Mayor [Thomas Menino] gets a surprise shot at academia

Could Mayor Thomas M. Menino reinvent himself as a cheesehead? Unbeknownst to the mayor, someone has floated his name as a candidate to be the next chancellor - the Big Cheese, if you will - at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

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"Somebody must have been pretty impressed by his accomplishment as a leader," said Wisconsin search committee spokesman David Musolf, secretary of the faculty at the university. He declined to reveal the identity of the nominator but said Menino is among hundreds of nominees.

"We reach out very broadly," he said. "We do not discriminate."

They do not discriminate against marble-mouthed Italian American Bostonians.