The excitement inside of a University of Wisconsin-Madison lecture hall Monday morning was comparable to a room full of sports lovers ready for the start of the Super Bowl.
UW-Madison announced on Monday that schools and colleges will be required to cut their budgets by 5% of their allocation in fiscal year 2026.
Deans and vice chancellors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will have to make tough choices in the coming weeks. University leadership on Monday announced budget cuts for the next financial year.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is cutting its budget due to ongoing financial uncertainties stemming from changes to federal funding.
Schools and colleges will face a 5% base budget cut for fiscal year 2026, while administrative units will see a 7% reduction. These cuts are part of efforts to protect the university’s financial viability amid risks like potential federal funding changes and grant terminations.
UW-Madison leaders are telling all departments to reduce their budgets by at least 5% amid a flurry of federal changes shaking up higher education and now further uncertainty surrounding the state’s budget.
Former UW-La Crosse chancellor Joe Gow has a trial date set for his case against the Universities of Wisconsin system and UW-La Crosse leaders.
Pretrial conferences begin June 9, 2026, with the full trial starting June 22. Court documents entered last month suggest the trial will last for five days.
Facing funding cuts from the Trump administration and uncertainty from the Wisconsin Legislature, the leader of the state’s flagship university directed all departments Monday to cut their budgets between 5 percent and 7 percent next year.
While the program was set to end in January 2024, Evers kept it afloat with emergency funding through June 2025.Evers has never vetoed the state budget in full, but he has threatened to do so in previous years over issues like funding cuts for the University of Wisconsin System.Evers said negotiations over UW System funding levels this year are going in the “right direction” but didn’t reveal specifics, other than, “it’s a positive number.” Last week, Vos confirmed his caucus would support an $87 million cut.
Sophia Vento, a 2023 Journal Sentinel intern who is now an associate editor at The Hill in Washington, D.C., had recognized Herndon from my latest Facebook post, and introduced herself. Vento, a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate, wanted me to know she and Herndon were bonding over their time at the Journal Sentinel.
Sophie Pokela just graduated from the University of Wisconsin with an English degree — and a rigorous education in nutrition.
Pokela grew up thinking she was a healthy eater because she mostly chose foods packed with protein and fiber. It dawned on her a year into college that she didn’t actually know much about what she was consuming.
There’s got to be a convincing reason you’re going to give money to a total stranger, so the “police” text or call you to say that your college kid is in jail, and if you want them out, pay up bail money (which happened earlier this year to parents of University of Wisconsin-Madison students). Or a fake lawyer will contact an immigrant and say they can help them become citizens for very real fees.
The University of Wisconsin and its athletics collective are challenging another school’s alleged poaching of a football player the Badgers had under contract.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association penalized the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s football program last week, citing recruiting violations from spring of 2023.
UW-Madison political science professor Mark Copelovitch discusses how the unstable landscape of tariffs and war abroad disrupt both the overall global marketplace and the everyday lives of American consumers.
Since finishing her residency at Loyola University Chicago / Cook County Hospital in 2015, she has been an attending physician with the US Department of Veterans Affairs in Salt Lake City and a clinical assistant professor at UW-Madison, practicing with UW Health.
Edgar Lin is Wisconsin State Policy Advocate & Counsel at Protect Democracy, where he focuses on policy advocacy and litigation related to preventing election subversion. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Law School.
Enjoy a moment in Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum.
Many might have seen this coming. The Miami Hurricanes are being sued by the University of Wisconsin over Xavier Lucas and how he was brought to Coral Gables.
The Xavier Lucas saga is far from over.
Yahoo Sports reported June 20 that the University of Wisconsin and its NIL collective, the Varsity Collective, are suing the University of Miami for what is termed tortious interference with the former Badgers cornerback who is now a part of the Miami Hurricanes football team.
ANITA was designed to search for the highest energy neutrinos in the universe, at higher energies than have yet been detected, said Justin Vandenbroucke, an associate professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The experiment’s radio antennae search for a short pulse of radio waves produced when a neutrino collides with an atom in the Antarctic ice, leading to a shower of lower-energy particles, he said.
Some of the most important political coalitions for Democrats emerge on this map, especially in comparison with 2000. The 2024 map shows the birth of Democratic vote powerhouses in majority-Black DeKalb and Clayton counties in Georgia and in Wisconsin’s Dane County, home of Madison and the University of Wisconsin, with its heavily white and college degree-holding population. Both coalitions are essential to Democratic wins in those states in recent elections.
When I approached graduation from Lake Forest College, I felt lost. How could I blend my passions into a career? I found the answer during a research internship at Rush University on a project funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease. Today, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I am a doctoral candidate in epidemiology, the field that works to understand and reduce disease. My research and training are largely supported by the National Cancer Institute.
The leader of Wisconsin’s 13 public universities said without additional funding in the next state budget, he expects more branch campus closures, decreased affordability for students, layoffs and program cuts.
“All of which will hit hardest at our most vulnerable UWs,” Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman said on social media this week.
“The models that we’re seeing right now are able to create content that is incredibly persuasive, and incredibly hard to detect as AI generated. It’s impossible to predict just how corrosive this will be to political discourse in this country,” said Annette Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It’s just not feasible for ordinary citizens to do a ton of extra research on which content is actually legitimate.
“One of the things that you can see as a symptom of cyanide poisoning is someone having difficulty breathing,” said John Berry, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This happens very quickly.”
Berry said cyanide, which used to be in rat poisons because of its potency, can be combined with other substances to form gasses or salts that can dissolve in water. He also pointed out that cyanide is extremely difficult for someone outside of a research lab to get their hands on.
One in four Wisconsin child care providers could close their doors if the state support for centers ends in June, according to a survey of child care providers commissioned by the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) and produced by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I worry that it is being done too quickly, without appropriate scrutiny of the potential outcomes,” said UW-Madison’s Dr. Jonathan Temte.
The decision sent shockwaves throughout medical and public health circles, with Dr. Jonathan Temte, former committee chair and an associate dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health, calling the removals, “totally unprecedented.”
Assembly GOP leaders said they’ve had “productive conversations towards a budget that cuts taxes, puts more money into K-12 schools to stave off higher property taxes, and funds childcare and the university system in exchange for meaningful reforms.”
Newly uncovered evidence from fossil corals suggests that sea levels could rise even more steeply in our warming world than previously thought.
“This is not good news for us as we head into the future,” says Andrea Dutton, a professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dutton and her PhD student Karen Vyverberg at the University of Florida led an international collaboration that included researchers from University of Sydney, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Victoria University of Wellington and University of Massachusetts Amherst who analyzed fossilized corals discovered in the Seychelles islands.
Professor John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told MailOnline: “Harbin gives us a strong indication that some of them are large, with large skulls.
“But we have some good reasons to suspect that Denisovans lived across quite a wide geographic range, from Siberia into Indonesia, and they may have been in many different environmental settings.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they are as variable in body size and shape as people living across the same range of geographies today.”
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said his caucus supports cutting $87 million from the UW system, but wouldn’t say if that’s the final proposal the budget committee will take up. The system has said it needs additional funding and Evers had requested $855 million in his proposal for it. Vos says Republicans want “reform” of the UW for the “broken process that we currently have.”
I also studied my good friend Jason Gay’s recent commencement speech at the University of Wisconsin. He didn’t just talk in abstract, he showed proof. Next commencement season, we’re offering a WSJ columnist 2-for-1 deal. Steve Carell has nothing on us.
John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the studies delivered a definitive answer to the question of the Harbin skull’s identity. “Mystery solved,” he said.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told reporters Wednesday afternoon the Republican caucus supports a roughly $80 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System budget, saying the reform is needed to fix the “broken” process currently in place.
Very few long-term studies of psilocybin for depression have been conducted to date, said Dr. Charles Raison, a professor of human ecology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the research.
“They are very difficult to do because people drop out,” Raison told Live Science in an email. “But also because they go on all sorts of other treatments that obfuscate the degree to which any longer lasting benefits result from the psychedelic or because the participant got therapy or restarted an antidepressant.”
“I think we’ll learn a lot about what the capabilities of various A.I. protocols are from how well we can get them to generate material that’s of interest,” said Jordan S. Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is part of a team applying for an Exponentiating Mathematics grant. “We have no intuition yet about which problems are going to be hard and which problems are easy. We need to learn that.”
Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said the impact was disappointing last year, especially given the amount of work exhibitors put into getting an animal ready for show.
“I’m hoping that with one year of experience under their belt, they feel more comfortable to be able to submit that testing and make sure that we have robust cow classes in these shows,” said Poulsen, whose lab processes all of the avian flu samples taken in the state. “It’s part of our culture, and we missed that last year.”
We get an insect update from UW-Madison entomologist PJ Liesch. Then, we learn about a collaboration between a children’s book author and The Nature Place in La Crosse. And then, we talk about the resilience of the Northwoods with two leaders from The Nature Conservancy.
“The income tax proposals cost the state a fair amount of money, but it’s not a huge share of the state budget,” said Ross Milton, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The flip side of that is that the impacts to any given household in Wisconsin in terms of how much money they’ll save on income taxes are pretty modest.”
The Morgridge Institute for Research, or MIR, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has always been a bit of a mystery to me, and not just because the scientific research that goes on there exceeds my limited grasp of biology, chemistry and physics. (Or the fact that the building it shares with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, or WID, is at the nearly-impossible-to-navigate intersection of University Avenue, Campus Drive, North Randall Avenue and North Orchard Street.)
Republicans who control the state Legislature are considering cutting funding to the University of Wisconsin System by $87 million as they build a new two-year state budget that may require Democratic votes to pass.
Already, a group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Realta Fusion, a Madison-based nuclear startup, have developed a fusion device in Stoughton that creates the same kind of reaction that fuels the sun and stars. The process is much different than fission, the nuclear reaction that powers current nuclear reactors and the atomic bomb.
The effect on U.S. forecasting will be “like losing your eyesight: slow and torturous,” said Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin.
Americans who have grown up amid the “unheralded revolution” of ever-more-precise weather forecasts will find themselves in a world growing blurrier — even as the weather grows ever more volatile, Martin added.
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.
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.
For the second time in two days, authorities accompanied by hazardous materials teams swarmed a residential area in Madison Tuesday, this time just west of Camp Randall Stadium. A third hazmat investigation happened on Schroeder Road.
“AGE-PRO provides the first measurements of gas disk masses and sizes across the lifetime of planet-forming disks,” research principal investigator Ke Zhang, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement.
First, we talk with civics educator Sam Scinta about the importance of civic learning. Then, attorney John Scott is with us to talk about legal issues associated with condo ownership. Finally, Bassam Shakhashiri is back to talk about fireworks, plus other current issues in science.
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.
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.
Earlier 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.
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.”
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.
Lawmakers writing the state budget delayed a vote on the University of Wisconsin System, with Republican legislative leaders declining to explain why.
Committee co-chairs Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, and Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, wouldn’t elaborate on why the vote was pulled from the June 17 schedule.
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.
Leonard first came in 1990, as keynote speaker for the first University of Wisconsin–Madison Writers’ Institute. Leonard was famous by then, having landed on the cover of Newsweek around the 1985 publication of his novel “Glitz.”
The institute was produced by the UW–Madison Division of Continuing Studies. They had no budget for speakers. But “Get Shorty” had just been published, and Leonard was headed from his Detroit-area home to the west coast to promote it.
“I’ll put you on my book tour,” Leonard told UW writing instructor Christine DeSmet. They need only pay expenses. “He was so kind,” DeSmet told me, years later.
The latest shift for McIntosh and his department came June 6 when federal judge Claudia Wilken signed off on the settlement of the House v. NCAA antitrust lawsuits, a decision that opened the door for schools sharing revenue with their athletes, sets roster limits, and enacts additional oversight over athletes’ commercial NIL agreements. McIntosh — who testified in front of a Congressional subcommittee on March 11 on the House settlement and the state of college sports — said the settlement laid out the path to what college sports leaders want.
Annemarie Hickey’s long run with the University of Wisconsin volleyball program ended, but she won’t have to travel far for her new job.
Hickey, who played for the Badgers before becoming an assistant coach, recently accepted an assistant coaching job with LOVB Madison.
How much exercise is needed to counter the several hours of sitting we do every day? Our two regular physical therapists break it down. Then, we talk to a UW-Madison researcher about the science of color.
University of Wisconsin senior Jason Swarens got inspiration from a diversion on the eve of winning the NCAA outdoor shot put championship last week in Eugene, Oregon.
He went to the movies.
