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Author: knutson4

Wisconsin Union’s inaugural chef-in-residence brings more vegan, vegetarian options to campus

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The Daily Cardinal

Chef Lauren Montelbano has worked as Wisconsin Union’s first chef-in-residence since last April, expanding vegetarian and vegan options across Union restaurants and collaborating with Union chefs to develop recipes and culinary programs for the Madison community.

Over the past year, she designed dishes for the catering menus, Grab ‘N’ Go areas and the Rathskeller and hosted a cooking demo and class through WUD Cuisine to teach more about vegan food preparation.

“I had the opportunity to collaborate and learn from the highly skilled and talented chefs that have made the Union their home,” Montelbano said. “Their attention to detail, passion for teaching and ability to manage multiple high volume businesses at once was inspiring to witness and be a small part of.”

UW-Madison, WARF open San Francisco office to boost campus startups

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Wisconsin State Journal

Entrepreneurs launching startups through UW-Madison and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation will soon have a larger presence on the West Coast.

The university and WARF, the campus’ nonprofit patent licensing arm, are partnering with seven other schools to open a two-year pilot workspace in San Francisco that university-founded startups and teams traveling to the Bay Area can use for work and to meet with investors.

Hmong American Peace Academy received national recognition for exceptional performance. How did it do it?

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Wisconsin Watch

Angelina Vang said she knew she wanted to go to college since her freshman year.

She has choices – she’s been accepted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Loyola University and DePaul University. She’s looking to study medicine and become an emergency physician.

The office has also supported Yang, who plans to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“A lot of the students here are first generation,” Yang said. “Having that support really builds our self-esteem and making sure that we know what we want to do in the future and how we can go to college or enter the workforce.”

UW scientists genetically editing Badger hemp lines with USDA approval

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WKOW - Channel 27

Scientists at the Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center are pioneering the future of hemp farming. Researchers at UW-Madison have received deregulation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for 3 gene-edited hemp lines, allowing field cultivation without special permits.

Senior research scientist Mike Petersen explained they use a tool called CRISPR to gently edit the plant’s DNA, giving it traits like no THC or resistance to disease. Back in November 2025, the first line approved was Badger G, high in CBG, and known to reduce inflammation and other pharmaceutical benefits.

Wisconsin legislature advances $14.6 million funding bill for UW athletics NIL program

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Channel 3000

Wisconsin lawmakers moved closer to providing millions in taxpayer funding to help the University of Wisconsin-Madison athletics department compete in the evolving landscape of college sports name, image and likeness programs.

The Joint Finance Committee approved Bill 1034 on Wednesday afternoon in an 8-5 bipartisan vote, advancing legislation that would allocate $14.6 million to UW athletics. The bill could reach the Senate floor as soon as next week.

UW-Madison faculty union calls for removal of Flock security cameras

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Channel 3000

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department’s use of Flock security cameras has sparked privacy concerns among faculty and staff, leading to calls for the surveillance technology to be removed from campus.

UW-Madison police adopted the security cameras in July 2025. The department said the cameras help with investigations by identifying license plates and vehicles, but do not identify faces, people, gender or race. The system captures photos rather than videos.

Evers calls for special Legislative session to ban partisan gerrymandering

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The Daily Cardinal

When Evers called Republican lawmakers in the past for special sessions, they often gavel in and out within seconds to avoid taking action. But University of Wisconsin-Madison political science Professor Barry Burden said this special session might have potential among Republicans.

The amendment is more of an “idea of wanting to end partisan gerrymandering,” not necessarily about the process, Burden said, adding that the amendment has to move through the legislature, campaigning and voter ballots before it could be approved.

“It’s a long, complicated set of steps. But I think for the moment, it’s still a live issue and has some potential,” Burden said.

‘Mathematicians are just going crazy’: YouTuber 3Blue1Brown packs UW lecture hall, talks high-dimensional spheres

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The Daily Cardinal

A crowd of over 400 gathered in Van Vleck Hall to hear Grant Sanderson, a STEM content creator known by his YouTube handle 3Blue1Brown, talk about high-dimensional spheres in a Feb. 13 event hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Math Club.

Sanderson’s UW-Madison talk was titled: “Who cares about high-dimensional spheres?” Enough people, a UW-Madison math club member joked, to “outdraw the Harry Styles pre-album release listening party.”

Women’s History Month: Honoring Vel Phillips, a Wisconsin trailblazer

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WMTV - Channel 15

A statue of Vel Phillips stands at the corner of Main and Carroll streets in Madison — the only statue of a Black woman on the grounds of the Wisconsin State Capitol.

Phillips, who became the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s law school in 1951, built a career defined by historic firsts in Wisconsin politics and civil rights.

In Antarctica, UW-Madison researchers answer questions about the hidden giants of our universe

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The Daily Cardinal

“When the neutrino interacts in the ice, it shatters an atom and the splinters from that direction are a lot of energetic subatomic particles,” UW-Madison professor of physics and astronomy — and frequent IceCube collaborator — Justin Vandenbroucke said. “A fraction of those have electric charge, and they make a flash of blue light.”

Legislative committee advances funds so UW-Madison can pay student athletes

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Wisconsin Public Radio

The Legislature’s budget committee voted Wednesday to give more than $14 million a year to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for athletic facilities costs as the sports powerhouse pays student athletes for “name, image, likeness” deals, known as NIL.

But the vote on the GOP-led Joint Finance Committee suggests the legislation will require Democratic votes to get over the finish line in the Senate.

UW-Madison international students navigate uncertain federal policies

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The Daily Cardinal

As recent changes to immigration policy under the Trump administration lead to a decline in foreign student enrollment across the country, some current and prospective international students feel uncertain about their future in the U.S.

The U.S. saw its largest decline in foreign enrollment in a decade, excluding the COVID-19 pandemic, as international enrollment for the 2025-26 academic year fell by 17%.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, freshman international enrollment declined by 30%, with only 325 students joining this academic year compared to 506 students the year before.

Former Milwaukee-based artist creates installation for Obama Center

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Before she was commissioned by the Obamas, she made her mark in Milwaukee contributing work to Shepard Fairey’s “Voting Rights are Human Rights” mural on the north side of the Colby Abbot building, 759 N. Milwaukee St.

In 2010, she received her master’s in fine arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Two years later, she became the first Black woman to win the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for individual artists. In 2015, she won the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Love of Humanity award.

Wisconsin Film Festival features ‘September’ songwriter documentary

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The Cap Times

“The World According to Allee Willis” will be screened as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival on April 10 at the Chazen Museum of Art. Fenton, an award-winning creative visualist and writer (she’s won three Emmys and a Grammy) and Willis’ longtime partner, will lead a discussion after the screening.

Willis grew up in Detroit in the 1950s during the height of Motown and was heavily inspired by the music coming out of the city. She studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before moving to Los Angeles.

Academic Staff approve resolution opposing Flock Safety cameras on UW-Madison campus

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WKOW - Channel 27

Academic staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison approved a resolution Monday opposing the university’s use of license plate reader cameras operated by the company Flock Safety.

The resolution, written by Barrett Elward, Co-President of the United Faculty and Academic Staff Union, raises concerns about privacy and the potential for widespread data collection.

Prescribing improv to improve patient-doctor relationships

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Amy Zelenski, associate professor and director of Education Innovation and Scholarship at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, teaches an elective class in improvisational theater.

She recently visited WPR’s “The Larry Meiller Show” to discuss the relationship between improv and improving health care.

“I started my career working with medical residents, and I realized that they could say the words, but they were struggling with the connection piece,” Zelenski recalled.

Survey: Fewer than 10 percent of UW-Madison faculty are conservative

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Fewer than 10 percent of faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison identify as conservative, while 70 percent identify as liberal, according to a new poll from the school’s Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership.

The study surveyed 2,388 tenured and tenure-track faculty across all of UW–Madison’s schools and colleges on ideological composition, campus climate, academic freedom, free expression and hiring.

Trump cuts upend UW-Madison students’ plans and research projects

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The Cap Times

The Trump administration disrupted university research last year by canceling grants, delaying new awards and seeking other policy changes that put millions of dollars in jeopardy both in and beyond Wisconsin.

“There continues to be great volatility and uncertainty around federal funding, which is our largest single source of external revenue,” Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said at a campus meeting last month.

American Family Field may go second straight year without big concert

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The dry spell is a swift reversal from back-to-back blockbuster years for concerts at American Family Field in 2023 and 2024.

It’s also happening as another Wisconsin stadium has entered the concert picture.

Camp Randall Stadium, home of the University of Wisconsin Badgers football program, hosted its first concerts since 1997 last year with Wallen and Coldplay, and has an AC/DC concert scheduled July 19. On top of that, Lambeau Field is back in the live music business – hosting its first concerts since 2019 with Luke Combs May 15 and 16 – with the Green Bay Packers’ new CEO and President Ed Policy vowing to book more events.

How UW-Madison’s WSUM became the best campus radio station in the country

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Wisconsin State Journal

On Feb. 21, the station took home one of the highest awards in college journalism: the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System named WSUM the best college station in the nation.

Kelsey Brannan, the director of student radio at WSUM — one of the station’s two full-time employees — said WSUM’s students provide listeners with authentic shows and music that aren’t replicated on other stations or streaming services.

“You’re hearing students bring in music that you’re not hearing anywhere else,” Brannan said. “They’re telling news stories from their perspective that you’re not getting from the national news or even local outlets — it’s a really unique perspective. You’re hearing sportscasters who are students who are calling the games that their peers are participating in. There’s something really special about that.”

Bird flu outbreaks hit Wisconsin egg producer again, millions of hens impacted

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Wisconsin State Farmer

Ron Kean, University of Wisconsin-Madison’s poultry specialist, told Wisconsin Public Radio that poultry producers are also growing frustrated by a lack of solutions in this new era of avian flu response.

“There’s going to have to be more work on vaccination, which is a big international political issue,” he said. “That I think is one of the big frustrations for the poultry industry.”

Wisconsin family navigates loss of gender-affirming care at UW Health

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Wisconsin Public Radio

In December, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to bar hospitals from providing “sex-rejecting” services for youth under 18.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says that children may experience “irreversible damage” when exposed to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical operations at a young age — for example, infertility, impaired sexual function, diminished bone density and other irreversible physiological effects.

As a result, UW Health and Children’s Wisconsin halted what the health organization calls gender-affirming care in January.  If hospitals didn’t abide by federal rules, they would lose funding for Medicare and Medicaid.

Mount Mary offers a 3-year bachelor’s degree. Universities of Wisconsin could follow.

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Wisconsin Public Radio

This year, Mount Mary University became the first college in Wisconsin to offer a reduced-credit bachelor’s degree.

The Universities of Wisconsin could soon follow.

Last week, the Board of Regents Education Committee unanimously approved revising a policy that would allow campuses to offer 90-credit degrees.

The approval on March 5 did not yet establish three-year degrees.

Pass NIL bill, Wisconsin Badgers athletics director urges lawmakers

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The Cap Times

If state lawmakers don’t pass a college sports bill in the coming weeks, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s athletics department anticipates facing difficult financial decisions.

“Either we will need to reevaluate our expectations on the success of our sports, or we will need to reevaluate how they’re supported or how many of them exist,” Chris McIntosh, UW-Madison’s athletics director, said at a legislative hearing this month.

A critique of the new UW-Madison faculty survey

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Inside Higher Ed

A new report by Alex Tahk, director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reveals the results of an important survey of UW Madison faculty. But there are serious problems with the survey questions, and we need to be careful not to adopt Tahk’s claims about “ideological imbalance and its consequences” uncritically.

UW Athletic Hall of Fame has a new home

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The Daily Cardinal

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Athletic Hall of Fame will have a new, permanent home outside of the Kohl Center, according to a UW Athletics press release. Construction is set to begin early spring and be completed in time for the 2026 Hall class next September.

UW-Madison faculty pressure leaders to remove on-campus Flock AI cameras

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Wisconsin State Journal

A group of UW-Madison faculty and staff is putting pressure on campus police to remove AI-powered license plate-reading surveillance cameras.

UW-Madison installed eight cameras in July 2025 from the Atlanta-based company, Flock Safety. The company operates a network of automated cameras that monitor 24/7 and capture images of the rear of passing cars.

New professorship recognizes Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy

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Madison Magazine

Anna Andrzejewski, an art historian who arrived at UW–Madison in the early 2000s, is the first holder of the Wright professorship, which was inaugurated on July 1, 2025.

Andrzejewski has taught a course on Wright’s architecture and writings since 2016. The endowed professorship — which she calls “utterly transformative and inspiring” — will enhance and expand Andrzejewski’s Wright-related teaching and research while supporting student field trips to Wright-designed buildings in the region.

Latest Wisconsin Supreme Court case flips the script on which judges strictly interpret the law

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Wisconsin Watch

The law in question has been wrapped up in a yearslong debate over separation of powers that has made its way to justices in recent years, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. In many of those cases, the Supreme Court opinions have shown the justices interested in balanced branches of government.

“There seems to be an inclination to reinstate greater separation of powers between the branches and preserve the important roles of various actors, whether that’s the attorney general or the governor or the Legislature,” Godar said.

The internet is calling this type of men worse than gold diggers

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HuffPost

“It’s not labor digging if it’s mutually beneficial: He agrees to provide financial resources, and she agrees to make the home a haven,” said Allison Daminger, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of “What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life.”

“I’d probably label something like that ‘specialization,’ which has been around for a long time,” she said.

This weird winter was one of the warmest — and coldest — on record. It’s a glimpse of our future

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CNN

Jonathan Martin, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been tracking the size of this cold pool, tracing it back to when such reliable data began in the 1940s. Martin views the long-term cold pool data as a unique indicator of human-caused climate change.

“It’s one of the first free atmosphere, that is, away from the surface … measurements that conclusively show that the hemisphere is warming during the wintertime,” he said.

“The dice are loaded,” Martin said. As the world warms, it’s clear that cold pools are likely to keep shrinking and winters of the future are more likely to keep breaking warmth records.

Book Review: ‘The Opinionated University’

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Inside Higher Ed

“As I argue in a new essay for Inquisitive magazine, institutional neutrality as originally formulated by the University of Wisconsin in 1894 is a concept that protects academic freedom by prohibiting colleges from punishing or condemning faculty for their political views. The issue of affirmative institutional statements is a much later, and more minor, concern. But when a university condemns certain political stands, it inevitably creates the danger of suppressing those ideas.”

“Universities ought to return to the 1894 University of Wisconsin approach to the opinionated university, where academic freedom is so important that even denouncing a professor violates standards of neutrality. But when the concept of institutional neutrality is abused by politicians and administrators to silence faculty, then it becomes a cure worse than the disease. Soucek’s book recognizes these dangers and provides a thoughtful approach to trying to address the problems inherent in the inevitable opinions of a university.”

 

Gen Z men twice as likely as Boomers to believe a woman should obey her husband

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SheKnows

Mariel Barnes, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of public affairs whose research has focused on the effects of the “manosphere,” says that the latest survey results were to be expected, as she has seen “a pattern of continued misogyny and patriarchy through multiple surveys in last decade,” she says. “I think social media plays a huge role and needs to take a lot of responsibility.”

Teen boys are using ChatGPT as their wingman. What could go wrong?

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Vox

Some young people are using chatbots “to test out being flirty or being romantic or being a little bit sexy and seeing how the chatbot responds to that,” Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies technology and adolescent health, told me.

That kind of experimentation may be more common among boys, who generally engage in more risky behavior online than girls, Moreno said.

The best bamboo sheets of 2026, tried and tested

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CNN

Bamboo is more absorbent and “can hold more moisture without feeling wet, compared to cotton,” Majid Sarmadi, textile expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

So are these sheets actually bamboo? Technically, yes. They’re made from the bamboo plant, but that’s not the full picture. Sarmadi compared the process of creating bamboo rayon to making spaghetti noodles. “When you make spaghetti, it is 100% wheat, but it’s in a different shape,” Sarmadi said. In short, you grind wheat into flour, then mix it with other ingredients to create dough. So, think of bamboo cellulose as wheat. There are different ways to extract and treat it, but the cellulose eventually becomes the yarn you weave into fabric. The result is far different from bamboo stock, but it’s still part of the origin.

UW campuses can start offering 3-year bachelor’s degrees, Board of Regents says

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Wisconsin State Journal

Wisconsin’s public universities are now allowed to offer reduced-credit, three-year degrees — joining dozens of schools across the country finding alternatives to traditional four-year bachelor’s programs.

The UW Board of Regents on Thursday approved policy changes allowing the Universities of Wisconsin’s schools to develop the degrees, which typically require students to take 90 credits to earn a bachelor’s degree, rather than a minimum of 120.

Madison immigration law center expanding as staff steels itself to continue fight against Trump

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Wisconsin Examiner

CILC’s legal director, Aissa Olivarez, grew up in the Rio Grande valley near the U.S.-Mexico border. After five years teaching first grade, she attended law school at UW-Madison with the intention of practicing immigration law. She has stayed in Wisconsin because she saw a greater need here than in her home state of Texas, where there’s already robust infrastructure to assist immigrants.

UW requires students to report vaccination records

Posted on
The Badger Herald

As of Thursday, Feb. 12, a new University of Wisconsin policy requires its students to share their vaccination status amidst the recent measles outbreak.

Despite some confusion, according to Jake Baggott, Associate Vice Chancellor & Executive Director of University Health Services, students are not required to be vaccinated but rather obligated to share their status for specific vaccinations, such as Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR), Varicella (Chicken Pox), Hepatitis B and more, according to the UHS Vaccination Records website.