Erik Paulson's Blog

[This is part of my series of ASM goals for Spring Semester. Read them all here]

Finish the Housing/Tenant Services RFP. I’ve written about this a lot already, so I won’t go into it in much detail. My goal is to have it out to the Dept of Administration before the end of April. It’s going to take a ton of bureaucracy navigation with the UW to get it happen.

Finish the guidelines for the Creative Works fund and get them approved with the Finance Committee. My plan is to write a first draft, and then kick it to Finance and let them polish.

ASM should continue to diversify its funding streams. This is something Alex Gallagher wrote about last spring in a post that everyone should read twice. In particular, I want to bring his “Centers funding stream” to life. Here’s what he wrote:

“Centers: CWC, LGBTCC (when it was a group), Wunk Sheek, MEChA, and WCSU look similar in that they provide safe space and programming around issues of underrepresented minorities.  I think that you could capitalize on this similarity and create a stream which could provide funding for their unique needs.  Rather than pretending that they look like GUTS or ALPS, this will allow them to be treated like centers.  You can use the exact same budgets as you do for GSSF groups, if you want, but you can change the criteria to fit these particular types of services.”

We’d create it this funding stream this spring, with applications starting in Fall of 2010, for funding to start in July of 2011. It will actually probably save money, because right now in order to be a GSSF group you actually have to provide services. With a centers fund, groups wouldn’t have to screw around with that and could focus on their center aspect, which means they can ask for less money. To keep the growth from going crazy, maybe we cap the total fund, but that’s tricky to do in a viewpoint-neutral fashion.

I don’t know that we’ll get this done this year

In another funding stream, it’s time to think about the future of newspapers. UW System policy allows for seg fees to pay for newspapers, but currently the GSSF explicitly disallows publications as a service.

Now, both the Daily Cardinal and the Badger Herald swear up and down that they’d never take a dime of money from ASM, but I’d rather design a system when they don’t need the money, so if the day comes that they do really need the money they can decide how important it really is to not take ASM money. Broadly, here’s what I’m thinking:

- ASM won’t fund the entire costs. We’d fund maybe 50%, with a cap of say $200,000, and a minimum of $25,000 (which means that a paper has to be able to raise at least $25000 before we’ll take them serious).

- You have to be a real paper. Published at least once a week during the semester, some print minimum (5000 copies?). I’d like to put some minimum, like 25% news coverage, but that’s probably too tricky to get right.

- You have to print. Online only is the wave of the future and all that, and we should eventually think about how to fund online only, but for now an online-only org could get started for much cheaper than a print version – probably cheap enough that it doesn’t need any assistance.

- We need to protect editorial control. Student papers risk enough criticizing the administration, which controls their grades. It’d be even harder to serve as the watchdog for student government knowing that the student government also controls your funding. I think a newspaper would still probably apply to the SSFC, but there would also be a review by a committee of outsiders, from the journalism world (hopefully we could draft some faculty from the J-School, and the local press) to review any denials of funding, looking to ensure it wasn’t because the paper criticized the student government.

- The students and university should get something out of the deal, too. If you take ASM money, the UW should get a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide license to all of the content of the paper that allows them to store the archives and display it in any form for any and all comers.  (Maybe only what’s published while under the deal, but it’d be nice to have the complete archives of the papers that go back for decades.)

In full disclosure, it’s no secret that I write for the Badger Herald, though it is not a paid gig.  I hope to graduate before this funding became available, but even so we’d put in some language that said anyone who votes for the creation of this funding stream can’t be a regular contributor to a publication receiving funding.

The newspaper fund isn’t likely to get done this year, but I wanted to at least ask the SSFC to think about it.

[This is cross-posted to Muckrakers. Comments are off here]

Wisconsin has a strong open meetings law that aims to ensure public participation. It’s always been unclear if the law covers student governments, so a recent Attorney General opinion was welcome news. The AG’s opinion was that so long as the student government was carrying out its duties under state law, they should follow the open meetings law.

This is somewhat moot at UW-Madison for ASM. Under the ASM bylaws, which were written long before the AG’s opinion was issued, ASM has to follow the state open meetings law. Unfortunately, ASM has been a bit sloppy.

One of the great things about the WI Open Meetings law is that anyone can ask for clarification. Two situations in ASM bothered me enough to take the AG up on that option, and so in November I wrote asking for clarification. I got back a written response the other day. You can see my questions here, and read a PDF of the AG’s written response here. I’ll summarize briefly my two questions and the answer.

The first question was over timing of agenda notifications. The agenda needs to be posted no later than 24 hours before a meeting. On November 10th, I stopped by the ASM offices at exactly 6:30, saw the agenda, and noted something important had been left off. A corrected agenda was posted at 6:45. At the meeting on the 11th, there was a conscious effort to foot-drag to make sure the meeting did not start until 6:45. (To be fair, at that point in the semester, people were harried, and it’s possible the meeting would not have started until 6:45 anyway).

My question to the AG was: is this legal? The AG laid out a pretty clear guideline: it depends on what the effect it would have on members of the public. If it only caused people to arrive for the meeting 15 minutes early, then there wasn’t really any harm done. However, and the situation that I was concerned with, was what if it caused people NOT to attend a meeting. Here’s how it could happen.

The agenda needs to provide people with a reasonable idea of what will and will not be discussed and acted on at a meeting. The ASM agenda evolves over time – if you ask the ASM chair 3 days before a meeting what will be discussed he or she will have a pretty good idea, but things come up that add or remove agenda items. If you look at an agenda on Sunday, it may be different than the agenda on Monday. The 24 hours rule gives a clear safe harbor for checking the agenda: if it is not on the agenda on 6:30pm on Tuesday, then it will not be discussed on Wednesday night at the meeting. There is no need to check any earlier or later (though, it never hurts to look early). It is possible that by changing the agenda after 6:30pm, someone looked at the agenda as it was posted at 6:30, saw that their issue wasn’t on the agenda, and decided not to come to the meeting, even it was later added to the agenda.

Now, at the November 11th meeting, am I worried that this was an issue? No, not really. First, the actual agenda item was pretty inconsequential – to be honest I don’t even remember what it was (I think it was some internal appointments to a committee that had no objections.) Second, no one comes and looks at our agendas, and even if they do, the window of vulnerability was only 15 minutes in this instance. (Though, ASM has gone longer delaying the start of a meeting – at the July meeting, the meeting didn’t start until about an hour after the scheduled start, because there wasn’t quorum.) The true value of this incident, and the AG’s opinion, is the clear emphasis on the consideration of “reasonable burden” that ASM can expect to place on a member of the public when providing notice of a meeting and the meeting’s content. It is not likely that ASM placed an unreasonable burden on anyone by delaying the meeting on November 11th.

That idea of reasonableness went right into my next question. ASM, like most governmental bodies, considers the meeting officially noticed when physical copies of the agenda are placed in a designated spot. Government bodies generally post them electronically as well, but the canonical document is the physical version, so you don’t have to own or be able to use a computer to access the notice. (For every hypothetical you can come up with on why an electronic version is better, I can come up with a problem why electronic versions are more dangerous, so let’s not have that argument today. We should do both, but the official notice should be the physical copy.) When ASM physically posts an agenda, it places the whole packet on a shelf outside the ASM office. The top page or two is the agenda, and the next 15 to 20 (or more) pages are supporting material.

What has been long-standing tradition in ASM is to get the agenda and packet posted a couple of hours, if not days, before the 24-hour deadline. The ASM Chair, Vice-Chair, or Secretary are the only ones who usually print the agenda. However, it’s fairly routine that should have been on the agenda don’t make it, either because of a mistake or just not getting it done as fast as it was needed. In this case, the practice has been for the council member or committee chair to just put all of the materials under the stack, but not reprint the agenda. (This is all done before the 24-hour deadline has arrived.) At the actual meeting, a motion is made to just amend the agenda to add the item. ASM has considered the item “noticed” because it was present in the stack of paper that is provided for the public. The assumption has been that any member of the public who wants to know what will be in the meeting will read the entire packet, not just the agenda on the top of the stack.

I have objected to this at every meeting it has been attempted, and have usually prevailed. I never felt that it is reasonable to ask the public to read through the entire stack, and hope that they can figure out the ASM jargon in the supporting material and figure out what will actually happen at the meeting. I’m pleased that the AG’s office agrees with me, and I hope this convinces the rest of the council that getting agenda material on time is important.

I think everyone in ASM recognizes that that there is work to be done on keeping the public informed. Unfortunately, most of that thinking is on reporting afterwards, and not informing ahead of time. Putting a piece of paper on a shelf may be the legal minimum, but no one could, with a straight face, justify it as doing enough to actually notify the public.

[This was only ever an email, but it my next post makes no sense without it. I got an answer back today, I'll get that up next.]

Hello Kevin -

First, this message might be aimed too far up the organizational chain at the DOJ. It wasn’t clear to me from the SPAR webpage (http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dls/spar.asp ) who the best contact person would be, and you were the only person listed.

I’m CCing Nancy Lynch, senior University Legal Counsel at UW-Madison. I haven’t discussed this with her and it’s the first she’s hearing of it. I don’t expect this message to be a big deal, but just in case I wanted her to have a heads-up.

I’m a member of the UW Madison Student Government. I understand that there’s some ambiguity as to whether or not the Open Meetings and Open Records laws apply to us, and that there’s currently a request, from the UW-Milwaukee student newspapers, for an advisory opinion in the AG’s office as to that very question. Additionally, there’s proposed legislation from Rep. Gottlieb that would explicitly require student governments to comply with open meetings and records law.

At Madison, this is all somewhat moot – our bylaws explicitly state that we will comply with the state’s open meetings law, and as much as possible we have directly incorporated those requirements into our bylaws.

I have two specific situations where I would like your office’s opinion. One I believe is a clearcut question, and the other is more a question of what is “reasonable”.

The first question has to do with the definition of “24 hours” and meeting start time as listed in the public notice. If a meeting is scheduled, and announced, to start at 6:30pm on Wednesday, but a substitute agenda is posted at say 6:45pm on Tuesday, still listing the start time as 6:30pm on Wednesday, has the “24 hours” requirement been met if the meeting is not actually called to order until 6:45pm on Wednesday? The public, of course, had no way of knowing that the meeting would be delayed 15 minutes or however long we needed to get back to the 24-hours safe harbor. More importantly, the public would also have no idea that the agenda could be changed after the T-minus-24 hours time of 6:30pm on Tuesday. This seems to me to be a clear case of insufficient notice.

The second question I think is more difficult, and perhaps too specific to our arrangement. Our “public notice” consists of placing written copies of the agenda and supporting material on a shelf in a public space outside of our offices. The agenda is placed on top, the supporting material is placed below. The agenda itself is typically one or two pages long, the supporting material may be another 15 to 20 pages. (Typically, each item on our agenda has one to three pages of supporting material.) The agenda is typically posted 48 hours in advance. However, occasionally new material arrives after the agenda is posted. If that material, including the wording of the exact motion that will be made, is inserted into the stack of supporting material for a meeting, but the “agenda” document on top is not changed, has the public been “reasonably apprised”, so long as it occurs more than 24 hours before the scheduled start of a meeting? I note the following passage from the Compliance Guide issued by your office in 2007 ( http://www.doj.state.wi.us/AWP/2007OMCG PRO/2007_OML_Compliance_Guide.pdf )

“Whether a meeting notice reasonably apprises the public of the meeting’s subject matter may also depend in part on the surrounding circumstances. A notice that might be adequate, standing alone, may nonetheless fail to provide reasonable notice if it is accompanied by other statements or actions that expressly contradict it, or if the notice is misleading when considered in the light of long standing policies of the governmental body. (Linde Correspondence, May 4, 2007;) (Koss Correspondence, May 30, 2007.)”

Note that it is a long-standing practice in the UW-Madison student government that so long as the material was in the pile 24 hours before the start of a meeting, even if it did not appear on the agenda,  it would be proper to amend the agenda at the start of the meeting and add the new topic for discussion.

I realize that you probably have better things to do than answer procedural questions for student governments, and this question may be made more difficult by student government’s special circumstances as a part of the University. I’d ask that you simplify your research, and answer as though we were a typical Wisconsin governmental body. Even if it is legal for the UW-Madison student government to provide notice as described above, it is helpful to know if our notices would not be legal if we were any other governmental body.

Thank you in advance for your time.

Erik Paulson
Graduate Student, UW-Madison

[This originally appeared in the December 10th, 2009 issue of the Badger Herald. Yes, it is basically just a rehash of two earlier blog posts. Originally, my piece was going to be on diversity issues, but the night before the Herald declared their Diversity Week over, so I had to put something together on in short order, and trust me, I know my hit counts, not many people had seen this ]

Stable and worry-free housing is critical to students’ academic and personal well-being. After tuition, school housing is probably the most expensive and complicated challenge most students face. Everyone knows somebody with rental horror stories, if they don’t have any of their own. Worse, these horrors were often avoidable. The university makes some effort to help students, primarily with the Campus Area Housing List, but we should demand more. As an ASM representative, I have two proposals under consideration in this area.

The first is acting to secure and expand housing support and counseling services by contracting with an outside provider. ASM, with the chancellor’s consent, would develop a request for proposals and ask area providers to bid to provide these services. In the Madison area, there are several organizations capable of bidding and providing housing services. The organization that provides the best value would be awarded the contract.

ASM would request a range of possible services, and exactly what we purchase will somewhat depend on what the different organizations are able to provide. At a high level, the services can be broken into three large themes. The first is focuses on “help desk”-type services, exclusively for UW students. This could be in person, over the phone or via e-mail to answer questions about tenant rights, lease and subletting agreements, and avenues for enforcement. The second theme is broader outreach efforts, such as educating first-time renters before they sign leases, and outreach efforts to remind current renters of their rights and responsibilities. Finally, providers could offer direct services or consolidate existing services, such as operating the landlord rating website or helping with documentation management in rental disputes.

Currently, the ASM budget for next year allocates $50,000 to purchase some or all of these services. That amount will be reviewed by the SSFC before becoming final. It is important to recognize that this amount is really not an increase in seg fees. In years past, ASM has funded these services through the GSSF. This year, no student group was determined eligible to provide the services. If we purchase services using an outside provider, it looks like a decrease in one column and an increase in another, from a seg fee perspective. The $50,000 is actually less than what the SSFC last fully funded a student group to provide a year’s worth of services.

The second proposal, which may be tied to part of the first proposal, is to create a “housing fair” in the fall of 2010. The fair is simple to explain: imagine a college recruiting fair you might have gone to in high school, but for apartments instead of colleges.

Landlords, both big and small, would have a booth or a table and could tell students about their properties in person. They could sign up students for showings on the spot (or, if they really wanted to, sign a lease on the spot, though that’s not recommended).

A fair is advantageous for landlords because it lets them “sell” their apartments in a much more personal way than any advertising they could buy. They’ll also get exposure to many more students in a short timeframe, all of who have apartments on their minds. At the same time, students benefit from the large event, where they can see many options in a short timeframe and immediately have their questions answered. Furthermore, they can interact with landlords and discover apartments they might not ever have found.

There’s a higher purpose for the fair, too: if successful, the fair could become the kickoff to the annual rental season. In 2010, the fair would have to be in November for it to be at all relevant. With time, as the fair grows and gains importance, we could push the date for the fair back a bit each year, in effect pushing back the start of the rental season for the upcoming year. The end goal would be to eventually push the start back into the spring semester.

As an aside, Ald. Bridget Maniaci has a proposal that’s just about to be taken up by city committees that would legislatively accomplish this goal, by prohibiting a landlord from renting an apartment until the current tenant’s lease is at least half up. Currently, the landlord must wait until one-quarter is up, hence the mad dash on Nov. 15. I enthusiastically support Maniaci’s proposal and hope other alders sign on, but I am not optimistic for its chances. At one point, the deadline was one-third of the lease term, but several years ago it was reduced as a concession to landlords, some of whom would sign a lease more than a year in advance if they could. They will fight the new deadline tooth and nail. Furthermore, Maniaci’s proposal will not be able to address special provisions in the lease that allow an earlier date. Pressure from the marketplace might be the only way to make progress there.

A later signing date would be in the best interests of everyone. In November, many students don’t yet know their plans for the next year. They may not know future roommates well enough to really know what they’re getting themselves into. Current tenants have barely unpacked, and may not have even turned on the heat in their apartments and have no idea what a Wisconsin winter in their apartment is like before being asked to renew for another year.

The ASM proposals would benefit from more student feedback, both to refine them and to give the ASM Student Council some feeling if students are interested in these ideas. Please, visit the ASM website and let ASM and SSFC representatives know your thoughts, or stop by and visit with any ASM member during office hours around campus, or come and speak at the Open Forum of any ASM meeting.

Erik Paulson (epaulson@unit1127) is a Ph.D. student in computer science.

The Housing and Tenant Support Services I proposed for the 2010-11 ASM Budget has passed the first few hurdles, and is included in the first draft of the ASM Internal Budget, with $50,000 in funding.  The next stop will be the SSFC, probably sometime in mid January.  Once there, it may be left as-is, raised or lowered, or deleted entirely. I feel fairly confident that the SSFC will see the value and will leave it funded at a significant level before returning the budget back to the Council.

In my initial post, I detailed a number of services that I thought we might want to include in the eventual RFP. My plan is to further develop that list as a draft RFP, and start sending it through ASM and the community looking for feedback.  There are other efforts ongoing this year that we may want to leverage as part of the ASM funds. For example, Alder Bryon Eagon is developing a framework for Landlord/Tenant mediation, crafted towards students. These mediators, with some sort of city certification, could have some legal authority or at least a role to play in eventual court proceedings. It is possible that as part of the services ASM purchases, we could get dedicated time with these mediators. I’ll have much more to say about the RFP in a future post.

One idea that I want to move forward with, even if the Tenant Support Services funding is entirely removed from the ASM Internal Budget is the creation of a housing fair in the fall of 2010. The management of this fair may be something that we ultimately hand over to the contracted service provider, but that provider won’t start until July of 2010 at the earliest. We need to get started before that, so I’m going to propose the initial investigation of a Housing Fair as an ASM Intern Project for the spring semester.

The fair is pretty simple to explain: imagine a college recruiting fair that you might have gone to in high school, but for apartments instead of colleges. It would take place at the Great Hall in Memorial Union, or the Kohl Center’s concourse, or some other larger public space. For the first go-round, I was thinking a one day event, say from 3pm to 7pm.

Landlords, both big and small, would have a booth or a table, and could tell students about their properties in person. They could sign up students for showings on the spot (or, if they really wanted to, sign a lease on the spot, though I wouldn’t encourage that.)

A fair is advantageous for landlords, because it lets them “sell” their apartments in a much more personal way than any advertising they can buy. They’ll also get exposure to many more students in a short time frame, all of who have apartments on their minds.  At the same time, students benefit from a large event, where they can see many options in a short time frame and immediately have their questions answered. Furthermore, they can interact with landlords, and discover apartments that they might never have found. Finally, no fair would be complete without schwag, and who doesn’t want a frisbee with “Steve Brown Apartments” or “CHT” stamped on top?

Concurrent with the fair, we could have short seminars on basic tenant education issues. This would be ideal for the contracted provider to manage. Community services may be interested in having a booth at the fair as well – Community Car, Lazybones Laundry, some of the food delivery services, Charter, etc. It might be a little early for them, but they might be interested and it’s worth inviting them

There’s a higher purpose for the fair, too: if successful, I could imagine the fair being the kickoff to the annual rental season. In 2010, we’d have to have the fair in November for it to be at all relevant. With time, as the fair grows and gains importance, we could push the date for the fair back a bit each year, in effect pushing back the start of the rental season for the upcoming year. The end goal would be to eventually push the start back into the spring semester.

As an aside, Alder Bridget Maniaci has a proposal that’s just about to be taken up city committees that would legislatively accomplish this goal, by prohibiting a landlord from renting an apartment until the current tenant’s lease is at least half up. Currently, the landlord must wait until one quarter is up, hence the mad dash on November 15th. (Up until a few years ago, it was 1/3, but was reduced as part of a compromise to fix other language.) I enthusiastically support Maniaci’s proposal and hope the other downtown Alders sign on, as well as a few from the edges of town. If her proposal passes, we could still have the fair, just later in the year.

A later signing date would be in the best interests of everyone. In November, many students don’t yet know their plans for the next year. They may not know future roommates well enough to really know what they’re getting themselves into. Current tenants have barely unpacked, and may not have even turned on the heat in their apartments and have no idea what a Wisconsin winter in their apartment is like before being asked to renew for another year.

There is also the possibility of eventually hosting a second fair, near the end of May. This would help students who weren’t in Madison this spring, such as study-abroad students, but the main beneficiaries would be first year graduate and professional students. They have an extremely difficult task of finding housing, usually in a one or two day whirlwind visit. I know in Computer Sciences, most first-year students have terrible apartments, and move after their first year when they can actually search for apartments.  It would be a relief if they could attend a fair on say a Thursday, and look at apartments on Friday or Saturday.  Many landlords also prefer not to list their apartments in the fall rush, and instead would rather wait until later in the year. Often, this is an attempt to legally discriminate against students, so they probably wouldn’t participate anyway, but if it was aimed more at graduate students it might be a different story. This is likely not something we can pull off in the spring of 2011, but could be attempted in future years.

Now, for some boring logistics, and the part of the post that’s a little more aimed at ASM.  First, this is probably big enough that it will take two interns. I’m indifferent as to where they’ll wind up; this seems appropriate for interns with Academic Affairs, Legislative Affairs, or Shared Gov, or interns who work with the Chair or Vice Chair. There’s enough stuff going on with the city that Leg Affairs is probably my first choice, but if one of the chairs feels strongly about it, they can have it.

The goals for the intern part of the project are to organize a couple of different things, not necessarily to run the actual fair.  First, we need to really flesh out the plan for how the fair would work. Then, with something we can take to landlords, we need to gain the support of enough landlords to make it worthwhile doing. Working with some of the big landlords, as well as the Apartment Associations is key here.  We’ll also want to talk with city Alders, the Housing Committee, and the Campus Area Housing office of the University.

We want to make it as frictionless as possible to get people to attend, both presenters and students. Ideally we wouldn’t charge any landlords anything to have a booth at the fair, but if we have costs for the fair we’ll need to find a way to pay for them.

The final wrap-up will be to come up with a management structure for the fair, so we can hand it off to someone at the end of the semester, and as much as possible have them just execute the strategy we put together this spring.

This is much more of a write-up than would typically be done for an ASM Intern project. This relates to my legislation requiring Council sign-off on Intern Projects, and is above and beyond what I had in mind for other proposals.

The next step for this proposal will be at the ASM Student Council on December 9th 2009. Please feel free to email me or other any council member with feedback, leave a comment, or come and speak at Open Forum. I think I’ll move to refer it to a couple of different committees for further feedback, and then on to the Chair for possible implementation in the spring.

One of my favorite documentaries is Man Made: Incredible Islands (and the recycled footage in some other National Geographic Megastructure episodes). I like construction documentaries, and ocean documentaries, so building islands was a perfect combo. National Geographic did me a favor by simply staying on the island building, and about the only thing to be annoyed with were the obnoxious, greedy foreign investors who had far too much money for anyone’s good. (See also: House Hunters International. Great scenery, but I want to beat the people buying a second house with my shoe for their pettiness)

By focusing on the engineering only, National Geographic avoided the three absurdities that really define Dubai: an impossible business model, an unavoidable ecological disaster, and a human rights tragedy.

That Dubai was a bad investment was obvious right away. You’re never going to build a tourist destination somewhere that Sharia law holds. However, this will be the big news for the next couple of days. (Already tonight the NYTimes has a couple of stories on how it was all a mirage)

Building ski slopes and golf courses in the middle of the desert was also crazy, at least with the current generation of solar power options. Warning flags had been raised, but as illustrated by the National Geographic documentaries, mostly ignored. You’ll start to see more ecological warnings as part of the debt coverage.

Dubai’s human rights failings are also well-known. (If you read nothing else on Dubai, read this).  Now that it’s clear the wheels have come off Dubai’s building boom, I think we’ll also start to see more articles like this calling out Dubai for using slave labor.

It’s not like this is the lone holdout of modern-day slavery. Sadly, it took losing a lot of money before the world seemed to notice. Hopefully a few people will read about it before Tiger Woods issues another web release and pushes it off the front page.

First, my apologies to the two or three of you that have me in an RSS reader. I just went back and copied all of my BH posts into posts on my blog. I wanted to do it in the middle of the holiday weekend, so I’d be out of the way when everyone with current topics came back on Monday. However, it was just too beautiful on Saturday, and I went up and enjoyed a bit of a hike in Horicon Marsh instead (No jacket on November 28th? Hell yeah). Late Sunday night is better than midweek. So, if you’re freaked out that I’m suddenly talking about the ASM constitution or the district 2 race again, don’t worry.

One of the main points of this blog is a way for me to always be able to keep track of my own content, and ensure that it only leaves the Internet when I want it to. (The BH’s search functions are terrible, and the Daily Cardinal periodically seems to delete all of their old content.) This is sort of what John Udell calls Hosted Lifebits. I’m using WordPress at the moment, but I’m careful to use a URL that I control, and more importantly, I can always preserve the namespace no matter where I host it. I experimented some with Google App Engine to host the blog, because I’ve got some ideas for posts involving serious computation, but for now no GAE blog engine is as easy to use as WordPress. If I eventually move, however, it should be completely transparent.

Comments are off on the old posts. My original idea was to leave them off entirely. Again, I’m drawn to John Udell’s thinking on the subject, which is that each individual should ultimately be responsible for their own comments, though there’s presently no good way to do that. (For those of you wondering “wait a sec, didn’t he rail against people publishing their own stuff in his first post?” the answer is that publishing and syndicating are different.) I’m sympathetic, but less convinced, by Joel Spolsky/Dave Winer’s version of the argument. Finally, comments demand a fair amount of time, especially if you want it to be any sort of community. The Critical Badger has a great set of commenters, but ask him how much time he’s spent tending to them. There are other, more vibrant places for discussion, and I’d rather they get the traffic. However, I post so infrequently that comments aren’t really an issue, but I would encourage you to read Udell’s posts.

[This originally appeared in the November 12th issue of the Badger Herald]

You’ve probably never thought much about the UW class gift, or even known that graduating classes give one. However, there is good reason to pay attention in 2010. This spring is the 100th anniversary of the class of 1910’s gift, the Sifting and Winnowing plaque on the front of Bascom Hall. The very prominent plaque captures our motto of academic freedom: the university “should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

No gift before or since is simultaneously both a beloved physical piece of campus as well as a cherished fundamental ideal, and its anniversary should be marked by more than a ceremony and a few speeches. The best way to honor the plaque and the class that gave it is to try to match them by giving an equally treasured token of appreciation.

The full history of the plaque is worth knowing. As part of its centennial in 1949, the UW commissioned Theodore Herfurth to prepare a brief history of the 1894 controversy that lead to the phrase, the creation of the plaque 16 years later, and the five-year battle to actually display the plaque. The library has the full version online, and it’s an easy 30-minute read.

The 30-second version goes something like this:

In 1894, Oliver Wells, a loud-mouthed conservative from east of Madison, found himself in a position of some power and used it to launch attacks against the university for political gain. (Perhaps Rep. Steve Nass had a former life.) That summer, Wells managed to make a fuss over the supposed secret socialism of professor Richard Ely. The regents appointed a committee to hold a “trial” that fall. Wells lasted for all of one day at the hearings until he was thoroughly debunked and never returned. The committee instead turned the process into an examination of academic freedom, and their final report is the source of the Sifting and Winnowing passage.

In 1909 and 1910, academic freedom was again perceived to be under threat. Professor Frederick Jackson Turner left in November 1909 for Harvard due to interference from the regents. (In modern terms, imagine Mike Leckrone being forced out.) Conservative regents also trotted out more socialism scaremongering — a refrain that apparently never gets old — and again were beaten back by the faculty and university president.

At this time, class gifts were pointless tombstone “memorials” that were put in what are now the woods just north of Bascom Hall. A muckraking journalist whispered in the ear of the class officers that a better idea would be something to memorialize academic freedom. The idea caught on quickly, and the students went ahead and made the plaque themselves. Herfurth notes — and you can clearly see — it was not professionally made, as the letters don’t line up very well. The amateur quality of the plaque is part of its charm, and the plaque is actually a little more special when you know who actually laid it out.

The regents, correctly detecting that the plaque was at least in part an attack aimed at them, refused the plaque at the end of the year. Instead, it was dumped in the basement for five years until eventually a combination of a new progressive majority and a carefully negotiated compromise led to its 1915 placement on Bascom.

So, what should happen in 2010? There is some money for the class gift, between several different sources, but only a few thousand dollars. We should maximize this money in two ways.

First, this shouldn’t be only the class of 2010’s responsibility. History demands that they take the lead, but the true centennial of the plaque is 2015. It seems appropriate that this be a multi-year effort of the next few classes. And it shouldn’t be left to undergraduates.

Second, the Alumni Association’s Senior Week should be involved. This will only be its second year, but Senior Week, April 3 to April 8, 2010, is an effort by the WAA to celebrate graduation. It is also a way to get students into the Alumni Association before they even leave campus. The WAA includes a “special offer” membership, which includes a donation toward a class gift. The actual dollar amount through this program isn’t important — again, like Senior Week, it’s an attempt to condition students to be open to giving to UW. Building a donor base by making the gift something students are likely to contribute to is more valuable than the small amount raised for departments.

Are students open to donating for a serious class gift, especially with the bill from the MIU and the now-full Union Initiative? I hope so. What should the gift be? I have no idea, but I bet someone on campus does. This is an opportunity for the senior class officers to make those positions worth something. They can help us find the right gift, and I hope they step up. A good gift not only satisfies history and enriches future students but it ties us back to campus through the rest of our lives. That’s a gift we should give ourselves.

[This post originally appeared in the October 29th issue of the Badger Herald]

I’ve been to two town hall meetings on reorganizing the research enterprise at UW, and like other commentators, I don’t get it. Not only do I not get how the changes are going to fix some of the problems we’re facing on running our research programs but I also don’t get why so much of the faculty is so fearful of this proposal.

The provost would be the first to admit there are very few details in the plan as presented. This might even be by design — as professor Mike Corradini pointed out in the final town hall, a full proposal would have been torn apart as soon as it was unveiled. The proposal creates a new vice chancellor for research, split off as a separate position from the current dean of the graduate school and vice chancellor for research. Some functions of the current job would stay with the dean of the grad school, but other functions would go with the new position. Additionally, some of the safety and regulatory compliance responsibilities that are spread around campus would be brought together under the new vice chancellor.

That’s it. That’s all that’s been proposed. No one has specified how big the new research organization might be, but given the relatively small dollar amount mentioned, it’s not likely it could be much more than six new people.

All of the positions created in the initiative could fit (uncomfortably) in a full-sized sedan. That’s not enough to address all the improvements we want to make. How we engage the rest of campus are the details we need to start discussing.

The driving force behind the initiative is a rash of serious safety and protocol incidents that have been near-disasters for UW research. Additionally, grant administration and the reporting UW is required to do on behalf of faculty members has been severely backlogged for years. UW could improve in other areas, like managing industry-sponsored research, career development for grad students and post-docs, and building a more visible presence in Washington. It may be that a new position is the best way to address these shortcomings or it may be best to leave research in the graduate school, or some option yet to be discovered. In any course, it doesn’t seem like the outcome of these discussions would much depend on how the top level of the university was organized.

But are we going to be able to seriously have this discussion? There’s such a rush to beat up this proposal that there’s very little space for anyone to speak positively about any changes. Corradini, whose reputation and record of service to the university is beyond reproach, essentially felt the need to apologize before speaking in support. The website Siftingandwinnowing.org, a self-styled “independent opinion forum for the UW-Madison community” goes further, with one post suggesting that a town hall contained “plants” recruited to speak out in favor of the proposal.

In another post ironically titled “A Call To Speak Up”, the faculty are urged to shed timidity and come out against the proposal. The post is signed CK Adams. Charles Kendall Adams, president of the university from 1892 to 1901, was the author of the famous “Sifting and Winnowing” passage. What seems forgotten is the crucial “fearless” that immediately precedes the phrase.

The discussion over how we want to improve the university, and yes, perhaps make changes at the very top of the organization, is precisely in line with the ideals of fearless sifting and winnowing. Our faculty, staff and students are protected by a combination of tenure, 36.09 and a fierce tradition of shared governance and open discussion. If we have come to a point where members of the university community cannot speak their true thoughts due to real or imagined fear of compromised relations with the administration, then we have far bigger problems than who is the head of the research enterprise. Pseudonymous blogging is not worthy of being signed “Charles Kendall Adams.”

With the lack of details, just as it is hard to see the proposal as a serious improvement to the university, it is equally hard to find much cause for fear. Direction from the top to set research agendas of individual faculty members is always a danger, regardless if it comes from the current graduate school or from a new research office. The same forces that hold back such interference now will always continue to exist, no matter what the top of the organization chart looks like.

We have urgent needs in our research organization. What changes we make or don’t make to address those needs should be an open discussion, free from fear and intimidation. Our researchers are at the forefront of their fields, and a maximized research enterprise isn’t just crucial for the UW, it’s crucial for society. Failure to live up to that responsibility is what we should fear.

[This originally appeared in Muckrakers on October 15th, 2009]

This post isn’t going to win me any friends, but what if we added a localized alcohol sales tax to downtown bars?

A few years back, Madison added a $100,000 fund for the “Downtown Safety Initiative”. It funds police overtime to add extra patrols on busy nights in downtown Madison. The DSI isn’t used every night, or even every weekend night – it often depends on what else is going on, like football games and even the weather. Every year, the DSI runs out of money before the end of year.

The DSI has always been a target or acomplaint from alders from outside the downtown core. It is in the budget again this year – with a twist. Instead of getting $100,000, this year it’s funded at $80,000. The remaining $20,000 will come from “donors”. From a Mayor who prides himself on enhancing public safety, that’s sort of like replacing some of our full time fire fighters with volunteers.

I’m glad the DSI is being funded, and I’d like to see the police have extra resources, so long asthey’re not being wasted on checking for 20 year olds with fake IDs. In fact, I’d like to see if funded sufficiently to make it through the entire year. However, it’s a tough sell to the rest of the city to increase the funding, especially in this budget environment.

The Ed Board today decided that it could handle the principle of taxing booze to raise some funds for the government. It’s not quite apples-to-oranges, but what if we applied the same logic and added a sales tax to downtown alcohol sales? We could use that new revenue to fund the DSI. It wouldn’t be a huge tax, mind you, just maybe something that would raise a tolerable beer from $3 to $3.15 or $3.25. The DSI doesn’t cover the entire city, so this wouldn’t hit every bar in the city. A logical set of bars to add the tax would be the bars in the Alcohol License Density Plan area.

It’s a small enough tax that no one is seriously going to say “fuck it, I’m going out to the Hilldale Great Dane because it’s cheaper”. It’s not meant to reduce alcohol consumption. Even a very small tax could raise some serious funds – the bars in the ALDP do millions of dollars a year in alcohol sales. It applies to everyone who drinks downtown, including those who come in from the outskirts of town, but only those who actually use the downtown bars. That’s something that all-but-officially-running-for-Mayor Alder Schumacher could support.

It’s also more fair than asking for voluntary contributions from downtown businesses. The cost of the “donation” is going to get passed on to the clients anyway, and so what’s the incentive for all bars to participate? Brothers would be better off if it didn’t donate, and instead let Wando’s and the KK pony up.

There’s certainly precedence – many of the bars in the downtown area are already part of the Business Improvement District, which means they all have no choice but to pay extra taxes to support special programs in the downtown area.

I have no idea if this plan is even legal, and if state law permits the city to tax like this. I assume that if nothing else, the city can put conditions on liquor licenses to effectively create the tax.

It’s a better plan than passing the hat to fund a critical safety tool.