for a hearing today in a Senate committee would force high school seniors who don't pass the test to get at least four weeks of remedial help before a retake...