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Weekend, February 17-19, 2012
Reporting giant Shadid dead at 43 Correspondent was UW, Daily Cardinal alumnus By Kayla Johnson The Daily Cardinal
The world lost one of its greatest storytellers Thursday when New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid died of an asthma attack while on assignment in Syria. Shadid, a Daily Cardinal and UW-Madison alumnus, threw himself into the most tumulotous Middle East conflicts for nearly 20 years. Most recently, he bounced seemingly non-stop from revolution to revolution as his stories transformed the front page of The New York Times into a looking glass for Western readers into the Arab Spring. Shadid, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, defined journalist. He first appeared in the doorway of The Daily Cardinal office on a summer day in the late ’80s carrying an army rucksack nearly as tall as him. He
told the editor he has just moved up from Oklahoma to attend UW-Madison and to write for The Daily Cardinal. He had just gotten off the bus. He hadn’t found an apartment yet. Everything he owned was on his back. But, he was ready for his first assignment. Sacrifice and uncertainty in Shadid’s life would not stay within the walls of The Daily Cardinal office. Indeed, they would only escalate. In 2002, he was shot in the back in Ramallah while reporting for the Boston Globe in the West Bank. He told The Daily Cardinal last December that as he bled onto the curb thousands of miles from home, thinking he was going to die, he asked himself, “Was this worth it?” Apparently, he decided it was. He took some time to rehabilitate and was right back on the roads of the world’s most dangerous countries, pen in hand.
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Courtesy Peter Barreras
Anthony Shadid worked at The Daily Cardinal in the 1980s before going on to a Pulitzer Prize-winning career as a foreign correspondent. He died in Syria Thursday.
Documents reveal Republican plan to redraw heavily Latino voting districts By Alison Bauter The Daily Cardinal
Daven Hines/the daily cardinal
SSFC Chair Sarah Neibart said Chancellor David Ward can overrule the committee’s decision.
SSFC denies Union, Rec Sports budgets By Anna Duffin The Daily Cardinal
The Student Services Finance Committee denied UW-Madison’s Rec Sports and the Wisconsin Union’s budget requests Thursday, freezing the groups’ funds at the amount they received last year. Committee members said since the groups could not provide a detailed outline of how student segregated fees would be spent, they did not feel comfortable approving the budget requests. “There’s no working together on these budgets and these are student fees and they should be our purview,” Rep. Tia Nowack said. “There’s no consultation here. It’s coming to us with the assumption that we’ll just approve it and there’s no student say in the process at all.”
But the committee’s decision serves as a recommendation to Chancellor David Ward, who SSFC Chair Sarah Neibart said she would “not be surprised” if he overturned SSFC’s ruling. If he does, Neibart said the committee will take the decision up with the Board of Regents. Neibart said the committee requested the groups provide the specifics of where segregated fees were going to since December, but the groups could not give them. She said the committee’s liaison with the Chancellor’s office had been unresponsive to requests to help find the information. Since SSFC representatives agreed the services the groups provide are vital to students, they
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Documents revealed under court order Thursday showed that private attorneys hired to help Republican legislators with redistricting broke down Hispanic voting districts, scripted favorable testimony and more. The 63 pages of communications released Thursday suggest attorneys strategically designed the new maps to maintain the Republican majority. “We will want to make sure that those districts that may be most questioned meet Population criteria as closely as possible,” attorney Jim Troupis cautioned in one memo. GOP leaders hired attorneys from the Michael Best & Friedrich and Troupis Law offices to aid in redistricting, a oncea-decade process of redrawing voting district lines to account for the latest census data. In a unanimous ruling, federal
judges ordered Republicans to release the email exchange, lambasting their “all but shameful” attempts to keep the documents private. GOP leaders tried to prevent publication of the emails by claiming attorney-client privilege. While partisan redrawing itself is legal, several of the documents could give weight to Democrats’ contentions that the new maps discriminate against minorities, particularly in Latinodominated Milwaukee districts. In one email, Troupis touted the support from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, stressing the importance of getting a member of the group to provide favorable testimony. “This will take the largest legal fund for the Latino community off the table in any later court battle,” Troupis wrote. The emails also show attorneys gave talking points and at least one word-for-word draft to those pub-
licly testifying in favor of specific maps, among them Dane County Supervisor Eileen Bruskewitz. Emails show that Bruskewitz, a Republican who lost the race for Dane County executive last spring, was given a draft testimony designed to prevent “Liberal Supervisors” from “reach[ing] into non-Madison areas to complete districts dominated by Madison liberals.” Additionally, lawyers recommended ways to “tell the best story” once the maps debuted. In February of 2011, attorney Eric McLeod recommended replacing certain words, “so as not to give the impression that any particular strategy has been reached on timing as it relates to the legislative process”; he recommended keeping language “sufficiently ambiguous.” Republican Party representatives were unavailable for comment by the time of publication.
UW-Madison considering creating College of the Arts UW-Madison announced Thursday university officials are considering creating a College of the Arts. The college, which would be financed by existing departmental funds, would consist of the existing School of Music and the departments of art history, theatre and drama and design studies. If the departments were to remain the same size, it would sustain 1,192 students, 118 faculty members and 349 graduate students. Norma Saldivar, Executive Producer of the Arts Institute and Professor of Theatre and
Drama, said reorganizing the departments would not cost any additional money and the dean of the school could oversee funding to ensure resources are used in the most efficient way. The initiative of the college would be to “[provide] a meaningful discussion of the merits, challenges, and opportunities for a more unified approach to research, practice, and performance in the arts,” according to the College of the Arts website. Saldivar said students would benefit from consolidating the departments. “It’s going to serve our stu-
dents in a stronger way,” Saldivar said. “We also think it will give prospective students a chance to find the arts more readily than they have in the past.” Saldivar said that with Chancellor Ward asking the campus to be innovative with education to more efficiently allocate resources it is “an opportune time for us to have this conversation.” The Arts Institute executive committee is holding town halls, beginning Feb. 20 to seek input on the college from members of the UW-Madison community. —Anna Duffin
“…the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”