Forgetting and Forgotten: Dementia and the Right to Die

W. Lee Hansen, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus, economics, earned undergraduate and master's degrees at UW-Madison (1950, 1955), and a Ph.D. in political economy from Johns Hopkins University (1958). He taught at UCLA, held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, was a senior staff economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and had visiting appointments at the London School of Economics, the University of Sydney, the University of Western Australia, and Maastricht University. He became professor emeritus in 1998. His numerous awards include a Distinguished Teaching Award and the Hilldale Award for Distinguished Professional Achievement at UW-Madison.He has had a longtime interest in academic freedom, due process, and faculty governance. He is a member of AAUP and also UW-Madison's independent Committee on Academic Freedom and Rights that brought about the end of the UW-Madison faculty speech code in 2009. He is editor of the book Academic Freedom on "Trial": 100 Years of Sifting and Winnowing at the University of Wisconsin (1998). Since the mid-1990s he has been writing about "diversity" as it is practiced at UW-Madison.