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June 18, 2025

Top Stories

Report: Republicans weighing $87 million cut to UW system

Wisconsin State Journal

Republicans on the Legislature’s budget committee may deal the Universities of Wisconsin the system’s biggest cut in nearly a decade, to the tune of $87 million.

The cut was first reported by Civic Media on Monday night. By contrast, the UW system had requested an increase in state aid of $856 million. The committee had been slated to take up the UW system’s budget on Tuesday but punted it for unspecified reasons.

Research

Higher Education/System

Wisconsin Republicans vote to add new prosecutors, but won’t replace expiring federal funds

Wisconsin Public Radio

GOP lawmakers also delayed a vote on the Universities of Wisconsin budget which had been scheduled for Tuesday. Evers’ budget called for about a $700 million increase in state funding for the UW system.

Democratic lawmakers told reporters Tuesday they’d heard Republicans were considering cutting funds to the UW system. The GOP cochairs of the budget committee did not comment when asked about that prospect.

Wisconsin tribal colleges at risk under Trump plan to cut funding by nearly 90%

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin’s two tribal colleges could face existential cuts under a Trump administration proposal to reduce funding by nearly 90%.

The colleges are located in rural areas of northern Wisconsin and together enroll about 600 students, many of whom would not attend a traditional institution in the colleges’ absence for financial, logistical and cultural reasons. The College of Menominee Nation is about 45 miles northwest of Green Bay. Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe University is 100 miles north of Eau Claire.

Campus life

Community

Capitol City Band will celebrate Juneteenth as it opens 57th season on Thursday

Madison 365

Since 1981, Jim Latimer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus music professor, has been leading the Capitol City Band and conducting hundreds and hundreds of concerts. Ronald Reagan had just become president when Latimer first started conducting the band. “Is that right?” Latimer laughs. “I hadn’t thought of it in that context. But it has been a labor of love over these many years and I am so happy and proud to be involved with it.”

Arts & Humanities

Harvard alum’s book focuses on ‘The Onion’

The Harvard Gazette

The Onion has been making fun of human folly since its founding by two undergrads at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988. The mock news site has created satiric pieces so smart some believed them real, others that were just plain silly, and one headline (“‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”) that has achieved a dark fame after being reposted after each U.S. mass shooting since 2014 Isla Vista, Calif., attack.

Business/Technology

Milwaukee police might trade 2.5M mugshots for facial recognition technology

Wisconsin Public Radio

Alan Rubel, who studies the ethics of data and surveillance and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, highlighted the fact that MPD wants a trade, rather than purchasing the tech.

“That’s going to be very useful for that company,” he said.

“We’ve collected this data as part of a public investment, in mugshots and the criminal justice system, but now all that effort is going to go to training an AI system,” he added.

How AI helps us fact-check misinformation on the air

Wisconsin Watch

arlier this year, I worked with Gigafact using Parser to process 24 hours from the same hosts the week after this year’s Super Bowl. We came up with a list of claims in two hours.

Wisconsin Watch and Gigafact presented that case study in using AI at a recent Journalism Educators Institute conference hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. We’ll present it again this week at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in New Orleans.

UW Experts in the News

Obituaries

Cliff Behnke, former ‘old-school’ Wisconsin State Journal managing editor, dies

Wisconsin State Journal

After graduating, he enrolled at UW-Madison to study journalism where he wrote, beginning in 1962, for The Daily Cardinal student newspaper. He rose to become editor-in-chief, spending so much time there and at his first reporting job for the State Journal, that he flunked an art history class and delayed his college graduation.

After college, he was drafted into the Army, where he helped produce a military newspaper at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., from 1967 to 1969. He then returned to the State Journal and covered City Hall, the Capitol, UW-Madison, the bombing of Sterling Hall in 1970 and waves of anti-Vietnam War protests. He was 29 when, in 1973, he was named city editor. He was promoted to managing editor in 1989 and senior managing editor in 2003.