“There won’t be tailgates taking place around our stadium. There won’t be Badgerville. The Union won’t look like Union South normally looks,” McIntosh said. “We’ll come back in the fall of 2021 in a big way and get back to normal, but we all need to participate … We feel good about our chance to play right now, but there’s no guarantee, so we all need to play a role.”
Fears of a pandemic-related drop in student enrollment were not reflected at UW-Madison this fall. The 7,306 students in this year’s freshman class is the second-largest in university history.
“It’s hard to know what’s going to be the next pandemic,” said Kristen Bernard, a UW virologist who studies animal-borne viruses, like the one that turned the world on its head this year. Bernard spoke with Kelly Tyrrell, an award-winning science writer and director of UW-Madison’s research communications, in a one-on-one session for the Cap Times Ideafest on preparing for the next pandemic.
Despite working longer hours than she ever has as the University of Wisconsin-Madison reduced its COVID-19 cases over the past two weeks, Chancellor Rebecca Blank said her to-do list for the fall semester is far from finished.
Balances in tuition reserve funds across the University of Wisconsin System are at their lowest levels since 2008. Without a significant cushion, some campuses are cutting spending and staff to address financial problems caused by declining enrollment, the coronavirus pandemic and eight years of frozen tuition.
UW-Whitewater Chancellor Dwight Watson will return to his leadership post on Monday after sexual misconduct allegations made against him at a previous job were found to be without merit, according to the University of Wisconsin System.
Across the University of Wisconsin system, some campuses are already reducing fees for their students. UW-Milwaukee has significantly reduced their student fees due to the move to distance learning and online classes. Fees for fall 2020 are 23% less than what was charged in fall 2019.
“When it’s not enforced, you’re seeing very low mask-wearing rates,” said Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer with UW Health, a health system that serves more than 600,000 patients each year. “When we do contact tracing, it’s not the people who have been wearing their mask and doing social distancing that we’re talking to.”
While the fall semester started under unusual circumstances, UW welcomed its second largest freshman class of 7,306, including a record number of applicants up 4.6 percent from last year.
“We are perilously close” to the county’s peak of COVID-19 hospitalizations in April, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at UW Health. “It is vital at this point to preserve the capacity of the health care systems and, equally importantly, to protect the health care workforce.”
According to Public Health Madison & Dane County, UW students and staff made up 38% of cases last week. Public Health said that number was 65% the previous week.
Walter Dickey, a high-ranking member of the University of Wisconsin athletic department since 2011 and before that the Athletic Board chair for six years, has retired.
When asking University of Wisconsin men’s basketball coach Greg Gard how the process of putting together the 2020-21 schedule is going, timing is everything. “It’s fluid. That’s probably the most complete way to say it right now,” Gard said. “What maybe you view as where you are at 9 a.m. may change by 1 p.m., and maybe again by 5.”
Usually returning talent refers to key contributors like a quarterback or a linebacker building off what they showed the previous campaign. But in a year such as this, with unprecedented challenges and delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, having returning coaches on the sideline will be as important as ever.
Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said that colleagues who went to cottages during the summer began reporting that they’d seen towns where no one appeared to be wearing a mask.
Quoted: David Cannon, department chair of the UW-Madison political science department, explains.
Ms. Campbell was born on April 18, 1931, in Cuba City, Wis. Her parents, Frank Churchill Florine, a pharmacist, and Irene (Bower) Florine ran Florine and Son’s Drugstore and Pharmacy, where their daughter worked as a soda jerk. After earning undergraduate and masters degrees in English at the University of Wisconsin, she joined the Marines because, she said later, she wanted to see if she could handle it.
Several University of Wisconsin System campuses, including UW-Milwaukee, reduced student fees this semester because of pandemic-related programming limitations.
