It was 50 years ago, but Bob Shaffer hasn’t forgotten. It’s not something anyone who lived through could forget.
Quoted: “We were really, really close two years ago and then the number ticked up in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Sarah Paige, a former post-doctoral fellow from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who now works at the CORE Group Polio Project dedicated to eradicating the disease. In 2019, the number of polio cases rose to 94.
Noted: Harris briefly lived in Madison when she was young in the late 1960s. Her father, Donald Harris, was an associate professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer researcher there.
Laurie and Scott Dubin, along with their daughter Lindsay, stood outside a rented RV last Saturday with a heap of luggage.
They were about to start the 2,000-mile drive from the San Francisco Bay Area to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Lindsay would start her freshman year at her dream school in the middle of a pandemic.
“I hope school isn’t canceled from Saturday until then,” Laurie Dubin had said earlier that week.
The head of the University of Wisconsin System will propose its Board of Regents support a 3.5% increase to its 2021-23 state budget in the hope of funding several new initiatives, including a statewide free tuition scholarship program for some Wisconsin students.
Written by Robert N. Golden, MD, is dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Joseph E. Kerschner, MD is dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin School of Medicine.
Quoted: But, Trump is still tailing Biden among Wisconsin’s voters. According to surveys from both the Marquette Law School and the UW-Madison Elections Research Center, Biden is holding a steady, five to six percent lead over Trump in the state.
“In 2016, Trump was the outsider and he was trying to take down Washington,” Burden said. “He was running against an establishment figure in Hilary Clinton and he pledged to go to Washington and ‘drain the swamp.’ Now, he’s governing and is serving as president in the swamp and has to still convince voters that he’s shaking things up, but still governing effectively.”
Noted: The College Democrats of the University of Wisconsin-Madison are hosting a series of remote, online watch parties this week for the convention with a plethora of political guests.
On Tuesday night, the group will be joined by former state Senate District 26 candidate Nada Elmikashfi and Madison Ald. Max Prestigiacomo, who is also a UW-Madison student.
Noted: UW-Madison had a virtual commencement this spring. It featured video appearances from administrators, students, athletes and author James Patterson, as well as a Camp Randall lights display and a carillon rendition of “On Wisconsin.” The university hopes to host a physical winter commencement in December and a larger in-person ceremony once the state emerges from the pandemic.
Noted: University of Wisconsin researchers have been testing volunteers this summer with a saliva test.
UW athletic director Barry Alvarez, speaking to reporters during a Zoom session last week, acknowledged the current inability to secure rapid test results played a role in the Big Ten’s decision to shut down fall sports in 2020.
Quoted: But raw numbers don’t always tell the whole story, said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For example, a rise in cases can also be due to a rise in testing.
“If you think about something too simplistically, you can fall into the trap of believing something that is partially or maybe not even true at all,” Sethi said.
In a shaded parking lot on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, so-called spit concierges guide volunteers though giving a saliva sample. On the other side of the parking lot is a pared-down biology lab where scientists test the spit-filled plastic vials for the virus that causes COVID-19.
They’ll have the results within one or two hours.
Quoted: Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told PolitiFact Wisconsin voting policies in Wisconsin over the past decade — when Republicans have generally controlled state government — have had “a disproportionate impact on communities of color, as well as other vulnerable voting groups.”
But Mayer added he does “not see evidence that the (election officials) had the goal of disenfranchising Black voters” when reducing the number of Milwaukee polling places from 180 to five.
Noted: One justification which does not fly in terms of putting student-athletes’ health first may be that athletic departments face historic revenue shortfalls without football. University of Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez has said a season without the sport could leave his program alone with a hit of more than $100-million. That kind of deficit would require university financial assistance at a time when most institutions are dealing with massive budget issues just to keep educational operations going.
Quoted: “Experiencing symptoms of hypervigilance, stress or distress are signals to discontinue your journaling exercise,” University of Wisconsin psychologist Shilagh A. Mirgain told UW Health.
Quoted: “The genie is out of the bottle,” says Professor Thongchai Winichakul, a historian at the University of Wisconsin and another survivor of the 1976 massacre.
“Society won’t stop, change won’t stop. The only thing we can do is to take care that the change takes place with as little bloodshed as possible. Thais have been gossiping about the monarchy in private for years, then teaching their children to praise it lavishly in public, to be hypocrites. All these young protesters have done is bring that gossip out into the open.”
Quoted: “If a storm is moving northwards at 10 miles per hour, and the wind’s rotational speed is 90 miles per hour, then to the east, the wind speed will be 100 miles per hour, and to the west, it will be 80 miles per hour,” said Steve Ackerman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
It’s been one month since the University of Wisconsin agreed with a request from some of its student-athletes to put a patch with the university crest logo with a black W on its uniforms for upcoming seasons.
Noted: That was the year the doctoral student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison packed her bags and headed west for an unknown school, then called the Southern Regional Division of the University of Nevada. “I wanted to do something different for a year,” Campbell said, explaining how she got here.
There’s only one “Badgers” nickname in NCAA Division I college athletics, and it belongs to the University of Wisconsin. The name has deep ties to the state, dating back roughly 200 years.
Here’s everything we know about Wisconsin’s mascot and nickname.
Over the past two weeks, Wisconsin universities have revealed more information about their plans for COVID-19 testing.
Noted: Vel Phillips was a civil rights activist who smashed racial and gender barriers as the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin law school, the first woman to be elected to Milwaukee Common Council, the first appointed female judge in Milwaukee County and the first Black person ever elected to statewide office in Wisconsin.
Born in Keshena, Wisconsin, in 1935, Ada Deer grew up in a log cabin on a Menominee Indian Reservation. She was the first Menominee to earn an undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin and the first Native American to receive a master’s in social work from Columbia University. Deer also was the first woman to chair the Menominee Tribe in Wisconsin.
Noted: University of Wisconsin System: $32 million. Evers recently allocated these funds for additional testing and protective equipment so UW campuses can conduct some classes in person.
Colleges and universities across Wisconsin have developed a patchwork of plans to prepare for what at its core is an unknown: How to reopen campuses safely during a pandemic.
Quoted: Testing students every week or two will provide a gauge of whether the virus is taking hold on campuses. Many physicians stress this so-called surveillance testing is the only way to identify students and staff who are infected but don’t have symptoms.
“I don’t see how one can not do it,” said Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease physician at UW Health.
Quoted: Parents are making choices within an unequal system, says Erica Turner, who studies race and inequity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Education Studies.
“You can’t undo that individually,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that while it’s not unusual for a political party or party activists to try to keep a candidate off a ballot, the reverse is “bizarre and unusual.”
“We’ve never really seen [that] before,” Burden says.
“If this was happening in just one state, that there were a couple of Republican insiders who were aiding the Kanye West campaign, that would seem a little odd and kind of unexpected,” he says. “But because we’re seeing it now in multiple states, people who are either slated as electors, delegates or Republican attorneys working on behalf of Kanye West’s effort to get on the ballot, it looks like something systematic and organized across large parts of the country.”
It’s been called one of Madison’s greatest unfinished stories of the last half of the 20th century.
What happened to Leo Burt? Three of the four bombers of UW-Madison’s Sterling Hall in 1970, were caught and sent to federal prison. But Leo Burt, the fourth bomber, 22 years-old at the time, is still wanted by the FBI.
His whereabouts remain a mystery.
A CBS News and YouGov poll released Sunday morning found Biden leading Trump 48% to 42% among likely voters, and the Election Research Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looking at registered voters, found Biden ahead with 49% to Trump’s 43%. The Marquette University Law School Poll, released on Tuesday, finds Biden at 50%, in a close race with Trump at 46% among likely voters.
Sixteen gallons of hand sanitizer sat in the foyer of the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority house at the University of Wisconsin as house mother Karen Mullis reconfigured tables in the dining room to maintain social distancing.
The Wisconsin Farm-Related Fatality Report, which was inactive between 2006 and 2020, is now being updated again to offer insight on the state’s ag-related deaths.
The report said Wisconsin farm fatalities reached 41 in 2017 and 34 in 2018, a rise from the last report, which claimed 25 deaths in 2006. Researchers Bryan Weichelt and John Shutske recently resurrected the annual report, which was not updated for 14 years.
Shutske, an extension specialist and professor in several ag health and safety programs at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s important to remember that these aren’t just statistics – every number represents a real person, someone’s parent or child. He said he hopes farmers have a self-interest in preserving farm safety and preventing accidents. Growing up as a child on a farm himself, Shutske said he knew people who wore farm injuries, like a missing limb, as a badge of honor.
Quoted: “It’s definitely a trial run for November in terms of recruiting poll workers, finding new locations, and distributing personal protective equipment,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden, who directs the Elections Research Center. “August is really good practice for that.”
Noted: The School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered its first business-focused, business-led FIG last fall, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities granted in partnership with UW’s College of Letters and Science. The lead course, “The Sociology and History of American Marketing and Consumer Society,” was taught by Thomas O’Guinn, former chair of Wisconsin’s Department of Marketing, and the Thomas J. Falk Distinguished Chair in Business.
“The first-year interest group is designed to immerse students in marketing, sociology, and history, and most importantly, how they interact. Marketing, and the consumer culture it helped produce, isn’t just about some bag of commercial techniques; marketing was made by, and in turn made, the character of contemporary society. You can’t adequately teach our history without some deeper recognition and understanding of marketing. This class does that, and does it within a supportive, cross-disciplinary learning environment,” according to O’Guinn, who also told me that one of his inspirations for teaching the course was the formative experience he had as a University of Texas freshman in an integrative nine-credit course, “The American Experience.” “That course meant a lot to me, and I wanted to offer something similar to my students,” he said.
Quoted: There are risks for both sides if one party embraces mail voting and the other doesn’t, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. If there is a surge of coronavirus cases near the election, those who had planned to vote in person may find it difficult to cast a ballot — and may not have enough time to request a ballot by mail, he said. Clerks short of poll workers might have to close polling locations, meaning some voters would have to go to new precincts and wait in longer lines.
Johnson, a UW-Madison doctoral candidate in interdisciplinary theater studies, was a spectacular interviewee. I was impressed with her experience and her clear-eyed description of the challenges of being a Black artist transplanted to Madison. She is a polymath, seamlessly shifting between academic research, writing, singing, activism and poetry. In her hands, the lines between these areas blur.
Quoted: No plan for opening a university can be fool-proof, which leads to UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank being both confident in her campus plan and concerned about the things she – and any university’s chief executive – cannot control no matter how comprehensive a plan’s framework is.
“I admit I am both optimisitc and worried. I think we’ve done everything we need to do. We’ve got a lot of moving parts,” Blank told WTMJ’s John Mercure during Tuesday’s WTMJ Cares Special Roundtable.
Quoted: “It’s inadequate,” says Tim Smeeding, who teaches economics and public policy at the University of Wisconsin La Follette School of Public Affairs and whose research topics include income and wealth inequality. “It’s too small, misdirected, legally questionable. It’s clearly not enough. So it’s more show than the actual dough.”
Noted: I grew up in New England with no family ties to China, and started learning Mandarin in grad school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the 1980s out of a curiosity about an Asia that was on the rise. I benefited from scholarship money, and spirited teachers like Arthur Chen and Clara Sun. The Chinese language is a wide window into one of the world’s most influential civilizations, richest economies, largest military forces, and biggest populaces; it’s also a country whose ambitions aren’t about to go away.
There was no Massillon/McKinley game in 1918. The game was cancelled because of the Spanish Flu pandemic. How did the pandemic affect pro sports at the time? Dr. Susan Lederer, Professor of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison joined Jon to provide some insight.
Noted: It’s worth noting that another experiment, from a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, actually found that gaiters were the most effective mask in containing a cough, though those gaiters were slightly different, containing elastic.
The Big Ten Conference won’t be playing football this fall because of concerns about COVID-19.
Noted: Sandy Stuttgen, an ag educator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison extension, says the first signs of eye irritation are tearing, tear stains and squinting, which get progressively worse as pink eye continues to develop. Pink eye may also appear as an opaque spot on the cornea. Conjunctivitis and corneal ulceration may also occur, she writes.
Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said that while case numbers in some rural parts of Wisconsin may be far lower than in cities such as Milwaukee, rates of infection in some rural counties are now higher.
Noted: Gopalan and Harris separated when Kamala as just five, according to the BBC. The reason, per Kamala’s book, The Truths We Hold: Harris took a professorship position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
With coronavirus cases still high around the country, half of U.S. elementary and high school students will attend school only virtually this fall, according to a study by Burbio, which aggregates school and community information nationwide.
That will have grave implications for minority and disadvantaged students, said Madeline Hafner, executive director of the Minority Student Achievement Network Consortium at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
The past five or six months have “really brought to light these racial disparities that have persisted for generations,” she said.
“With great uncertainty about the new school year, wealthier, predominantly White parents are using their resources to secure educational options for their individual children,” Erica Turner, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in her “Equity in Pandemic Schooling” action guide.
Noted: Developed by University of Wisconsin students in 2018, the music discovery streaming app launched for Apple’s iOS In July 2019, growing to about 100,000 users, 200,000 song uploads and 15 full-time employees in the year since.
The University of Wisconsin System will reduce central office spending by $10 million over the next two years in an effort to streamline administration and refocus resources on students, its leader announced Tuesday.
Quoted: Miriam Seifter, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in an email that “the opinion seems to have had a chilling effect on further attempts at executive emergency response, with both the governor and the state (Department of Health Services) hesitating on or delaying actions not covered by the ruling out of fear they will lose in court again.”
“The result has been a governing gap in Wisconsin, with local governments left to try to address statewide problems,” said Seifter, who co-wrote an amicus brief in the case “on behalf of 17 legal scholars” that criticized the GOP controlled legislature’s challenge.
Quoted: Despite avoiding the worst-case scenarios predicted when the pandemic first hit, the number of deaths is still troubling, said University of Wisconsin-Madison epidemiologist Patrick Remington.
“It’s been hard to get the general public and even some policymakers to realize how serious a disease this is,” Remington said. “These are absolutely preventable deaths.”
Quoted: Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, said the July jobs report only confirmed his suspicion that the economic recovery was starting to plateau. Now, he thinks a W-shaped recovery — where the economy improves somewhat, only to crash again — is still possible, and “a stall is more and more likely.”
Noted: While it may seem wise to separate your disposable face mask from your other garbage, Nasia Safdar, M.D., Ph.D., and professor of infectious disease at the University of Wisconsin, notes that it actually isn’t required. “The virus does not survive for prolonged periods outside the body,” she says. “Persons handling garbage must wear gloves when handling any trash, and that will protect against this [virus], as well.”
Noted: In Wisconsin, widely seen as a key 2020 battleground, a new poll coordinated by the UW-Madison Elections Research Center in collaboration with the Wisconsin State Journal, found Biden leading Donald Trump in the state, 49% to 43%. Among those who say they’re “certain” to vote, Biden’s lead grows to 52% to 44%.
Noted: A recent study by the University of Wisconsin found the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a “significant toll on the mental health and well-being” of student-athletes.
The Big Ten is likely to cancel fall sports, including football, over coronavirus concerns, according to several reports. A formal announcement is expected Tuesday.
Quoted: “What’s not obvious is that a lot of information that is contained in language, including information about cultural stereotypes, [occurs not as] direct statements but in large-scale statistical relationships between words,” says senior author Gary Lupyan, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Even without encountering direct statements, it is possible to learn that there is stereotype embedded in the language of women being better at some things and men at others.”
A new poll shows voters in Wisconsin favor Joe Biden over President Trump. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center poll finds Biden leads Trump by six points. According to the poll, Biden’s drawing support from Democrats who went for other candidates than Hillary Clinton in 2016, or didn’t vote at all.
Co-authored by Dr. Adrian Treves, a Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Greene earned his Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees, he was deeply influenced by jazz piano teacher Joan Wildman, who died this year. “It hit me pretty hard,” says Greene. “She was fiercely creative and always encouraged me to do my own thing.”
Noted: As a result, Kind has drawn challengers from both the left and right. In the Democratic primary, he’s facing Mark Neumann, a former missionary and pediatrician. Neumann has criticized Kind’s lack of support for Medicare-for-All, but his primary challenge hasn’t drawn much national attention. Kind is the clear favorite, according to Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: But as the outbreak drags on, and we’ve become more conscious of germs and hygiene, “some of the changes we made are likely to be really durable,” said Malia Jones, who researches social environments and infectious disease exposure at the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have captured video of invasive round gobies eating invertebrates amid mats of gooey green nuisance algae called cladophora, which grows in abundance offshore of Sleeping Bear. When the algae dies, it creates oxygen-depleted areas that are a perfect breeding ground for type-E botulism spores.
