Humanities is the second building this month where UW-Madison officials asked employees working there to leave and then ordered repairs to because of safety concerns.
Noted: The two-year state budget plan also won’t allow the University of Wisconsin System to borrow for operational expenses, restore collective bargaining for public employees, make Juneteenth a state holiday, create a so-called red flag law for gun owners or adopt maps from the governor’s redistricting commission.
It was a comment to that effect by Rebecca Blank, the chancellor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, that helped ignite the debate in her state over faculty course loads. Blank started a political firestorm by saying that, when top faculty got job offers from other institutions, she sometimes reduced the number of courses they had to teach as a way to get them to stay.
Other items Republicans intend to remove include freezing enrollment in the private school voucher program and allowing the University of Wisconsin System to borrow for operational expenses. That is a top priority of university officials, who said it was needed to deal with short-term losses caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Gov. Tony Evers on Friday appointed a medical group CEO to the UW Board of Regents, tipping the political balance of a board long led by Republican appointees who passed policies for University of Wisconsin System campuses opposed by many faculty and staff.
Republicans are also stripping the budget of proposals to allow the University of Wisconsin System to borrow money for operational expenses. They also stripped a provision that would have expanded a tuition promise program to all of the state’s universities and their branch campuses, building off a UW-Madison tuition promise, which provides free tuition to students from families making up to $60,000.
Column by Thompson, president of the University of Wisconsin System.
Usually running in April, this year’s festival will take place May 13-20 and will feature 115 films — from narratives to documentaries, international, independent, animated films, shorts and more. The lineup was announced Friday, and single tickets are now on sale at wifilmfest.org. Viewers can buy tickets for particular works for $10, a series for $50 or an entire festival pass for $140.
UW-Madison is in the process reimagining Library Mall — the area featuring Hagenah Fountain between the Wisconsin Historical Society and Memorial Library — the last piece of the East Campus Mall project from Regent Street to Lake Mendota. “I would say that the overall goal is to make this another entryway, or front door to the campus … one that is indeed welcoming to all people and helps open the university and its amazing events to everyone,” said Gary Brown, the university’s director of campus planning and landscape architecture.
“Shift” is made up of two 70-foot-long perforated weathered-steel sculptures spanning each side of the Highland Avenue underpass beneath Campus Drive. Lights installed behind them will shine through the perforations to create “a shifting light mural” that will serve “as an interactive gateway between the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, UW Hospital and Clinics and the Regent Neighborhood,” according to a statement issued by the city April 23.
The key, experts say, will be weighing the risk of new variants against economic benefits and the need to resume normal life. Laura Albert, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said the United States has reached a point where it can start to contemplate how it might reopen more widely, including to more travelers from abroad.
“We’re in a different place than we were a year ago,” said Albert, whose work focuses on analyzing risk in public spaces. “Last year, it was, ‘No, don’t do it.’ It wasn’t clear it was safe to be on a plane. This year, it’s how and where you go, not whether.”
Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor of population health sciences at Wisconsin, said travel always has been linked with the spread of viruses, but as more people are vaccinated, the risk is reduced. The wild card, however, is the possibility of new variants.
Dr. William Hartman, principal investigator for the AstraZeneca vaccine trial site at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the delays are frustrating to clinical trial teams in the U.S. who “put in a tremendous effort” to study the vaccine.
But he supports FDA’s extra efforts. “They are looking under every stone, making sure that this is the safest product that can be put out there,” Hartman said.
“The finding that growth and carbon uptake are higher in bacteria that may have predatory lifestyles than in other bacteria is interesting, and supports the idea that bacterial predators can play meaningful roles in the soil food web,” wrote Thea Whitman, a soil ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the study, in an email to Popular Science
Alhaji N’Jai left Sierra Leone to pursue a scholarship in the US, which also served to get him out of the country during its civil war, but in recent years he has been able to return, both to study Ebola and help educate the next generation of STEM talent there.
The show also looks at Faye Emerson (right), widely considered to be the first-lady of late-night television, who paved the way for the likes of Chelsea Handler, Samantha Bee and Lilly Singh. Ealer said that Syracuse professor Robert Thompson led them to Wisconsin to talk to Maureen Mauk, a former Fox exec now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who helped preserve and digitize her archive. “Our eyes exploded because none of us had heard of her,” said Ealer. “In an era where we’re constantly and appropriately looking to evaluate ourselves and do better with representation, we took very seriously the obligation to do that in late night history. Maybe the first late night imprint on the moon was a woman and that’s pretty amazing.”
“We know that individuals do have different tolerance for the kind of risks-and-benefits trade-off,” said Nancy Wong, a consumer psychology professor at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology. “Some people are just naturally risk-takers and some are not.” Evan Polman, an associate professor at the university’s School of Business who researches decision-making and moral psychology, said risk aversion is “probably the most important dimension” for someone deciding when to resume activities outside the home. The community they live in factors into that decision, Wong and Polman said.
Georgetown political scientist Donald Moynihan saw all this coming years ago. In a New York Times op-ed just before Trump took office, Moynihan — then at the University of Wisconsin — focused attention on what was really happening where he worked.
UW-Madison business professor Justin Sydnor, who specializes in risk and insurance, said insuring more school districts through ETF could be beneficial but questioned the need for a separate pool. “The high-level idea of leveraging ETF’s expertise at creating a big pooled plan and getting some competition among insurers makes some sense,” he said. “But why propose an entirely new program? Why not just work on whatever the issues are that are preventing more school districts from taking advantage of it?”
The upshot is the “market price for licensed child care is wildly high,” said Katherine Magnuson, who studies economically disadvantaged children and their families as a professor of social work at UW-Madison. “How many families can afford to spend between $8,000 and $10,000 a year to pay someone to watch their young child so that they can work outside the home?”
Nearly everyone who met him knew he was a dedicated Badger, serving in numerous volunteer roles at UW-Madison, including as the national president of the Wisconsin Alumni Association. He loved helping young people find their path to college.
Those readers whose memories of home economics class are dominated by muffin tins and sewing machines might be surprised to learn about Caroline Hunt, an early innovator in the field. Hunt had no patience for the time-consuming household tasks “home ec” became associated with. “The woman who today makes her own soap instead of taking advantage of machinery for its production enslaves herself to ignorance by limiting her time for study,” she declared. In 1908, she resigned from her position as the University of Wisconsin’s first home economics professor with a letter bemoaning the department’s emphasis on cooking and sewing.
Freiwald’s writing has been published in anthropology journals such as Current Anthropology, Ancient Mesoamerica, and the Journal of Archaeological Science.She received her B.A. in International Relations and History, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Madison isn’t just a city with great walkable neighborhoods like Downtown (home of the Dane County Farmers Market, one of the biggest in the country), Greenbush, and State-Langdon; it also ranks as one of the top 10 cities in the U.S. to live in overall. It’s not a huge city, but it’s teeming with people walking everywhere thanks to the University of Wisconsin, ample supply of tech campuses, and affordable housing.
Wilson is a native of Appleton, Wisconsin, and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in journalism and communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She joined the Illinois faculty in 2000 after stints at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Louisville. Her research has focused on the social and psychological effects of the media and its impact on children. She is married and had two adult children.
