Katie Nash, the head archivist at UW-Madison, read aloud snippets from pandemic-era headlines torn from newspapers. The clippings were cut out and pasted onto a collage designed by a retired UW-Madison professor to depict the heart-wrenching sentiments and uncertainty surrounding COVID-19.
And even that is likely an underestimate, according to Adrian Treves, study co-author and professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We took the most conservative estimates of poaching and cryptic poaching,” or illegal hunting that goes unrecorded, he says.
The University of Wisconsin System, for example, won’t require proof of vaccination on its 26 campuses this fall, and with the lifting of state and local mask mandates, many campuses have said they don’t have the grounds to impose one of their own. That leaves campuses such as UW-Madison, which has upward of 60,000 on campus when the school year is in full swing, saying they have an “expectation” that unvaccinated people wear masks — one that will likely be difficult to systematically enforce.
Major engineering schools in the state, such as UW-Madison and Marquette University, have diversity numbers that reflect the national data. “We do know that we need to increase diversity in engineering, at the undergraduate level, the graduate level, the staff level and the faculty level,” said Ian Robertson, dean of the College of Engineering at UW-Madison.
UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said Republicans may have inadvertently handed Evers a huge re-election gift by allowing him to sign such a monumental income tax cut, defusing the GOP attack line that Evers is a tax-and-spend liberal. “I think that’s more the irony in all this,” Burden said. “The budget itself looks like a win for Republicans, they mostly got what they wanted. But the budget I think will help Evers’ re-election and doesn’t do much to help Republicans out.”
“We know that uncertainty can be a major driver of anxiety for some people,” Brian Leitzke, a pediatric psychologist at UW Health said.
“This all takes place in a country like ours with less upward mobility and less opportunity for kids now than in past,” said Tim Smeeding, who studies poverty as a professor of public affairs and economics at UW-Madison. He sees the payments as good public policy “based on the idea that kids are expensive, and society has a shared interest in seeing them thrive.”
Two Republicans, University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor Ryan Owens and Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, are also running.
