When Jennifer Mnookin joined UW-Madison in 2022 as its chancellor, she faced declining state funding, a decadelong tuition freeze, then campus protests and an onslaught of federal research cuts.
But during her nearly four years in the position, Mnookin built a track record of forging deals with critics of her leadership or the university itself, such as breaking ground on the hard-fought new engineering building, despite frequent opposition from the Republican-led Legislature.
“We don’t have the fountain of youth— nobody ever found it,” said Dudley Lamming, co-director of the Wisconsin Nathan Shock Center (WiNSC) and professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “but can we find ways [to] get to the end of our lives, still fit and functional?”
“I am just a lot more concerned about how we design the digital landscape for kids than I am about whether we allow kids to use screens or not,” said Heather Kirkorian, an early childhood development researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I haven’t seen concrete evidence that convinces me that screen use itself is creating problematic behavior.”
Since the resignation of the last permanent University president, Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s board of trustees has tapped both its own CEO of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and a fellow trustee to fill the seat. The next permanent president, however, has no affiliation with Columbia.
Wisconsin legislators haven’t directed a ton of their attention to higher education issues during the current legislative session, lobbyist Jack O’Meara said.
“It just seems generally that it’s not at the top of the list of items that are being discussed … so I don’t see a whole lot of bills moving,” said O’Meara, who advocates on behalf of faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison through an organization called PROFS.
Jennifer Mnookin forged compromises with protesters and politicians at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now, she faces her biggest test.
Columbia University’s new president is already facing opposition from anti-Israel rabble-rousers, who have condemned her for previous actions taken against leftist encampments at her last college.
Campus and community leaders are congratulating Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin as she prepares to step down as leader of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison Athletic Director Chris McIntosh considers impacts of a decline in Wisconsin Badgers football season ticket sales for the 2025 season and the significance of that revenue to the university.
Statewide, school enrollment data tells a similar story: throughout the 2000s and 2010s, enrollment in suburban school districts increased, while rural school enrollment continually declined, according to Sarah Kemp, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Lab. Urban school districts, including Milwaukee, saw relatively steady enrollment through the 2010s, but the pandemic brought a sharp decline in student enrollment in most Wisconsin cities.
“There’s maybe not housing available for those young families to move into, or maybe the opportunities aren’t there for young families to find employment, and that may then show up in the school districts with declining enrollment,” Kemp said.
IKEA has dozens of other pickup locations around the country, including at Loyola University in Chicago and near the campuses of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan State University in East Lansing and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
For UBS, located on the eastern edge of the UW-Madison campus, it gets a flat fee from IKEA for each order.
UW-Madison researchers argue undisclosed organizations targeted users based on race and location to discourage them from voting.
Young Mie Kim is a coauthor of the report and a media professor at UW-Madison. Kim was one of the first independent researchers to discover Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“It was just difficult just to surgically target these people, until now,” Kim said. “But with (today’s) data-driven, micro-targeted, algorithm-based information environment, it’s much more effective.”
