Although Olivia Guo is starting her second year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she had never set foot on campus until two weeks ago. Following her first in-person class on Wednesday, she admired the view of Lake Mendota from her seat at the Terrace, hoping for a better, more interactive school year. Or, at least one that wouldn’t leave her so tired.
We talk with a museum curator and researcher who used a special collection at UW-Madison to learn more about a fungus that affects snakes.
It didn’t generate nearly as much attention, but Jordan had a separate tweet yesterday featuring recent footage from a University of Wisconsin football game. The video showed celebrating fans, nearly all of whom were standing side by side without masks, packed into a stadium.
At one such game, University of Wisconsin’s home opener against Penn State, no vaccination proof or negative test was required. Masks were required indoors but only “strongly encouraged” in outdoor spaces. More than 76,000 people attended. The Madison, Wisconsin, metro area, home to more than 660,000 people has seen a steady increase in cases since mid-July and a positive test rate of 3.4 percent, according to Public Health Madison and Dane County.
The University Committee discussed sending a letter to University of Wisconsin faculty following continuing concerns about COVID-19 accommodations and mitigation efforts in a meeting Wednesday. University Committee Chair Eric Sandgren said the committee could be sending a statement regarding several COVID-related topics to UW faculty members as soon as next Monday.
Convocation was hosted at the Kohl Center, where the scenes Friday sharply contrasted the stadium’s role last year as a COVID-19 testing site throughout the global pandemic.
Two days before the start of classes, Becca Poor sat outside Witte Residence Hall, already busy with pre-chem homework. She graduated in the spring from Woodbury High School in Minnesota, after what she called ‘a pretty easy year’.
The university doesn’t have the exact numbers yet, but school officials say this year’s freshman class is expected to be the largest ever. To accommodate for the large class, the university has converted double rooms into triples and some triple rooms into quads.
The University of Wisconsin Law School is launching an Evictions Defense Clinic for law students to provide legal resources to people struggling with housing instability. The clinic, staffed by a supervising attorney and seven law school students, is an expansion of the Neighborhood Law Clinic and joins five other clinical programs run by UW’s Economic Justice Institute.
“We have seen an increase in enrollment,” said Meredith McGlone, a Spokeswoman for UW Madison. “We won’t see final figures until after the 10th day of class, but it looks like we’re on pace to have another record-setting first-year class. Interest in attending UW continues to remain very strong.”
Quoted: National studies show people have been consuming more alcohol, especially women with young children, during the pandemic, said Julia Sherman, coordinator for the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. She said other research has found that people who increased alcohol consumption to cope with natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, didn’t slow their drinking afterward.
“And that is the big question,” said Sherman. “Will the drinking subside as this crisis fades? As we are able to get back to normal or the new normal? Will we all go back to the previous level of alcohol consumption? And based on this other reporting, it’s not as likely as we might hope.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at Wednesday’s news conference that the partisan efforts would hurt the public perception of a well-run election.
“They are decreasing confidence in the election system, rather than increasing it, regardless of what they find,” Burden said. “The fact that questions and suspicions and allegations are being launched and there are multiple tracks of reviews happening simultaneously all coming in at different times with different conclusions is likely to undermine the trust that people have in the system.”
Today, we welcome back Wednesday host Ali Muldrow (and her adorable new co-pilot, Frida Hallelujah) for a conversation about the importance of the arts with UW’s new arts director, Chris Walker.
Among her young followers, Ms. Aniston’s apparent fallibility may well be a trump card, said Jonathan Gray, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin.
UW Health Principal Vaccine Investigator Dr. William Hartman. said monoclonal antibody therapy is one of the most successful therapies developed to fight the virus.
Fans returned to Camp Randall Stadium last weekend and so did complaints about long lines at concession stands and crowded walkways.
A more cautious safety plan — perhaps not to the same extent as earlier in the pandemic, but cautious still — may very well be necessary as we continue to learn more about this insidious pathogen.
Despite supply chain and hiring woes, experts say retailers in Wisconsin have had a successful back-to-school shopping season.
Jerry O’Brien, the executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said “it’s actually been a pretty good season in spite of lots of problems.”
“Retailers are pretty happy with the sales,” said O’Brien. “They just wish some of the other issues were better.”
Quoted: The racial wealth gap began with slavery, but even after the institution was abolished, the gap persisted, said University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor Steve Kantrowitz.
Many Black Americans could not qualify for Social Security, as jobs typically held by Black workers, such as agricultural and domestic positions, were excluded from the program. Black residents also were blocked from getting some home loans and from living in the types of neighborhoods where home values were steady or rising. Such barriers made it nearly impossible for Black people to acquire and accumulate wealth at the rate of white Americans, Kantrowitz said.
“So the end of slavery didn’t mean that Black and white people were suddenly on an equal economic, political, civil footing,” Kantrowitz said. “It meant instead that the institution of slavery had been formally abolished, and disabilities that followed from slavery were supposed to be abolished.”
Before the pandemic, Judith Bartfeld, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, found that school meals account for as much as 7 percent of economic resources among low-income households. That financial contribution approached the impact of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the main federal antihunger program, which provided more than 10 percent of household resources but is larger and more visible.
In a recent independent report, former Republican Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson and University of Wisconsin elections expert Barry Burden found that the firm hired by the Arizona Senate to conduct the “audit” failed to meet the most basic standards for a credible review, including allowing “glaring lapses in the safekeeping of ballots and equipment.”
Sept. 11 is an important topic in classrooms across America leading up to the 20th anniversary of the attacks.Over time, teachers’ classrooms have become filled with students who were not alive in 2001. In fact, more than a quarter of Americans were not yet born when the attacks happened.Recent Stories from abcactionnews.com”We have students now who have no lived memory of it, and from what teachers reported, very little information about it and in some cases, sort of misinformation or misunderstandings of it,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Jeremy Stoddard.
Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison, admitted the risk of COVID transmission is lower outside, but that doesn’t mean everyone is completely safe.
Astate agency this week dismissed a complaint filed against UW-Madison’s private foundation over its investment in fossil fuel companies, citing a lack of enforcement power.
