The 2006 DAA Honorees

Economics, College of Letters and Science; Law School
Jeffrey Bartell is a founding partner of Quarles & Brady-Madison. Formerly, he was the Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General and the Wisconsin Commissioner of Securities. For 10 years, he has been named one of The Best Lawyers in America (Corporate Law) by Woodward/White, a New York corporation that started publishing a guide to the top legal talent in the United States in 1982.

Not only has his law career been an active one of service to his profession and the state, the hours he dedicates to UW-Madison and the arts community are the equivalent of a full-time job. He is a member of the Bascom Hill Society and the Law School’s Benchers Society, and he chaired the successful $1 million capital campaign for the Memorial Union’s Director’s Fund.

Since the 1990s, he has been chair of the Wisconsin Foundation for the Arts. He is the director of the Ten Chimneys Foundation, the organization that restored and preserves the former home of actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, located in Genesse Depot, Wisconsin, and opened it to the public as a world-class museum and national resource for theater and arts education. He was instrumental in making Madison’s Monona Terrace and Overture Center for the Performing Arts become a reality.

Jeffrey Bartell’s parents, Gerald ’37, MS’40 and Joyce ’38 Bartell, received a joint Distinguished Alumni Award in 1978.

Chemistry, College of Letters and Science
Russell Peterson has been a rebel all of his life. As a chemist at DuPont in the 1940s and 1950s, he was instrumental in the development of Dacron. His career at the company, however, stalled when he suggested promoting five black employees. Although his suggestion was not popular at the time, DuPont later changed its policies regarding minorities.

As governor of Delaware from 1969 to 1973, he was a leader of the early environmental movement. He successfully blocked an attempt by 13 major oil and transportation companies and several Delaware businesses to convert the state’s unspoiled coastal zone into a multibillion-dollar network of refineries and petrochemical complexes. By a single vote, legislation was passed prohibiting any new heavy industry in the area. In 1971, Peterson was named the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservationist of the Year for his environmental efforts.

As the founding chair of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, he was the first to call for regulations outlawing the use of ozone-depleting CFC’s (chlorofluorocarbons) and successfully maneuvered such initiatives through a tangle of political opposition. Peterson forged a new vision for the National Audubon Society by expanding its scope to encompass a broader array of environmental concerns.

Today, the Russell W. Peterson Urban Wildlife Refuge on the edge of Wilmington, Delaware, is home to 143 species of birds and 55 fishes.

Landscape Architecture, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences; Law School
Pat Richter holds the record for the longest tenured UW-Madison director of athletics — even through three administrations. He brought the department out of a $2.1 million budget deficit, a budget that now has a reserve of $6.4 million.

He led a 12-year battle to get the department in Title IX compliance and is the man who first lured Barry Alvarez to head the university’s football program. Wisconsin student athletes earned more Academic All-Big Ten honors during the 1990s than any other school in the conference.

A three-sport letterman himself (baseball, basketball and football), Richter is credited with saving the UW athletic program.

Said Chancellor John Wiley MS’65, PhD’68 of Richter, “Through his leadership and ability to assemble a strong departmental team, UW Athletics is more fiscally sound, more highly competitive and more visible worldwide than ever before.”

Under Richter, the UW won three national championships, 49 Big Ten championships and eight football bowl games.

East Asian Languages and Literature, College of Letters and SCience
In her days on campus, Judith Hicks Stiehm was a student senator, co-founder of a literary magazine and chair of the Union Art Gallery.

Without doubt, she was an outspoken student leader. She has been an ardent advocate for women’s rights since before the word “feminist” was coined.

Her trailblazing nature continued after college and graduate school. She became a noted scholar in political theory — particularly as it relates to women and the military.

Always ahead of her time, she became vice provost at the University of Southern California in 1984, when few women were being appointed to such posts. She authored a book titled Champions for Peace: Women Winners of the Nobel Prize for Peace.

In the national public service arena, she has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was appointed to the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in Service.

She mobilized support for and was instrumental in building a school for girls in rural Afghanistan.

History, Communication Arts, College of Letters and Science
Benjamin Karlin came to Madison in 1989 not knowing what he was going to study and sick with mononucleosis. After one semester, he joined the staff of the Daily Cardinal as a sportswriter and columnist. He used that experience to get a freelance job at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona for United Press International.

In the meantime, friends from his days at the Daily Cardinal had moved on to work for the The Onion, a popular satirical newspaper, and they asked Karlin to join them. He became the paper’s editor in 1995. In 1996, Karlin left The Onion and worked on a variety of television projects, leading to his 1999 appointment as head writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

He has received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing and a Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting. His writing skills, humor and knack for satire have even influenced political elections.

Development Studies PhD Program
When Jean Geran first came to UW-Madison to earn her PhD, she brought with her some impressive experience: field appointments in Africa and Asia for international nonprofits, and previous positions at the United Nations and the World Bank. With this background and her Thai language skills, she was the ideal candidate to fill a research position under a Ford Foundation grant to study the effects of Thailand’s 1997 economic crisis on the poor in remote, rural areas.

Geran made an immediate connection with poor women and farmers from the Karen ethnic minority living close to the Thai-Burma border. After graduation, she was employed by the U.S. Department of State, where she was given responsibility for human rights and democracy policy in Asia. Nongovernmental groups had accused the Burmese army of the systematic rape of hundreds of Shan women, and Geran volunteered to go to the Thailand border to seek testimony from women in refugee communities. Her interviews corroborated the original accusations and initiated a UN-led international inquiry into the incidents.

In Iraq in 2003, Jean helped create the first Abuse Prevention Unit, charged with preventing and investigating human rights abuses in humanitarian assistance programs. There, she helped discover and document mass graves.