cc
everyone, to Wednesday Nite >> Tomat the Lab.lcome,
Glad to have you here tonight.
I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center and for UW
Extension Cooperative Extension,
Alliance, the Wisconsin Alumni and on behalf of the Science
Television, thanks for coming to Association and Wisconsin Public
We do this every Wednesday Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
Tonight I'm delighted to have Dave Nelson be the first
speaker.
biochemistry. He, up until recently, was also
the director for Center of
He is co-author of one of the most popular biochemistry
textbooks out there.
Lehninger, Professor Lehninger For those of you who know
How long ago? die>> 25 years.o.
25 years ago. And Michael Cox and Dave Nelson
have been keeping that name going for a long time.
Dave has also got a strong
science and particularly the interest in the history of
UW-Madison. hisWhen the new biochemistry at
addition opens up and the renovated old biochemistry
building opens up later this
murals will still be in place in no small part because of the
work that Dave put into preserving those.
Dave is going to talk tonight about science outreach at
UW-Madison, the first 50 years. It's been a delight for me to be
able to work with Dave for the
He's given me an hour of his last eight or nine years.
at 9:00, that included my time evtwo years at NSF. morning
And he has great vision both
grasp of where we have been. looking forward and an excellent
Dave Nelson to Wednesday Nite Please jat the Lab.elcoming
[APPLAUSE]
We are going to work in tandem >> Thanks, Tom.
I'm going to talk for I hope tonight.
history of the campus' early about 20 minutes about the
Tom is going to tell you about outreach activities, and then
future and some exciting the current situation and the
as a result of recent changes on possibilities that have come up
I'm talking about the first 50 campus, construction changes.
I think it's often helpful when yyou're trying to understand ase
complicated problem to look at a
And the complicated problem today of how the university can
coordinate its activities in
we do here, specifically how talking to the public about what
complicated by the fact that scientists can do that, is
there's so much to talk about and there are so many places
that we should go.
helpful for us to look at a very And I decided that it might be
things were here during the 50 years after the university
was founded in 1848.
idea of where you've been and it I think sometimes you get an
plans for where you're going. hAnd that is in any case ar
simpler case to us to look at and maybe we will be able to
combine what happened way before
to make a good story for you. Let me begin by saying that when
the university first started and
about what the university should the Regents sat down to think
right away was to start making do, one of the things they did
And I tell you about this because it's interesting the way
they did it.
invitations to the whole state, all over the state, asking
people, citizens, farmers that
belonged to them, to look for hadand bring in fossils andhat
geological specimens. So they actually asked the state
to come to them with the stuff
materials for the geology that would museum.the teaching
And I want to talk about that again as we finish today.
I think it's an interesting precedent to have set.
Several legal changes during and
big difference to the way universities were organized and
the way that they could do their
And one of them, one of the most outreach.
passage of the Moral Act of 1862 important of them, was the
funding land-grant colleges in which established a plan for
The idea was that you got 30,000 all of the states.
senator and representative that you had in Washington, and you
could use the proceeds for that land to set up a university
whose purpose was to teach the
arts. Some states decided to make that
land-grant university a separate
So we have Michigan and Michigan institution.
Iowa and Iowa State. State.
This university, after some competition with Ripon and
Lawrence, decided to make the land-grant university to be
here. And this is in a sense is
different from a lot of places. We have the two colleges,
letters and science, and the
same place. laThis was a one time shot ofthe
money, and it was up to the states to figure out how to keep
going after this. And so it was a terrific start
but not a permanent solution to the problems.
At this time, just in the middle
subsistence farming had been of the Civil War period
anymore. recognized to be not adequate
industrialized, largely as a This country had been
were switching from subsistence resfarming over to industrialle
farming where they could make enough product to take care of
two or three people for every one that was on the farm.
And it was clear that something had to change if productivity
was going to up to allow this to
And those who thought about this happen.
had to actually figure out, ascientifically, how to makene
farms more productive and then
them to develop means of making teach peothings better.work with
There were several university presidents, Chadbourne, Twombly,
Bascom, who were good presidents
question of agriculture, and but not very interested in the
their tenures here that moved verforward the program ofng
agricultural education. But then a dairyman, Hiram Smith
from Sheboygan, was appointed to
immediately took over the whole thplanning for the Wisconsinhe
agricultural offerings at the university.
He essentially became the czar. And one of the thing that is
Hiram Smith did was to bring in a dean.
He called him a dean, William Henry, he actually was the dean
of a single department called the Department of Agriculture,
and he was brought in to develop
agriculturalists how to make a school to teach
and more nourishing and so on. their products less expensive
thing he realized was that he Whad a job and no students.
And his solution to that problem
think, he took the first year to was really a very good one, I
of Wisconsin and talk to simply travel around the state
Asked them what they needed, farmers.
they could be helped, what they had to offer to the university,
and he, as a result of that time, developed a set of
interactions and relationships
him in the following years. thSoon enough there were both to
faculty members and students. The faculty was pretty small.
It consisted of these two people: Henry Armsby, who was
the agricultural chemist, and Trelease, who was the botany and
horticulture professor. Armsby stayed for a few years
and made some useful
Trelease stayed for a few years coand then left to become thety.
director of the St. Louis Botanical Gardens, a famous,
fabulous botanical garden.
Henry to get the teaching of But both of them helped Dean
And they also were in on the agriculture up and running here.
some several other programs that planning and the initiation of
outreach programs. actually turned out to be early
farmers institutes, which were There were, for example, the
the state, two-three days long. The faculty for these things
included farmers who knew what
members who were trying to teach they were doing and faculty
laboratory so that they could apply it to their agriculture.
And these things actually were
This thing on the right you can't read of course but it's a
list for all the farm institutes
are 80 some. for the year 1892-'93 and there
information passed there. In Iowa they took this idea one
step further. They actually got several
railroad cars and converted them
Took them all over the state to talk about corn and breeds of
corn and corn yields and the
it to grow better. things you needed to do to get
people in Iowa were able to see Andthis right in their owns of
community.
in the state? >>>> They didn't get to everyty
county in the state, but I've seen the numbers and they really
covered a lot of ground.
university that hadn't, as far In 1886 they started at this
else. They started a farm short course
which was timed so that farmers would be caught at their least
busy times in the winter. It was short so that the people
could come in for just a few
useful, and it was aimed at people who were actually working
on a farm and needed to know
veterinary medicine to do what botany and chemistry and
So these short courses began in they were '86.g better.
The first one had 19 students.
were going to these things. I once wandered around the attic
of the old Ag Hall up here and
buried up there in the dust sawpictures of the graduatingare
classes of the farm short course.
Everybody was wearing a shirt and tie.
Formal pictures for all of them.
resulted in a lot of people being in contact with the
university who otherwise
lack of time. It was because it was timed in
the winter that they could do this.
The Hatch Act was another legislative change that made
outreach and the teaching of
outreach more effective. agriculture easier to do,
Hatch was a senator from The Hatch Act,
ongoing grants for research. Missouri, provided yearly
simply funded the buildings, The original moral grant had
This one funded the continuation the start of a college.
all over the country. The amount of money that was
made available was small by today's standards, but it was
enough to allow the small faculty of a place like this to
start doing research that actually was relevant to the
farmers.
clear things about this early Onperiod was that the facultynd
members were going out to talk
what do you need. And the dean, who I said had
already circulated around the state and talked to farmers, got
his small faculty together and
that are real problems for the said, look, here are the things
going to concentrate on them. farmSo the result was a real're
interaction very early on in the
that meant that whatever was planning of the research and
usually valuable to the farmers who had initially suggested it.
The value was made by a publication of the year of an
annual report and the publication periodically of
bulletins on some specific
farmers, and the result of that was that the research very
quickly got into the hands of the people for actually needed
it who could apply it immediately in the field.
This is a picture of South Hall.
place where the dean of L&S lives, but that actually isa
where the agricultural chemists and the agronomists first were.
It's actually South Hall, not North Hall.
But it soon became too small, and they eventually built the
thing we now call Ag Hall.
to remind of you what many of you know already, namely thats
these faculty members were here early in the 20th century or
late in the 19th, were doing
applications. tSo for example here's Babcock.l
He was a famous biochemist, left
whole state ready to elect him here when he retired with the
And Babcock's principal gcontribution was a simplee.
chemical test that allowed a
milk that was being sold by the farmfarmer to the dairy andt the
determine its quality.
determined by measuring the fat content which took away all of
the incentive for a farmer to dilute his milk and sell it by
the pound and get more money for
And Babcock's work, therefore, it.
farmers honest than the bible. was often said to have made more
of his simple devices. Here's Babcock standing with one
a small gadget that you could Hhold in your hands and that ad
10-year-old person can operate
butter fat content. toHe also publicized this.f
He didn't patent it but he put
possible for anybody who could out literature that made it
became an international standard read to do this, and it quickly
milk. Here's another of the earlyr
pioneers here that made contributions both in the
laboratory and on the farm. KP Link was a biochemist, it was
called agricultural chemistry then, who in the course of
working with a farmer from
the reason that cows in this northern Wisconsin discovered
in which they bled internally state perioand died.ot a disease
He located the causative agent
and spoiled sweet clover. wIsolated it, showed that you
could actually overcome its effect either by not feeding it
anymore or by giving the cattle an injection of vitamin K.
And in the course of doing this study he realized that he had a
compound that was also a very potent rodenticide, which he
patented. And then instead of simply
letting the patent go, he actually took this finding out
to the farms. Here he is teaching somebody to
use a trap that's been set with this warfarin.
So again his work began in the
began on the farm when a farmer brought him a problem and then
it continued in the lab until he
went back to the farm where the sproblems could be addressed.t
There is, as Tom said, in the biochemistry building right
across the street a famous mural
the artist in residence here in by John Stthe 1940s.y who was
And the mural tends to say what the title says social benefits
of biochemical research.
farm animals and farm plants It shows on the left farmers and
They have been poorly nourished. that have not prospered.
of rickets. TheOver on the right we haveegs
healthy animals and healthy and happy children all with nice
straight legs.
characters who are the And in the back we have a row of
discoveries that changed this ssituation to this one.
It was during the period between
outflowing of new information 191about vitamins and theus
importance of those vitamins for
change life, not only on the nutrition which did really
President Van Hise was farm but in the city as well.
said something that you will apparently the first one to have
here long enough, namely the hear often if you stay around
in 1904. statement of the Wisconsin Idea
the beneficent influence of the university reaches every home in
the state.
ideal. We talk very often about this
to tell you about is our efforts And much of what Tom will have
of taking the things that we to actually meet this challenge
bringing them so far out of the luniversity that they actuallynd
reach every corner of the state or even further.
Van Hise's idea is a hundred
it. One of the changes that's taken
place during the period of the
was the development of first 75 years of the ag school
And I don't whether Tom plans to agricultural extension.
but it's certainly an example of talk to you about this or not,
organize to bring its research the way a university can
do somebody some good. out into the world where it can
extension program actually There was an agricultural
1866. As far as I know the first one
here in this country was in 1891
were taught as ag extension. at Rutgers where a few courses
included children because the teachers in the courses realized
the best way to get farmers to
children involved first and then participate was to get their
to participate. These ag extension courses wenty
beyond field farming, and they
things that a farm family has to took into account all of the
in their jobs. do to be efficient and effective
education for women who were And so they had a big element of
economy of the farm. often the people who ran the
and home economics, in a broader Ag economics was taught to them
that was covered in sense, beag extension.he topics
Seaman Knapp is the guy who is
of extension, and he was a Texan generally considered the father
send a county agent out to each whcounty in the state and haveo
that agent be sort of the antenna for the university to
find out what was needed, what
that he could bring if back to was wanted in the community so
to help with it. the university and ask somebody
First in New York in the late There were fa1890s.eaus set up.
And the idea there was to have
was like the Kiwanis for an organization for farmers that
together and talk about their problems at a regular time and
solve them together.
that had a big impact was the AnSmith-Lever Act of 1914.on
Two senators here shown put up
extension service in all the the money to fund cooperative
And one by one the states actually set up to do this.
Now I think all of the 50 states
So that's briefly what things were like here during the first
50 years or so of the university
Agriculture. and of the College of
at what was going on, at how the And it seems to me when you look
are certain principles that fall outreach was organized, there
principles are worth using when you think about the future of
outreach on this campus.
of learning was reciprocal. OnIt wasn't the teachers, theess
professors going out and telling
That wouldn't have worked anyway, they wouldn't have paid
any attention.
silliness that goes on in the They didn'university.he kind of
So it was reciprocal. They actually went out and they
asked people what do you need.
The problems were brought in What are your problems?
research, and very often the here, made the focus of
only a solution to the specific soproblem, but it very oftent
allowed one to do something more
rodenticide warfarin. Another of the features of that
early outreach was mutual hospitality.
The people from the university
farmers came here for those short courses for example.
There was a lot of going back and forth.
And I think that that was a critical part of making what was
going on in the research
going on on the farms. laboratories germane to what was
informed by UW research, and so Thit was a genuine use ofas
scientific principles to improve
And because it actually worked, it was valuable.
The farmers knew it was valuable
the state economy. both to their families and to
was valued and continued. I think one of the significant
advantages of the smallness of
that it was possible to tailor the outreach program then was
the audience that you were the program pretty precisely to
And so the short courses could concerned with.
of the year when farmers had be planned at exactly that time
And other courses, the 4-H time.
integrated with the school programs could be planned and
had time for these things. programs so that the children
at a specific demographic but it The outreach here was not aimed
It included kids, it included working farmers, it included men
and women, it included the whole
and wanted the benefit of coresearch at the university.ed
And finally, and surprisingly,
I haven't cited the dollar it was really quite inexpensive.
of legislation, but these were values of these several pieces
programs. They were run on the cheap.
But it was possible because much
was done by faculty who were of the work that was being done
by volunteers who didn't need to paid by the university anyway or
So if we fast forward to 2011 now, I'll turn this discussion
over to Tom, but I hope that
what we think about in the some of this history will inform
Now the campus is loaded with people who do outreach.
If you exclude those whose job
talk about people who are members of the faculty and staff
who have a part of their job be outreach, it's well over 200
people. And if you look at where the
outreach is being done, the science outreach I'm talking
about now, it comes from all
colleges and most of the over the place, all of the
There was a survey about 10 years ago asking faculty what
they thought about outreach.
that survey would have revealed the attitude that outreach was a
lot of trouble and it interfered
did. with other things that faculty
what it showed. It turned out that people who
did outreach really enjoyed it, found that it had improved their
own teaching and in some cases
And so it's valuable to the had inforfaculty here. research.
Now, as then, funding for outreach is a problem.
It's varied, its sources are
The sources generally are small in amount.
There are some programs on
Wisconsin Idea grant, which interestingly comes from the
dean of the College of
his wife who set aside money Agriculture, Ira Baldwin, and
There are now government grants that can be obtained in
connection with the research
research grants and those are one of the places where science
outreach is being funded now. There is no place on campus, as
of six months ago let's say or
locus on campus where you can come and know that you'll hear
about science.
attending now. This is an unusual thing you're
things that provides for the This is one of the very few
regular time where you can count public a regular venue at a
related to science. There aren't very many suchg
venues on campus, and Tom will
development here that has offered the opportunity to make
a single place or a single group
So I'm going to turn the mic of places the venue.
he'll tell us about over tthe next 75 years. that
I don't know about 75,
I'd like to thank Dave but maybe five to seven.
background of the origins forhere at UW-Madison.ndid
If Dave had been in another department besides biochemistry,
if he were in physics he might
launching of Wisconsin Public Radio and eventually Wisconsin
Public Television.
Medicine and Public Health, he If he was in the School of
of public outreach in cities and could talk about the early days
Wisconsin. in rural communities across
have talked about the Ingersoll Physics Museum launched in 1917,
one of the earliest examples of a hands-on museum where the
exhibits were intended, designed
So we have many, many places on campus that are very proud, and
justifiably so, of their long history of public engagement in
science.
about what we're calling now the Today I get to talk with you
idea that the Madison campus can science constellation and the
science. be viewed as a constellation of
this intro and to say thanks to many of you who have been coming
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We're almost done with our fifth
year here.
of 2006. We started this on February 22nd
able to see a program that And it's a splendid thing to be
Wisconsin Public Television can go to places all over the state.
And because I work for
always ask for questions first. So if there are any questions
that you would like to ask
There's even a thing of chalk. first.
So if I understood the first Yes?
Lawrence or Ripon colleges might speaker correctly, either
institutions if they had started have become state sponsored
Correct. the land-grant schools there.
So the question was either Yes.
become the state sponsored Lawrence or Ripon could have
a possibility. agricultural college and that is
you have with Cornell and That's actSyracuse. model that
Cornell is a land-grant university, Syracuse has the
school of forestry for the state
Dane County provided $40,000 of New York.
school here. for the starting of the ag
County provided $40,000 to help, >> Dave is saying that Dane
or sway the state legislature, I was going to say help convince
Any other questions? Dave used the B word.
The idea of the science constellation goes back, in my
personal experience, at least to
I was struck by the fact that we 1997.
buses driving through campus. And where were they heading?
To the state capitol which I
visitors. tAnd I thought it's really00
unfortunate we don't have any place here to lure them
every day so that they would
just as they do at the state have a destination on campus
At that time, the new building capitol.
Foundation, had just opened up of the foundation, the UW
empty. and their whole first floor was
I went to talk to somebody there It was their surge space, and
to need this in five or ten and Iyears but would you beoing
interested in setting up a
And they said, well no, not really, this is our surge space,
would you be interested in the
And I said, sure, what dairy dairy barn?
And I had been on this campus as barn?
and I had no idea this dairy a PhD student starting in 1982,
the street, right across Campus barn, and itDrive.ight across
Well come to find it this is the
vitamins, it's where Henry Lardy cradle of the discovery of
developed work on artificial and his major professor
It is now a national historic inseminatlandmark.iry cows.
At that time it was, and it still is, a not very well used
building. But that was the beginning of
it. And Ken Smith's one son
suggested that we call it the museum, not of the museum of
life science, but the museum
Is that the same as the stock of lipavilion?nces.
Is that the same as the stock pavilion?
No. The stock pavilion is brick with
a green tile roof, and it is on this side of the overpass.
And the dairy barn is this white
little conical hat. It could be much more prominent,
if we painted it red I think
In 1999, an interesting thing people wouhappened.hat it is.
We had the university sesquicentennial and as part of
that there were four major open house events and one of them was
in science and that was called
And we held it at the stock pavilion, and that was the first
time in my experience, and I
specialist in 1991, that we had gotten together with a whole
bunch of people beyond our
So that was the first eye opening experience for me to see
what we'd be able to do.
UW Madison Open House Summer The following year we did the
We couldn't call it a sesquicentennial, and I don't
know what the Latin is for 151, so we'll just call it open
house.
We just stopped doing it, which Anwas unfortunate.d.
In 2002 I had a chance to do a
the Bolz Center for Arts cultural tourism project with
School of Business. And that is pretty interesting
because it raises this whole
campus be a cultural tourism idea of can the university
And if you know Harvard or the destination.
University of Cambridge or the service academies or the
or Stanford University, you know University of oxford in Britain
that people go for the that these are historic places
for the culture, oftentimes for arcthe science, and that'sory,
something that I think this place very well qualifies for
also. In 2003 we had a chance to set
up science expeditions. The planning for group for that
morphed into the Science
the science.wisc.edu Alliance, and Ken Smith set up
And it was the first portal on a web portal.
we had for a web portal for par foscience outreach.cs that
In 2004 Dave and I organized a
science outreach. And then in '05 we morphed the
Museum of Living Sciences to the
Center, and that was because we got some advice from Alan Fish
who said it would be a good idea
on campus for science outreach to de-link the idea of a venue
I thought originally that you got two good ideas and they'd be
better linked together, and Alan
two good ideas and they're pointed out actually you have
together. And then, of course, we startedn
Wednesday Nite at the Lab with
in '06. thAnd '06 was a pretty amazingTO
year because that was the year
that there would be not only the all these announcements came out
Discovery but the Morgridges had Wisconsin Institutes for
plans for the first floor commistarted coming out.d the
And that the first floor wasn't going to be just another
research floor, it was going to be what today we know, here we
are three weeks into the Town Center of the Wisconsin
Institutes for Discovery. The students also voted that
year to tear down and build up a
to be pretty splendid also. neIn '07 the Science Allianceng
started a series that ran all year called the
New Constellation Seminar.
theme that Dave Nelson And was the built around the
clock is ticking. aWe have these splendid new
physical venues on the drawing
to be built and they're board, fundunderway.ey're going
When the doors open, will we be ready?
Will we have the programmatic infrastructure, organizational
infrastructure, the social
buildings? infrastructure to match the new
of not only of a new And out of that came this idea
looking at the whole campus as a constellation of buildings, but
that's in contrast to a science science ccenter.ation, and
I've had conversations with Ken Smith since 1991, and Ken and I
had lots and lots of
working on the barn project. conversations as we started
Ken articulated. These are four big points that
whole campus as a destination One is efor exploration.ect the
It sounds pretty straightforward
that. As a matter of fact, if you know
of any campuses that do that, let me know.
He also said you got to be
and access. iYou got to think about this.
You got to learn from your
You got to invest in it and you have to think about how is this
going to fit for your learners, people who are coming from the
neighborhoods, from the city of Madison, from Dane County and
from all over the state of
He impressed on me that new media supplement but do not
supplant the old media. So when things come up like web
or social media, it doesn't mean
ones but you use those to supplement what you have going.
And that you use communications,
build a community. not only to communicate, but to
the Exploratorium Many oin San Francisco.r with
It started in 1967 and it has spawned probably 200 science
centers like it.
not based primarily on Hands-on, interactive exhibits
interactions with exhibits. Most people don't know that the
same year and across the bay at UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Hall
of Science opened.
named for a gentleman by the The Lawrence Hall of Science is
a Nobel Prize at the University namof California Berkeley. won
It was for the, help me here, accelerometer, accelerator, yes,
thank you.
101. [INAUDIBLE]
at UC San Diego, about nearly 20 years ago now, the Birch
Aquarium opened up at the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography which is
And what's interesting about part of UC San Diego.
mostly about the research thagoing on at the Scripps.are
So if you go to Lawrence, at
the emphasis hasn't been solely on the research going on on the,
Berkeley campus, but that is the
It's not just about science, emphasis at the Birch Aquarium.
how we figure out what we don't iknow yet, and the exhibits and
the interaction goes from the stuff that historically and
currently is being done at the
The Burke Museum is at the Scripps.
natural history museum that I visited, and I think the thing
that impressed me about that is how to handle controversy
because the Burke Museum has a
component. very strong anthropology
few sciences have been more controversial than anthropology,
especially when dealing with
It's one of the powerful things about the being on a campus is
that we don't quiver and quake
The Bell Museum at the in the face of controversy.
another natural history museum, but what's interesting about the
Bell is that they are trying to transform themselves into a
portal for the whole campus.
the St. Paul campus for the agricultural and life sciences
and then the Minneapolis campus for much of the rest.
The Bell Museum currently is on the Minneapolis side, but they
hope to move to the St. Paul
natural history to all things sideenvironmental.yond
And they also want to project themselves as the portal to
campus, the entire campus.
place because, one, it's at MIT, The MIT Museum is an interesting
MIT, and three, they have a two,curatorial function.m at
In other words, the prototypes
MIT get deposited at the MIT that are invented and tested at
So they've got great exhibits because they've got the
originals right there.
same things that other science And then they do many of the
They're on campus and they have this focus on engaging the
public in the life of the university.
The Morehead Planetarium at the University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill started in the '30s,
have been converting themselves into both a planetarium and ay
science center. Again, the idea that some
universities are recognizing, if
could welcome people to this we had a central building, we
introduce them to science cthroughout the campus.
And finally, the Hatfield Marine
center that has a visitors Science Center is a research
University. It's not at the Corvallis
campus. It's across the mountains at
Newport.
similar in my mind to the Birch ButAquarium, where you getvery
introduced to science through the research projects at the
Hatfield. One of the amazing things about
inviting people to come to a
they only have so many days or research campus, you remember
they're going to be able to say am I going to go to science
museum, am I going to science center, am I going to go to a
campus, how should I spend that time?
Why come here?
about. Here are some things to think
The strength of the university The experience.
going to be an interactive campuses I don't think is ever
I think our strength is always scientific exhibit.
scientists rather than going to be interactions with
And we have a lot of scientists and a lot of different flavors.
I don't think our strength is going to be solely in informing
but it's going to be in encouraging people to understand
the nature of exploration and not just in explaining but
getting them to feel how do we
experimentation and other means. go about testing ideas through
the epistemology that among the most important things and most
valuable things that
visitors are the ways that universities can share with
and we do science not as scientists view and do science,
already know but digging into stuff that nobody has ever known
before. So our aspiration is to invite
people to come to campus to experience science, as exploring
the unknown within and with a community of researchers.
And these are things that I hope
that Dave mentioned starting are echoing some of the themes
So one of the handouts that you have and I'll go through real
quickly now are what I consider the five core components of the
science constellation concept.
and the concept of the UW TMadison science constellation.
So if a science center is a hub and spoke, and here's the hub,
we don't have a hub.
a hub. I don't think we're going to get
that we have open them up, you But if you take all the venues
venues across the campus map. If you take a gold star and
stick it on the campus map at the site of the 30, 35, 36
scientific venues on or around
constellation comes in. The human brain, the human mindf
has the ability to take a spangling of stars and apply a
pattern to it, and that pattern is very useful in helping people
navigate. That's the metaphor.
The next core component is the
And the reason for that is it's a portal for welcoming people to
campus. It's a large, complex
institution.
January this is going to be about the eighth largest city in
Wisconsin because we have about 60,000 people here, even more if
you count the hospital. We need to be able to organize
if we intend to synergize.
inventions in the last 20 years has been the idea of the web as
a portal. We want to be able to learn from
our colleagues in arts and in athletics.
The common denominator is who really wants to welcome people
to campus?
and certainly the athletics Certainly people do.eople do,
I would argue that the hospital folks do also.
So we've watched what happens at
university and how the folks in arts and the folks in athletics
organize their enterprises to be
campus. It's a very interesting thing
you might want to do sometime when you have a week to blow and
nothing to do, get a list from
of the top universities based on the National Science Foundation
each one, the website of each one, and ask yourself where do
you first run into the arts link, where do you first run
into the athletics link and where do you first run into the
science outreach link.
been able to convert science. In the lastwisc.eduonths we've
from one of the old web 1.0 to a web 2.0 format
from informing visitors to also being able to engage
them in the conversation. We have a long way to go with
this, but it's a pretty powerful
web is something that's no thing to start to see that the
also a forum and a conversation longer just starter.in board but
And if you think this is a good idea, so do other people.
If you have a chance, go to the Smithsonian Institution's
website sometime. It's one of the shortest
websites I know, SI.edu,
website for visitors. and thIt's SI.edu/visit.ecial
They have a complex problem too because they have a complex
institution.
in Washington, DC, two of them They have 19 places, 17 of them
National Zoo. iSo they have dedicated a
significant amount of resources for their visitor website.
And that's the kind of thing
able to do. tI put this in here because the
National Research Council came
called Learning Science and oInformal Environments: People,
Places and Pursuits.
the impact of informal science It was basically asking what's
What's the impact of science learning.
websites and other modes of museumsinformal learning.rs and
And the thing that struck me the
specifically mentioned. Since I do science outreach for
informal science learners at a
that was. univerI still don't know.ng why
But the other thing was there was no hue and cry from
universities. Now maybe they had better things
to do.
because it may be a case of people don't even recognize what
we have yet.
hiding in plain sight. It may be a case of what is
to keep saying that's one of the So along those lines, I'd like
science constellation. things about calling a place a
to express what might otherwise Itbe hiding in plain sight.ble
If you don't think that's important, think of the impact
that Dave mentioned: the
I went to school here, I work here, I like this place about as
much as any place on the planet,
any greater commitment to public but I don't think this place has
public land-grant universities. But we do have this thing called
the Wisconsin Idea. It is a metaphor.
It's a handle.
incredibly powerful. It's a brand name and it's
is a handle? If you ask yourself how powerful
suitcase handle breaks? WhYou just have luggage.ur
You got to lug that thing around.
It's very powerful to have an idea that helps people organize
and carry an idea.
core components of the science Here's the third of the five
outfitter. constellation: the science
remember the first time I went I use this metaphor because I
look at a map of the Boundary Waters and it's all these lakes
and portages and lakes and
very fast. portages and you can get lost
talk to somebody who's been It's very helthere.o be able to
And that could be either your buddy who's been there or you
can go talk to a science
Likewise, the campus is a daunting place.
There's lots of amazement here
And so the idea behind the but it's also a maze.
we capture all the amazement and science outfitters is to say can
One of the great things that's cut the maze?
Visitor and Information Programs happening is that the UW-Madison
They already have had in place is doing this.
specialist, and she has worked for several years a field trip
21 North Park Street but first at Red Gym and then at
to Union South. That's a big deal because Union
South is right at the heart of
research in the sciences and the research campus now,
Across the street is the WID engineering.
for Discovery building and the building, Wisconsin Institutes
Information Programs folks and Town Center, and the Visitor and
this new science outreach WARF arspecialist job. to fund
And they will be working at the welcome desk at the WID Town
Center. So we're going to go from, on
December 1st, there was no
coming to campus for science to, welcoming desk for visitors
places where you can come and be on April 16th, there will be two
updated and be sent on your way to the various places around
campus. Again, this is in some ways
learning from the visitors
in Washington, DC. center at the Smithsonian Castle
point out when other people are doing things, especially places
like the Smithsonian that have
The Smithsonian Castle used to that much cache.
other places. thIf you go there today on the0
National Mall, the major
brick castle is the visitors function of the Smithsonian red
And it opens at 8:30 in the morning.
Almost all the other Smithsonian
They have a concept of venues open at 10:00.
be able to welcome people early hosso they can get oriented. to
The fourth core component is the
because, as Dave pointed out, this is a very diverse place.
It's large. It's complex.
If we don't have a reason to
each other. kAnd so we would miss all thesew
opportunities to collaborate and
any other word that you want to cosay for synergy and workingnd
together. It started as the planning group
for science expeditions.
trellis upon which we grow the Science expeditions has become a
And we now have 420 or more subscribers on the list served.
And we hope soon to have a
we're building or capacity to nwelcome people to campus we're
also building the social and
science outreachers on campus. organizational infrastructure of
a key role on that also because of the new abilities for socialy
media.
only for visitors but for those Iof us in science outreach.t
And finally, the fifth one is the Office of Science Outreach.
It's the formal counterpart of
The Science Alliance we just the Science Alliance.
It's a self-forming group. make up.
Outreach actually has a commission from the provost.
Their major role is enhancing science outreach for K-12
schools, students, teachers and school districts, but they can
also play a key role in being a point of first contact for our
science colleagues at institutions around the state.
This is one of the big themes that Dave made and that is the
reciprocity of hospitality. We need to be able to welcome
people here so that we can be welcomed into communities around
Wisconsin.
has a college of agricultural Noand life sciences that hasy
agriculture research stations scattered at 10 or 11 places
around the state. That's really important,
politically as well as
We don't have that kind of scientifically.
around the state for science constellation of locations
We do for the agriculture ouaspects but not for all thee.
rest. What if we could set up enduring
relationships with the science
children's museums and all these museums and science centers and
Wisconsin because they have something that we really prize.
They have community venue and community connections.
I hope we have something that they prize.
And that is the research and
research university. outreach resources of this large
being able to use the theme of And that's where this idea of
and sharing in the discovery sharing research, sharing venue
years we might be able to say here's the map of Wisconsin and
here are the stars on the map where the University of
Wisconsin Madison and these other science institutions have
enduring relationships where we can share in the research, share
in the venue and learners of all
By the numbers. Here's some things at UW-Madison
that I think are really important.
More so than the buildings and
people. moWe have over 2,000 faculty,the
6,000 academic staff, 12,000 graduate students,
28,000 undergraduates.
in Dane County and 141,000 There are 52,000 alumni living
Let's just say about half of living alumni in Wisconsin.
engineering. them are in science and
those. Let's say we only get 3% of
percentage of milk fat I use 3% because that's the
[LAUGHTER] in whole milk.
whole milk versus skim milk, And if you've ever tasted
a big difference. youActually it's 3.25%,ke
but I quibble.
have to offer is this extraordinary number and range
in age and experience and in
because it's so hard for other fields of interest that I think,
centers so match this, I think science museums and science
share science this way through we have a duty to be able to
Some more by the numbers. You probably read the story of
about six weeks ago that
recently surpassed $1 billion UW-Madisona year.arch budget
You know that our football team is ranked fourth.
We're ranked third and have been
last 30 years in size of second, third or fourth for the
UW-Madison is not alone. research budget.
$881 million, and $7 million We were third in 2008 at
That just goes to show what a close run thing these are.
Look at this number of what it
could take its campus map, put could be if every university
all its science venues and the stars on its campus map of
project it as a destination for exploration and welcome people
every day in an organized way to
exploring the unknown. come experience science as
that do $500 million of research There are 29 US universities
There are 60 US universities a year or more.
$300 million a year. that do more than
$100 million of research a year And thereor more. that do
How many teams are there in the NFL?
32. >> 32.
And those universities train
Now the numbers here are all a lot of people.
research universities, but when you get an idea that there are
about a half million people a year that get bachelor's degrees
in science and 120,000 people a year who get master's degrees in
science and engineering and about 33,000 a year that get
doctorate degrees in science and
people out there. There are 50,000 postdocs now in
sciences and engineering at research universities around the
country.
skip these, but I do want to Because of the time I'm going to
this is an example from the School of Medicine and Public
Health. A science constellation can be
on campus but it can also be
This is a map showing how the School of Medicine and Public
Health partners with clinics and
the state to help in the other academic campuses around
the updating of old physicians training of new physicians and
when they're sick and also in andpreventive measures and inoth
public health.
use what we have but upgrade it So by synergy is a powerfulto
metaphor that other people use
So the science constellation is taking the science center idea
and breaking it open. It's turning it inside out.
Instead of being a central hub, it's the entire campus as a
destination for exploration.
be able to welcome people every In oday to come to campus tod to
experience science as exploring the unknown.
The great thing about the new venues, the Wisconsin Institutes
for Discovery, Union South
opening in the fall, the School of Human Ecology opening nexty
year, as well as some of the
you're in right now, the key other venues including the one
Discovery and Union South, thing about the Institutes for
day until at least 10:00 and on they're the weekends.pen every
And Union South will be open not
Sunday. We will be moving from having
science outreach available at banker's hours to having science
outreach available at Barnes and
the weekend. Noble's hours, at night and on
coming here to campus at night And the miracle thing about
find? and on the>> Parking.hat can you
Parking.
What else can you find?
overcomes? And what's the third thing it
But we have to help learners to envision and find and navigate
and connect to this.
see the forest for the trees. That's what we have here, that's
the opportunity we have is to help project it and enable
people to envision all the
able to see what they are resouthroughout the state. to be
So the final thing is we hope if
pilot model that it's the kind we can make this fly here as a
universities would be able to do of thing that other research
doesn't necessarily depend on wnew bricks and mortar, itt
depends on being able to
synergize existing, it depends collaborate and cooperate and
hiding in plain sight. on the ability to see what is
and take your questions for me And with that, why don't I stop
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