Article slamming expected new UW chancellor circulated among GOP pols

Steven Elbow  —  6/04/2008 6:15 am

Is the state Legislature's most vocal critic of the University of Wisconsin gearing up to give the new UW-Madison chancellor a hard time?

An aide to Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, circulated a Web link Monday to a National Review Online story slamming Carolyn "Biddy" Martin, the provost at Cornell University, who is expected to be confirmed this week by the Board of Regents.

"Can you be an obscure, self-indulged, theory-laden, post-modern scholar and manage to be an effective university president?" writes Travis Kavulla, a former associate editor of the National Review.

Kavulla later sums up Martin as a "creature of the university, for the university, who thinks universities are 'useful' in the sense that they can flush students of the bigotry found in most of American society."

Mike Mikalsen, an aide to Nass, sent the article to Senate and Assembly Republicans.

Mikalsen said he circulated the article because Nass had been fielding questions from people wondering what the conservative national press has been saying about Martin.

"Trying to figure out who she is has not been easy," Mikalsen said. "She doesn't necessarily have a very high profile in higher education."

Nass, a member of the Assembly Education Committee, has in recent years been openly critical of the University of Wisconsin System, fighting pay hikes for administrators, domestic partner benefits and funding for programs he said were slanted politically to the left.

Kavulla -- who the National Review Online says is a Gates Scholar in History at Cambridge University, a 2008 Phillips Foundation journalism fellow and recent graduate of Harvard -- also pokes fun at Martin's best-known scholarly work, "Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian."

The full text of the National Review Online article can be viewed here.

Upon news of Martin's nomination to the chancellor's post last week, Nass said, "I am cautiously optimistic that Dr. Martin, as an outside selection, will shake up the status-quo and return UW-Madison's focus to a balance between undergraduate education and research." The people of Wisconsin, he added, "don't want a university promoting the liberal indoctrination of young minds at the altar of political correctness."

Steven Elbow  —  6/04/2008 6:15 am