Onwisconsin Summer 2009

For University of Wisconsin-Madison Alumni and Friends The World At Their Feet Having global competence is a new expectation for students — but what does it mean? SUMMER 2009 Home. It’s where you feel connected. Revisiting the Boob Tube Children’s television is a potential teacher after all. As a member of the Wisconsin Alumni Association (WAA), you are an important part of the UW community. And you’ll continue to feel right at Origins of an American Author home as you connect with ideas, information and fellow Badgers. Relive the Madison days of Joyce Carol Oates MA’61. Membership is also a way to leave your mark on campus by supporting valuable scholarships, programs and services, and enjoying exclusive benefits Making a Splash like Badger Insider Magazine. So live your life as a Badger to the fullest. The “Miracle on the Hudson” copilot speaks out. Join today at uwalumni.com/membership, or call (888) 947-2586. Goatherd Guru Meet the big cheese of chèvre. ad_full pg_acquisition.indd 1 5/14/09 8:34:05 AM Third Wave s Mirus Bio s TomoTherapy s NimbleGen s SoftSwitching Technologies s ProCertus BioPharm s Stephen Babcock (center), with his butterfat tester, and colleagues W.A. Henry (left) and s s T.C. Chamberlin. GWC Technologies WICAB NeoClone Biotechnology In 1890, University of Wisconsin professor Stephen Babcock s Stratatech s ioGenetics s Deltanoid Pharmaceuticals s invented a device to test the amount of butterfat in milk. His discovery ended the practice of watering down milk and AlfaLight s GenTel Biosciences s Quintessence Biosciences created a cash cow for Wisconsin, putting the state on the map as a leader in dairy production and research. s Opgen s NeuroGenomeX s Imago Scientiﬁc Instruments s Helix Diagnostics s ConjuGon s Scarab Genomics s UW–Madison faculty hold more scientiﬁ c patents than any NovaScan s Platypus Technologies s Virent Energy other public university in the country. At University Research Park, their ideas become start-up companies, generating Systems s SonoPlot s BioSentinel s Bridge to Life jobs and building the state’s future. s Mithridion s NeuWave Medical s aOva Technologies s FORWARD. THINKING. www.wisconsinidea.wisc.edu NovaShield s Cellular Dynamics International s Ratio, Inc. s Colby Pharmaceutical s Stemina Biomarker Discovery s Centrose s Nemean Networks s AquaMOST s FluGen A Better World Starts Up Right Here When it comes to start-up companies aiming to improve the world, there’s no stopping the dynamic start-up team of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and WARF. The great discoveries of the university begin to grow into healthy businesses with the help of WARF. Some, like Third Wave Technologies, Mirus Bio, TomoTherapy and NimbleGen Systems, have surpassed their start-up beginnings through successful acquisition or IPO, ensuring UW-Madison discoveries are at work improving lives around the world every day. Helping invent a better world. warf.org Researchers at the Stratatech Corporation hope the skin tissue they developed will help wounds heal with less infection, pain, and scarring. Ad_Economy_OW.indd 1 5/4/09 9:19:53 AM SUMMER 2009 contents VOLUME 110, NUMBER 2 Features 22 Global Views By Masarah Van Eyck Today’s students know that by graduation, their portfolios of knowledge and skills need to include global competence. But the UW, along with its peers, is grappling to define what that means, exactly, and why in the world it matters. 32 This Is Your Copilot Speaking By John Allen In January, US Airways Flight 1549 made an unsched- uled landing in the Hudson River. Quick action by the crew, including copilot Jeffrey Skiles ’84, ensured survival for all aboard. Skiles now shares his experiences. 22 34 Reflections on Joyce Carol Oates By Joanne Vanish Creighton ’64 An academic setback at the UW propelled Joyce Carol Oates MA’61 on to the pinnacle of literary achieve- ment. Read how Madison changed her life, and find an excerpt from “Nighthawk,” her campus memoir. 42 Tele[re]vision By Jenny Price ’96 Conventional wisdom says that TV is bad for kids, but research is finding that good messages can prevail — if parents choose programming wisely. 42 48 The Godmother of Goat Cheese By Denise Thornton ’82, MA’08 Anne Topham ’63, MA’65 didn’t set out to become a trailblazer, but her pursuit of award-winning chèvre helped launch artisanal goat cheese in Wisconsin. Departments 4 Letters 9 Inside Story 10 Scene 12 News & Notes 18 Q&A 34 19 Classroom 20 Sports Cover 50 Traditions Elizabeth Anderson ’07 nabbed first 52 Gifts in Action place in an annual Study Abroad Photo Contest for “Dune Walker,” an image 53 Badger Connections she captured in Namibia while studying 66 Flashback in South Africa in 2006. SUMMER 2009 3 letters Your excellent article on sleep brought to mind I was pleased to read Jason Stein’s story of my UW years, when raging sleep deficits, plus efforts to restore and preserve elements of a genetic disorder called central nervous sys- Menominee indigenous culture. I was born tem hypersomnia, combined to suck me down and brought up in Menominee — the one in into classroom naps. Willpower fought against Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. brain cells that kept saying, “You’re getting The indigenous Menominees left their sle-e-e-py.” The cells kept winning. name to designate three cities, two coun- After my condition was finally diagnosed, ties, two rivers, a reservation, and a mountain I wrote this song, sung to the tune of My Fair range in Upper Michigan and Wisconsin. I was Lady’s “I Could Have Danced All Night”: born in the city and county of Menominee on I want to sleep all night, I want to sleep all the Menominee River state line. There is also day, and still I’ll beg for more. another Menominee River in Wisconsin, plus, I want to go to bed, and rest my sleepy of course, the Menominee Indian Reservation. head; please tell me if I snore. The Menominees, then, were obviously I need to know why I am so exhausted, why not a quaint, prehistoric scattering. They were all at once I can’t stay awake. a significant indigenous population, and their Is there a pill or three, that you can give to heritage should be more widely acknowledged me than it has been through the twentieth century. Zzzzz … So I won’t sleep, sleep, sleep all day? Robert Sollen ’48 The article on sleep [“Bedtime Story,” Spring Jan Millar Alkire ’63 Carpinteria, California 2009 On Wisconsin] was most interesting. I Seattle, Washington have often wondered if the reason we sleep at Notes on News & Notes night might be because it is too dark to hunt A Word about Native Languages When I came to UW-Madison in 1974, I or gather food. I enjoyed “Weight of the Words” [Spring wanted a bona fide “campus” job, so, with a Bill Hogoboom ’51 2009]. I wonder what happened to the Oneida ton of cooking experience at Mr. Steak on my Madison Nation and its outstanding efforts to promote resume, I landed work flipping burgers at the their native tongue in the nation’s child care Red Oak Grill at Union South. I was good at I’m married to a UW grad (Lisa Boom ’88), [centers]. I recently observed such a child it, and it wasn’t long before I was promoted so I happened to see your article “Bedtime care center near the Green Bay airport going to food service manager, which made me stu- Story.” strong, as little ones happily shouted out in dent honcho over the Red Oak Grill, the Snack Randy Gardner broke the world record for the Oneida language, identifying the differing Bar, and the Union’s catering business. staying awake in 1964 (the event took place pictures on a flip chart. That was only a way station, though, as I over Christmas vacation 1963–64, not 1976 as John Davey ’45 soon found myself promoted to student build- noted in the article). I was there. Randy, Bruce Kendall, Wisconsin ing manager (making $2.75 an hour), dating McAllister, and I were high school seniors the girl who worked the info desk, and being doing the experiment for entry in the 1964 The fine article on the attempt to maintain the threatened by possibly inebriated bowlers who San Diego High School Science Fair. It was languages of Wisconsin’s Indian peoples left the had somehow broken their lane’s pin changer. called a stunt at the time, and we were almost Oneidas off the map on page 33. The Oneidas, It was with these memories that I read expelled from school, but it wasn’t a stunt! with their reservation just southwest of Green with some sadness about the demise of my Bruce designed a rigorous suite of mental and Bay, were involved in a WPA project to record former workplace [“A More Perfect Union,” physical response tests, which we adminis- and save their language from 1938 to 1940. News & Notes, Spring 2009]. Sure, it was ster- tered every four to six hours during the entire Then, as now, the University of Wisconsin was ile and underutilized, but where could you get eleven days. involved, as more than a dozen Oneida men a better steak sandwich and fries than the Red [Randy] could have stayed awake longer. and women were paid for eighteen months to Oak Grill? How about the two bigger-than-the- The experiment was terminated at 264 hours record stories and accounts of their lives in their plate pancakes at the Snack Bar for 65 cents? because Randy had definitively broken the own language and then translate into English, A lot of my Madison experience was tied existing record, and the attending physicians with the assistance of linguistic anthropolo- to that place, and, while I’m sure the new (and parents!) were strongly urging, “It’s time gists from Madison (Morris Swadesh and Floyd building will be fantastic, I hope it will provide to go to sleep.” Bruce and I were pooped, too, Lounsbury).

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