University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank delivered a sobering message Wednesday about the state’s flagship campus as the fall semester looms, saying “we’re in a real financial crisis” due to the coronavirus pandemic.
How bad the crisis will be depends on several factors, Blank said in an online presentation at the Rotary Club of Madison. Those include whether students who are enrolled for the fall semester actually show up, how deep state budget cuts are and whether the Legislature gives the university the authority to borrow money.
A CBS News and YouGov poll released Sunday morning found Biden leading Trump 48% to 42% among likely voters, and the Election Research Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looking at registered voters, found Biden ahead with 49% to Trump’s 43%. The Marquette University Law School Poll, released on Tuesday, finds Biden at 50%, in a close race with Trump at 46% among likely voters.
Sixteen gallons of hand sanitizer sat in the foyer of the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority house at the University of Wisconsin as house mother Karen Mullis reconfigured tables in the dining room to maintain social distancing.
Noted: The School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered its first business-focused, business-led FIG last fall, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities granted in partnership with UW’s College of Letters and Science. The lead course, “The Sociology and History of American Marketing and Consumer Society,” was taught by Thomas O’Guinn, former chair of Wisconsin’s Department of Marketing, and the Thomas J. Falk Distinguished Chair in Business.
“The first-year interest group is designed to immerse students in marketing, sociology, and history, and most importantly, how they interact. Marketing, and the consumer culture it helped produce, isn’t just about some bag of commercial techniques; marketing was made by, and in turn made, the character of contemporary society. You can’t adequately teach our history without some deeper recognition and understanding of marketing. This class does that, and does it within a supportive, cross-disciplinary learning environment,” according to O’Guinn, who also told me that one of his inspirations for teaching the course was the formative experience he had as a University of Texas freshman in an integrative nine-credit course, “The American Experience.” “That course meant a lot to me, and I wanted to offer something similar to my students,” he said.
It’s been called one of Madison’s greatest unfinished stories of the last half of the 20th century.
What happened to Leo Burt? Three of the four bombers of UW-Madison’s Sterling Hall in 1970, were caught and sent to federal prison. But Leo Burt, the fourth bomber, 22 years-old at the time, is still wanted by the FBI.
His whereabouts remain a mystery.
The university is providing free COVID-19 testing for students, faculty and staff. It’s set up on Henry Mall, between University Avenue and Linden Drive.
Quoted: “It’s definitely a trial run for November in terms of recruiting poll workers, finding new locations, and distributing personal protective equipment,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden, who directs the Elections Research Center. “August is really good practice for that.”
Quoted: There are risks for both sides if one party embraces mail voting and the other doesn’t, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. If there is a surge of coronavirus cases near the election, those who had planned to vote in person may find it difficult to cast a ballot — and may not have enough time to request a ballot by mail, he said. Clerks short of poll workers might have to close polling locations, meaning some voters would have to go to new precincts and wait in longer lines.
The Wisconsin Farm-Related Fatality Report, which was inactive between 2006 and 2020, is now being updated again to offer insight on the state’s ag-related deaths.
The report said Wisconsin farm fatalities reached 41 in 2017 and 34 in 2018, a rise from the last report, which claimed 25 deaths in 2006. Researchers Bryan Weichelt and John Shutske recently resurrected the annual report, which was not updated for 14 years.
Shutske, an extension specialist and professor in several ag health and safety programs at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s important to remember that these aren’t just statistics – every number represents a real person, someone’s parent or child. He said he hopes farmers have a self-interest in preserving farm safety and preventing accidents. Growing up as a child on a farm himself, Shutske said he knew people who wore farm injuries, like a missing limb, as a badge of honor.
The NCAA on Wednesday extended a recruiting dead period through Sept. 30 that bans in-person recruiting on- and off-campus for all sports due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s a chance for a spring football season, but talks about how that would happen are just beginning at the conference level. While Chryst may not have been able to see all of the reactions in the virtual meeting, some UW players expressed their feelings on social media.
The emotions exposed by a consequential day for members of University of Wisconsin teams whose fall seasons were wiped out touched all parts of the spectrum.
The waiting game is over. The Wisconsin volleyball team will move forward with no fall season. “Man we are hoping for a spring,” Head Coach Kelly Sheffield said. “I mean we are hoping for a spring.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that while it’s not unusual for a political party or party activists to try to keep a candidate off a ballot, the reverse is “bizarre and unusual.”
“We’ve never really seen [that] before,” Burden says.
“If this was happening in just one state, that there were a couple of Republican insiders who were aiding the Kanye West campaign, that would seem a little odd and kind of unexpected,” he says. “But because we’re seeing it now in multiple states, people who are either slated as electors, delegates or Republican attorneys working on behalf of Kanye West’s effort to get on the ballot, it looks like something systematic and organized across large parts of the country.”
Over 150 people attended a Zoom town hall Wednesday evening to voice concerns about the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Smart Restart opening plan, calling instead for a fully online, “moral restart” this fall semester.
