When one writes a weekly column for over 15 years, one notices patterns. The one I see today is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I sense an atmosphere of caution — and deep sadness — more pronounced than at any time in my decades observing and writing about the state’s flagship university.
The University of Wisconsin Police Department alerted community members to an alleged stabbing on the 500 block of State Street around 2 p.m. Saturday.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of 45 universities the U.S. Department of Education is investigating for using what the department calls “race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs”.
The fight for an indoor training space for the UW-Madison Track and Field program continues. During the chilly winter months, the team is having to commute outside of Madison for practice.
Wisconsin farmer Andy Diercks sits on a red Memorial Union Terrace chair in the middle of a farm field, holding a potato in his left hand. “It’s amazing all the work that goes into growing this little guy,” he says to Amanda Gevens, UW-Madison chair of plant pathology, who sits across from him. “The research you’ve done over the past decades is critical to grow a good quality crop.”
Closures are common after mergers, and a particularly sticky problem in more rural communities, which have fewer people and thus make less financial sense for profit-driven organizations, said Peter Carstensen, a professor emeritus in the UW-Madison Law School who focuses on competition policy. When competitors merge, they look for areas to reduce cost.
“It almost always means eliminating some overlapping activities,” he said.
Inside Higher Ed also contacted the two dozen institutions under investigation, and their responses varied. The University of Wisconsin at Madison and Carnegie Mellon University said they had yet to be formally notified of any complaint by the OCR and were awaiting more information to determine how to comply with an investigation.
According to Sanjay Limaye, a scientist working at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Space Science and Engineering Center, “Venus has a potential to harbor conditions for iron- and sulfur-centered metabolism.”
A UW spokesperson also pointed to fallout in 2020 in the University of Alaska system when then-president Jim Johnsen stepped down after he emerged as the sole finalist to lead the University of Wisconsin system. Johnsen withdrew from the Wisconsin search after criticism that the process lacked transparency. He then resigned from the Alaska presidency mere weeks later.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s former chief diversity officer displayed a “significant lapse” in judgment and fiscal responsibility, according to a report, as state and federal lawmakers seek to root out diversity, equity and inclusion programs in education.
Committee members quizzed the leaders of several state agencies — including the Department of Public Instruction, the Department of Administration and the Department of Health Services — as well as the University of Wisconsin and several private companies.
Meyerhofer requested all documents related to the UW Board of Regents vote that day and the dismissal of the unnamed UW-Stevens Point faculty member.
For the second time in a week, the federal education department placed the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a warning list.
The U.S. Department of Education said Friday it had opened an investigation into UW-Madison and 44 other universities nationwide over alleged racial discrimination. The notifications came exactly a month after the department issued sweeping guidance threatening to pull funding from colleges that do not eliminate all considerations of race from policies and programs.
Celebrating 100 years of excellence at University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing! With a growing nursing shortage, Badger nurses are stepping up—pursuing advanced degrees to educate, advocate, and transform healthcare for the future.
Dr. Laura Hanks is an OB-GYN with UW Health and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in the department of OB-GYN. She says they have seen an uptick in people requesting both LARC and permanent sterilization since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“We did a study at our hospital to looking at the increase in permanent sterilization rates, and we saw 106% increase in the year following the Dobbs decision,” Hanks says.
Ribbon skirts — once reserved for ceremonies across many tribal traditions — are showing up in everyday spaces on a new generation of Indigenous women. Miinan White, McKenna Metoxen and Ava Belisle attend the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where they’re building community around the garment. “When I was little, I only had like two or three [ribbon] skirts,” says White, whose mother taught her to sew them. Now White, Metoxen and Belisle are filling their closets.
The three young women all hold leadership positions for Wunk Sheek, a UW–Madison campus organization founded in 1968 that promotes Indigenous identity, culture and history.
President Donald Trump’s second term has introduced a series of policies raising concerns for the LGBTQ+ community across the U.S., particularly hindering the welfare of University of Wisconsin students, according to Human Rights Watch.
Founder and President of Interfaith America, Eboo Patel, joined University of Wisconsin Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin to discuss building bridges and fostering community at Tripp Commons March 12.
With a video camera and a $3,000 budget crowdsourced on Kickstarter, he visited two campuses that were in the process of shutting down last summer: UW-Milwaukee at Washington County, which was holding its final classes, and UW-Platteville Richland, where UW was vacating the campus after local officials spent a year fighting to keep it open.
The cicadas will likely be most active in areas ranging from southern Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and parts of western North Carolina, according to P.J. Liesch, director of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab. However, people can expect to spot them as far east as Boston and as far west as southern Indiana, Liesch said.
“Based on historical records, we know there’s going to be a little bit of activity in a few counties in Indiana,” he added. “Those would be about the closest to us up in Wisconsin.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s chief diversity officer made a series of poor financial decisions, including approving substantial salary increases and authorizing excessive travel spending, according to newly released records that shed light on the employee’s demotion earlier this year.
Documentary filmmaker Wendy Sachs was with her daughter Lexi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when she first learned of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack in Israel.
“The images coming out of Israel, babies and children, young people, grandparents being murdered. Their murders were being livestreamed, being put on Facebook. The videos from Telegram of Nova Festival, young people being taken hostage and kidnaped into Gaza,” Sachs said.
“In Japan, fruits are not just food. Fruits really have a lot of symbolic meaning and cultural meaning,” said Soyeon Shim, a scholar of consumer and financial behavior who’s studied the country’s fruit market. “High-end fruits are used as a gift. And gifts are a very important practice in Japan.”
A $19 strawberry isn’t unusual there, said Shim, who’s the dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology. The high-quality fruit is grown in controlled greenhouses and requires a lot of hand labor, she said.
“I wouldn’t ever buy a $19 strawberry to get my daily intake for vitamin C. So it isn’t designed for everyday consumption,” Shim said.
“Some of these surveys allow us to know if people are being successful in college. It tells us where those students are enrolled in college and where they came from. For example, COVID impacted everyone, but it had a disproportionate impact on specific regions in the U.S. and specific social and socioeconomic groups in the U.S.,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“Post-COVID, states and regions have implemented a lot of interventions to help mitigate learning loss and accelerate learning for specific individuals. We’ll be able to know by comparing region to region or school to school whether or not those gaps increased or reduced in certain areas.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison mass communications professor Michael Wagner said the state’s rule about justices making their own decisions about when to recuse themselves from cases makes the election outcome that much more consequential.
“It’s in a presidential swing state, it’s on a swing court,” said Wagner, “and the cases that are going to come before the court are going to be cases where the donors in the election, most notably Elon Musk, have a clear interest and a clear path they want the winning judge to take.”
This canceled grant — which funded research into retirement that informed federal policymaking — has impacted the work of more than 50 people at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, including the termination of five senior researchers, says Ghilarducci, who anticipates more job losses at the other centers.
The math concept hidden in this tree art — geometric shapes known as fractals — is apparent in branching patterns in nature and may be key to humans’ ability to recognize such artwork as trees, according to Mitchell Newberry, a mathematical biologist at the University of New Mexico, and his colleague Jingyi Gao, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin.
Around a hundred University of Wisconsin-Madison students and community members gathered at Library Mall Tuesday for a walkout in support of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine protest leader who was arrested by immigration officials in New York over the weekend.
UW Health doctors will continue to be in-network providers for patients with health insurance from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield until July 1.
Hundreds of students walked out at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in protest of ICE’S detainment of Mahmoud Khalil on March 11.
The University of Wisconsin Havens Wright Center for Justice, in collaboration with the High Road Strategy Center and the South Central Federation of Labor will present Labor Spring 2025, “Get the Scoop: What jobs are really like,” March 14 at the Old Madison Room in Memorial Union from 1-3 p.m.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Tribal Relations Director Carla Vigue describes how a group called “Relatives” offers different types of support to Indigenous students on campus and to student groups.
Five people, including two University of Wisconsin-Madison students, were displaced in an apartment fire in downtown Madison Monday afternoon, according to the Madison Fire Department (MFD).
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Florida have discovered a treatment for placentas deficient in the growth hormone IGF-1 that may soon be going toward human clinical trials.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of 60 universities across the nation that receiving notice Monday from the U.S. Department of Education for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students.
The State Democracy Research Initiative and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Election Research Center hosted an expert panel on Friday to explore funding, impact and the legal context of the upcoming Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
Employees and union leaders are raising concerns about the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s plans to shake up some jobs in the largest college on campus.
This summer, the university is set to move people who work in human resources, finance and research administration out of individual departments and into five “administrative regional teams” that serve all units within the College of Letters & Science.
The committee heard testimony from agencies with employees who telework, including the Department of Public Instruction and the Department of Safety and Professional Services, in addition to the University of Wisconsin System and private-sector companies.
“There’s still a little uncertainty about that, and so to be voting on it (in April) could be additionally confusing to voters,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said.
Prisons, hospitals, nursing homes and other “congregate facilities” can accelerate the spread of respiratory illnesses due to overcrowding, said Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“People aren’t always able to control how much space they can have around others, and so that that is one of the ingredients for the spread of a respiratory virus,” Sethi said.
Evers has broken records for vetoing Republican-sponsored bills, making it highly unlikely he would go along with anything significant the GOAT committee may recommend.
Still, as a committee of the Legislature, it was able to solicit testimony Tuesday from numerous agency heads in Evers’ administration at its first meeting Tuesday. University of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman and Bob Atwell, the founder of Nicolet National Bank, also testified.
Greg Wiercioch, Wood’s longtime lawyer and a University of Wisconsin law professor, said 150 pieces of evidence remained untested, telling the Guardian in an interview on Monday: “It’s incomprehensible why the state is opposing additional testing … They shut it down I think because they’re afraid of what they’ll find out. We have DNA testing, the most powerful crime-fighting tool ever developed, and we’re not using it.”
“It’s tempting to take these great figures of history, these creative and brilliant individuals, and see in them what we want to see,” said Steven Nadler, author of “Rembrandt’s Jews” and a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “With Rembrandt, it’s not just tempting, it’s also comforting, to see him as a friend of the Jews at a particular historical period when Jews did not have a lot of friends in many places.”
“When it comes to predicting outcomes that could harm people, you have a moral obligation to share that information,” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Andrea Lopez Lang said.
Lang — who formerly did consulting work for hedge funds and commodities traders — said she was recruited for at least one high-paying job since leaving the private sector, where she translated weather forecasts into actionable guidance ahead of cold weather outbreaks and other weather phenomena.
The manufacturing sector lost about 75,000 jobs as a direct result of the metals tariffs, according to a 2020 study by University of California, Davis economics professor Kadee Russ and University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Lydia Cox for Econofact.
John Hawks, chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved in the study, called it a “really cool paper.” He added, “It’s always great to see a new fossil, of course, but in this case the fossil helps add something to our knowledge of how some of the first human relatives in Europe were connected to other places.”
While these duties may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper. Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote. These spillover effects hurt other sectors of the economy, ultimately costing jobs.
“It appears that there are forces intent on destroying our existing vaccine enterprise,” says Dr. Jonathan Temte, a professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin who studies vaccine hesitancy. “Defunding research on vaccine hesitancy is the latest example of this effort.”
Trey Wenger, a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin, is funded by the NSF and found himself financially stretched when the agency suddenly halted postdoc stipends, only to be restored by a court order. “I missed a paycheck when rent was due, and remain concerned that my paycheck could be turned off at any time,” wrote Wenger, whose work in astronomy helps us better understand how galaxies form and evolve.
“What we want is animal sheltering organizations to maximize their life-saving potential, and also to help the community help them with their mission,” said Dr. Sandra Newbury, director of the University of Wisconsin Shelter Medicine Program.
There isn’t even the slightest hint of a domestic energy crisis, especially when compared to actual crises that occurred in 1973, 1979 and 2022, Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin’s Energy Institute, told ABC News.
“Prices for gasoline are mid-range over the last, say, 20 years,” Nemet said. “There’s plenty of supply. We’re not having electricity outages. We’re not having lines of gas stations.”
Gov. Tony Evers is recommending the state take a wrecking ball to numerous aging state facilities, including the Green Bay Correctional Institution and UW-Madison’s Mosse Humanities building, as part of his $4.1 billion capital spending plan.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent out letters on Monday to 60 universities, including UW Madison, saying they are under investigation for Anti-Semitic Discrimination and Harassment.
Wisconsin’s largest public university is at risk of losing a portion of their federal funding if they fail to protect Jewish students.
UW-Madison has been warned of potential enforcement actions if they do not fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus, according to a letter sent from the U.S. Department of Education Monday.
Many faculty members spend their academic careers in pursuit of academic tenure, a lifelong guarantee of job security and a shield for academic freedom. But recently, the promise of tenure has proved tenuous for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s College of General Studies (CGS) professors, 35 of whom were laid off in August.
Each April, the University of Wisconsin–Madison holds tryouts to test which hopefuls are up to the task, both physically and creatively. In a role-playing station, candidates don Bucky’s 35-pound head and respond to various scenarios. In a second station, they improvise a minute-long performance using props.
UW-Madison professor Mariel Barnes conducted research into how and why the “manosphere” took political hold, and described her findings and its impacts on politics.
University of Wisconsin Law School professor Zoe Engberg explains why campaigns for state Supreme Court release attack ads that focus primarily on crime and sentencing decisions of their opponents.
The satirical newspaper The Onion was started by UW-Madison students in 1988 and became a comedy institution. We talk to Chad Nackers, editor-in-chief of The Onion, and Christine Wenc, author of of the new book “Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire.”
Donna Friedsam is a researcher emerita who has been studying health care policy and reform for decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Friedsam told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that changes at the federal level could have significant ripple effects at home.
“Many people who are on Medicare, who are low-income, also duly rely on Medicaid to cover things that Medicare does not cover,” Friedsam said. “So, Medicaid is actually quite a wide-ranging program and reaches over a million Wisconsin residents who rely on it.”
