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UW-Madison under second investigation by Trump administration amid federal DEI crackdown

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

Doctors see influx of requests for long-acting reversible contraception

WKOW - Channel 27

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.

Indigenous ribbon skirts make a modern statement

Madison Magazine

R​​ibbon 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.

New film documents the closure of two-year college campuses in Wisconsin

Wisconsin Public Radio

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.

Will cicadas swarm Wisconsin again this year? What to expect with spring pests

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.”

 

New documentary shows the alarming connection between Hamas and campus protests

FOX News

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.

$19? We might be at peak strawberry

MarketPlace

“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.

Layoffs gut Federal Education Research Agency

Inside Higher Ed

“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.”

WI’s ‘nonpartisan’ Supreme Court race is anything but

Public News Service

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.”

Trees in art, as well as life, often follow simple mathematical rules, study finds

CNN

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.

UW-Madison unions, employees worry about administrative centralization

The Cap Times

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.

Deaths of 2 prisoners at Taycheedah occurred during uptick in flu cases

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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.

Wisconsin’s DOGE-inspired effort gets off to more collegial start

Associated Press

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.

Texas court blocks execution of David Wood two days before scheduled killing

The Guardian

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.”

Drawing on Dutch masters, NY exhibit explores Christians painting themselves into Purim parable

The Times of Israel

“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.”

Hedge funds paying up to $1 million for weather modelers

Bloomberg

“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.

Fragments of a face more than a million years old found in Spanish cave

The Washington Post

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.”

Is anyone coming out on top of Donald Trump’s tariff wars? Economists weigh in

The Latin Times

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.

NIH cuts off more research funding, including for vaccine hesitancy. mRNA may be next

NPR

“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.”

Federal research instability risks postdoc careers, American leadership

STAT

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.

Why the Trump administration is wrong about an energy crisis in the US

ABC News

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.”

UW-Madison at risk of losing federal funding over discrimination investigations

WTMJ

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.

The UW System is required to support tenured faculty they laid off. Faculty say they haven’t done enough

The Daily Cardinal

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.

Who is Bucky Badger?

Madison Magazine

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.

Cuts to Medicaid would affect wide range of Wisconsin residents, researcher says

Wisconsin Public Radio

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.”

Feds warn UW of “potential enforcement actions” over alleged antisemitism at campus protest

Madison 365

The federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating the University of Wisconsin-Madison for antisemitism, according to a press release issued Monday.

UW is one of 60 institutions that received letters “warning them 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, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities,” according to the release.

Gov. Evers seeks $4 billion for state building projects, including UW science facilities and new juvenile prison

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers wants to spend about $4 billion on state building upgrades across Wisconsin under a plan released Monday.

If approved, about $1.6 billion would go to the University of Wisconsin System for brick-and-mortar building projects. Other big-ticket items include $634 million for the Department of Corrections, $137 million for upgrades to veteran homes and $40 million to restore the state Capitol building.

Tariffs are ‘lose-lose’ for U.S. jobs and industry, economist says: ‘There are no winners here’

CNBC

While tariffs’ protection 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.

COVID-19’s fifth anniversary: 5 areas where life changed in U.S.

Deseret News

As the Journal Sentinel reported, quoting Sedona Chinn, an assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at University of Wisconsin-Madison, folks who were frustrated started doing their own research, but it also “led to more misinformation and more anti-expert bias, making it all the much harder for solid science to break through.”

Fennimore farmers work to reduce dairy intolerance through products

WMTV - Channel 15

Researchers explain that some people have a reduced ability to chop up and absorb lactose. UW Madison’s Center for Dairy Research is hoping to continue to learn more about the future of dairy digestion.

“There is weak evidence at the moment that this change in the moving from what is typically A1 to A2, that there’s a difference in potential difference in how the body digestive,” Dr. John Lucey, the center’s director said.