There’s a significant problem with the federal government’s efforts to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion in research, UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said Monday: the federal government has not defined what exactly it means.
During a Faculty Senate meeting that was streamed online on Monday, Jennifer L. Mnookin, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, urged professors to “hold off” on optional expenses so the university could help ensure that “you’re making smart choices.”
“The transition has created for us an enormous amount of uncertainty, combined with fast-moving and changing information,” she said. “It’s generated some potentially quite significant threats to important aspects of our mission, as is true for our peer institutions nationally.”
Baldwin toured the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy Monday morning to learn about opioid treatment efforts — programs that could be halted by the president’s funding freeze.
“The work being done here will save lives,” Baldwin said, “and that’s why I’m sending a loud and clear message that the president cannot cut off funding for vital programs like these.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is the most selective university in Wisconsin, according to a recent analysis from The Business Journals.
The Jan. 17 report used data from the U.S. Department of Education to determine the most selective higher education institutions in the country. Analysts used a weighted formula — based on acceptance and matriculation rates — to determine each ranking.
Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, plans to reintroduce legislation from last session that will allow Universities of Wisconsin to begin classes on Sept. 1.
Drinks with boba will be available at the Southeast Cafe inside Gordon Avenue Market and at the Bean and Creamery inside Four Lakes Market during opening hours.
The Wisconsin Opioid Overdose Response Center is set to launch this year, and would give community pharmacies in the state resources like educational information, naloxone and fentanyl testing strips.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin visited UW-Madison to hear how federal funding helps combat the fentanyl crisis in Wisconsin as President Donald Trump threatens federal funding.
UW-Madison is one of the nation’s leading research universities in terms of receiving federal grants — and levering those dollars with private and other external funds that make it possible to move ideas from the lab bench to the marketplace.
It’s not just about Madison, which is the sixth-leading federal R&D campus in the country. Every campus in the Universities of Wisconsin receives some federal R&D dollars, as do major private institutions such as the Medical College of Wisconsin, Marquette University and the Milwaukee School of Engineering.
But UW-Madison Donald Hester Professor of Economics Charles Engel told the Wisconsin State Journal “the overall effect on the cost of living would be relatively small” because the price consumers pay doesn’t only cover the cost of the good itself.
“If you think about when you buy a t-shirt, say that’s made in China,” he said. “The actual t-shirt is really a relatively small part of the cost that we pay, and a much bigger part is the cost of the design, which is probably done in the U.S., and then the cost of bringing the shirt from the port to the store where you get it.”
UW-Madison economics professor Charles Engel believes prices will increase and said tariffs will not provide a good outcome for the future.
Dorothea Salo, academic librarian and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Register we’ve been here before, citing how the prior Trump administration all but disappeared the US Environmental Protection Agency.
“That apparently made him happy enough to try to disappear half the federal government this time,” she said. “As happened last time, lots of citizens and citizen groups are rescuing what they can. It’s organically fairly decent preservation practice – the rescued work is being duplicated in widely geographically disparate places, which lowers the odds that sheer bad luck wipes it out. The difficulty is discovery – who’s got what data [and] where? If, as I hope, US leaders someday return to a belief that government transparency is important to democracy, putting the jigsaw puzzle back together will be a huge lift.”
