If the WIAA has state championships this fall, they won’t happen at the University of Wisconsin.
Wednesday the state’s high school sports governing body and the university announced that due to the “challenging situation with COVID-19 restrictions in Dane County” no state championships will be held on the UW campus this fall.
Dane County Executive Joe Parisi has asked the University of Wisconsin-Madison to consider sending undergraduate students who live in dorms home as COVID-19 continues to spread.
Citing rapidly rising COVID-19 cases including two straight days in which one in five student tests came back positive, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank locked down the state’s largest university campus for two weeks.
Noted: Polack, who grew up in Racine and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, served at the U.S. Treasury Department as an intelligence analyst and policy adviser under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
One day after the University of Wisconsin-Madison said COVID-19 spread was on the verge of jeopardizing plans for in-person instruction, the state’s top Republicans sent a letter to Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren asking that he reconsider the cancellation of the fall 2020 college football season.
After Hartland native Taylor Amann was eliminated during the national finals of “American Ninja Warrior” last year, she said she would be back.
Despite gyms being closed at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate stuck to her word.
The members of nine fraternities and sororities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been directed to quarantine themselves after 38 students tested positive for COVID-19, the university confirmed Friday.
Alarmed by a rise in coronavirus cases on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, Chancellor Rebecca Blank on Monday ordered all undergraduates to restrict their movements for the next two weeks.
As tens of thousands of Wisconsin students return to dorms and off-campus apartments this fall, universities have attempted to plan for just about everything.
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Chancellor Dwight Watson was placed on paid administrative leave Thursday pending the outcome of an investigation into an unspecified complaint.
Noted: Birx was in Madison to talk to Wisconsin officials and health care representatives about COVID-19 as part of a tour of states. Among those she met with was Tommy Thompson, the University of Wisconsin System president whom she knows from his time as health and human services secretary under President George W. Bush.
“I think he has taken a very serious and public-health approach to this,” Birx said. “He has a plan for surveillance testing, he has a plan for surge testing … and I think equally importantly, he has a plan for caring for students who become positive.”
She suggested that could help UW avoid the problems of colleges that have seen clusters of cases once students arrived on campus.
Quoted: “It is hard to find these causal relationships,” said Nasia Safdar, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
How are people going to figure out how students are doing in school this year?
“I can’t imagine how this isn’t going to be the most challenging year that we’ve ever had for answering that question,” said Brad Carl, an expert on the subject who is with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “How are we going to tell?”
A crucial Phase III clinical trial of a vaccine against COVID-19 begins this week at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and its teaching hospital UW Health.
Noted: Hart Posen interviewed in video beginning at 3:13 mark.
Quoted: The idea of using azithromycin for COVID-19 was based on preliminary French research suggesting a benefit that later was found to be flawed, said Ann Misch, an assistant professor of infectious disease at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Separately, laboratory research showed hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin reduced viral replication of cells infected by the virus, though not azithromycin alone. But, she said, “there’s a huge chasm between an effect in cell culture and in humans.”
She said there is no evidence azithromycin is effective against COVID-19.
“If people are using azithromycin, I am sorry to hear that,” she said.
Quoted: Richard Monette, director of the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, largely agreed that the messaging would not have much influence on Native people.
He doubled down on Greendeer’s statement that U.S.-tribal relations are not as bad as some make it seem, but he added the presence of these tensions opens Native groups up to these types of social media attacks.
“America has got this history of trying to separate the Native American from her land and from her wealth. That’s true, and that gets exploited by people throughout the world,” Monette said. “If we don’t want them to use this against us, then we should stop doing that.”
It’s been five months since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered college campuses across the country. Like thousands of other college students, I finished the spring semester on Zoom, attending classes and taking exams in my childhood bedroom in Madison.
Noted: The experience of dairy farmers like Peterson, who also was appointed to the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2018, is more complicated than the brief appearance at the convention might suggest.
The heads of the University of Wisconsin System, the Tavern League of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Restaurant Association sent an open letter to restaurant and bar owners Monday asking they take precautions to prevent COVID-19 spread as students start to return to campuses across the state.
UW System Interim President Tommy Thompson asked businesses to “help to encourage responsible behavior of our students,” alongside on-campus efforts to bring back a portion of some 170,000 students across 13 UW campuses.
Noted: Protests in Wisconsin’s capital city started around 9 p.m., drawing out hundreds of protestors who were largely peaceful. The group marched up and down State Street and other streets near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, drawing students into their ranks, according to tweets from Emily Hamer, a reporter with the Wisconsin State Journal.
Wisconsin doesn’t have the capacity to process the number of coronavirus tests health officials ideally want available when schools and college campuses reopen, Health Services Secretary Andrea Palm said Friday.
Quoted: “Face to face campaigning is a known positive … the positive on the Republican side is they know this can work. One of the negatives is that we don’t know that it works in a pandemic,” said Michael Wagner, a journalism professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in political communication and behavior.
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.
