The University of Wisconsin-Madison has announced campus-wide furloughs for faculty, and academic and university staff to help address a $100 million budget deficit caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
State campuses in Milwaukee and Madison unveiled more information on their plans to furlough employees this week, with the aim of mitigating the mounting financial fallout from the coronavirus outbreak.
University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty and staff will be taking three to six unpaid furlough days over the next six months, which Chancellor Rebecca Blank said Wednesday will save the university up to $30 million.
UW-Madison is ordering most of its employees to take varying amounts of unpaid time off over the next six months and university leaders will take a 15% pay cut over that same time as COVID-19 costs grow and the campus remains mostly closed.
Karl Martin, who has served as interim dean and director of Extension since June 2018, will lead the division, which has more than 700 faculty and staff located in 72 county offices.
Thomas Friedrich, professor of pathobiological sciences in the School of Veterinary Medicine, and his team at UW-Madison are tracking how the coronavirus changes, ever so slightly, as it moves from person to person.
A group of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used data from multiple vendors to estimate the impact of in-person voting on movement patterns during Wisconsin’s election on April 7.
“We were surprised to learn that the COVID-19 pandemic in China did not seem to impact people with asthma as severely as we would’ve expected it to,” lead investigator Dr. Daniel Jackson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said in a statement.
CoroFlu, being developed under an international collaboration, is built on the backbone of FluGen’s flu vaccine candidate known as M2SR. Based on an invention by the University of Wisconsin-Madison virologists and FluGen co-founders Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Gabriele Neumann, M2SR is a self-limiting version of the influenza virus that induces an immune response against the flu.
The UW System is now offering free applications for anyone applying to any of its two-year campuses, but only during an 11-day period this summer.
The furloughs will range from three days to six days over the next six months, UW Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank announced Wednesday.
For Franze, the furloughs add an extra layer of uncertainty. While she’s been teaching at UW-Madison for five years, Franze works on a semester to semester contract. She worries cutting salaries may escalate to cutting staff and she anticipates those without long-term contracts or low salaries will be hit the hardest.
University of Wisconsin-Madison officials are ordering most employees to take furlough days through October and top campus leaders will take pay cuts as the school tries to absorb a $100 million loss due to the coronavirus pandemic.
University of Wisconsin Chancellor Becky Blank announced today in an email to all staff and faculty a graduated furlough plan for most staff, a work-share program for some units and a 15-percent pay cut for Blank and all vice-chancellors. Under the plan, most staff will be furloughed just a few days over the next year. The number of days furloughed will depend on salary.
UW spokesperson Meredith McGlone said to the WSJ the current discussions revolving around the fall semester outline three plans, including a mix of face-to-face classes and online instruction — large lectures could possibly remain online while smaller classes would be in person.
Though the in-person award ceremony has been postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, UW recognizes and celebrates the achievements and contributions of its academic staff.
Amid questions about how the coronavirus will affect the 2020 football season and the rest of college sports, senior associate athletic director for capital projects Jason King said UW isn’t changing course until it has a clearer picture.
Quoted: But James Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, called opening different regions of the state at different times “terrifying.”
“It’s almost like the least common denominator will prevail if you do start to allow certain areas to open more liberally and have other areas still confined because you know there’s going to be travel and transit between those places. And as we saw in the Green Bay area it doesn’t take much for something to go from a small number of cases to exponentially exploding in just a few short days,” said Conway, who supports Evers’ plan.
UW engineering professor, graduate student create website designed to match PPE producers with hospitals.
The conference created its first-ever Task Force for Emerging Infectious Diseases on March 7. The group, which includes a representative from each of the conference’s 14 member schools, meets weekly with Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren. Dr. Ann Sheehy, a faculty member from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, represents UW-Madison.
“As the situation with COVID-19 continues to evolve, area hospitals are still in need of supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) for non-direct caregivers and support staff, especially masks,” the hospitals said Wednesday in a statement.
University of Wisconsin officials do not expect to extend for the second time the deadline to buy season football tickets for 2020.
CROWE director said Wisconsin unemployment rate has reached 19% overall.
On April 6, the State Department announced it would designate the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) as terrorists. This marks the first time that the United States has officially applied the “terrorist” label to a white supremacist organization.
Anna Meier (@annameierPS) is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Donald Waller, a forest ecologist recently retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, goes further. “I sketched out a little balance with risks on one side and rewards on the other, and I just kept scratching my head over the risks” that this transgenic tree could pose to the forest, he told me
Quoted: Dr. Jim Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told reporters on the call that if the statewide order is erased the state would start seeing major outbreaks within a week.
