Before the legendary Vel Phillips accomplished her many firsts in the City of Milwaukee and Wisconsin, there was Mabel Emily Watson Raimey.
Raimey was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned a B.A. in English in 1918 and was the first African American woman to attend Marquette University Law School. There is a marker at 11th and Wisconsin honoring her.
Quoted: “There’s a really diminishing number of people who are eligible for parole,” said Walter Dickey, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who led the state’s corrections department from 1983 until 1987. “And most of them have been in prison for a very long time.”
Danielle Yancey will moderate a panel titled “Lasting Impacts: How the Pandemic has Amplified our Health Inequities” on Tuesday, October 11, the second day of the 2022 Wisconsin Leadership Summit.
Danielle Yancey (Menominee/Santee) has worked in public service for nearly twenty years focusing on programs that promote social justice, education access, and equity. Currently, she serves as the director for the Native American Center for Health Professions at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Danielle grew up on the Menominee Indian reservation in north central Wisconsin. She is an alumna of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with undergraduate degrees in women’s studies and social welfare, Master of Science in urban and regional planning, and holds a sustainability leadership graduate certificate from Edgewood College.
Quoted: Warmer air can hold more moisture, and when the conditions are right — like they were last week — the atmosphere will “wring out that moisture,” said Steve Vavrus, a climate and atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison School for Workers professor Don Taylor explains an agreement between UW Health and nurses to halt a planned strike and communicate amid disputes over the legal status of a union campaign.
It was a record-setting night for the University of Wisconsin volleyball team, but there was no storybook ending.
The Badgers set a NCAA regular-season attendance record with 16,833 fans to beat the record of 15,797 Nebraska and Creighton set in Omaha earlier this month. Florida, however, left the building with a 3-2 victory in that was fueled by a strong start and a fifth-set comeback.
Noted: The Canada goose population was so low that when the Endangered Species Act was passed in the U.S. in 1973, “honkers” were given serious consideration of being placed on the inaugural protection list, said Stan Temple, Beers-Bascom professor emeritus in conservation in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology and senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation.
Supporters and nurses gathered at Madison Labor Temple Tuesday evening to celebrate an agreement between UW Health and SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin. The deal announced Monday, which narrowly averted a three-day strike this week, stops short of recognizing the nurses’ union.
Thursday afternoon, a group of alumni, faculty and students from UW-Madison’s art and art history departments will read an open letter outside the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
They’ll be there to protest the mistreatment of artists during this year’s Wisconsin Triennial exhibition, which was the first Triennial in the museum’s history to focus exclusively on the experiences of Black women, femmes, and gender non-conforming artists.
Quoted: Alexia Kulwiec, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers, said she would like to see the federal government return to providing tax incentives for employers who provide paid sick leave for people with Long COVID.
Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, employers providing paid leave for up to two weeks to employees for COVID-19 could receive reimbursements in the form of tax credits, but the program ended in March 2021.
“It’s very disheartening to see that the policies that came out during COVID have essentially been reversed and undone, so they’re not there to protect employees today,” Kulwiec said.
Thursday afternoon outside the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, a group of alumni, faculty and students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s art and art history departments will gather in support of Black women artists.
Why Race Matters, a digital series elevating issues of importance affecting Wisconsin’s Black communities, returns to PBS Wisconsin with four all-new episodes.
In the premiere episode of the new season, available now, Fitzgerald speaks with University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Emerita Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings to discuss the history of Critical Race Theory, what it is and how it’s used in educational settings.
ore than 250 people watched as Ho-Chunk Nation President Marlon WhiteEagle raised the Ho-Chunk Nation flag over the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on Thursday.
The flag, located at UW-Madison’s Bascom Hall, will fly for more than six weeks this fall, starting with one week in September. It will also be flown on Indigenous Peoples Day in October and for the full month of November, which is National Native American Heritage Month.
What Amy Kind observed during her residency as a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston often frustrated and angered her.
She could admit a poor person to the hospital again and again, each time potentially costing tens of thousands of dollars.
“Yet changing someone’s ability to have safe housing — even getting an air conditioner for someone with breathing problems — was not something I could do,” said Kind, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Do you have an old reel of film of your parents’ wedding that could use some help? Or a glitchy VHS tape of your solo in the middle school musical?
The people at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Archives and Film Studies program are here to help — and, maybe, give those home movies a screening of their own.
Dream big? Why not?
That is level to which the University of Wisconsin volleyball program has raised itself. The defending national champion has played in the last three Final Fours, won the last four Big Ten titles and in the past decade has more than doubled its average attendance to 7,200-plus.
The Badgers expect to not only blow away that number but also the attendance record for a NCAA regular-season match when it plays Florida at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Kohl Center. This will be the first match played at the Kohl Center since the 1998 NCAA final and with a capacity of more than 17,000 for basketball, there is more than enough room to beat the record of 15,797 set by Nebraska and Creighton in Omaha earlier this month.
Noted: The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire is also launching a fleet of Kiwibots on campus this fall.
UW-Madison partnered with a different company, Starship Technologies, though the general concept is the same. The university’s 30-bot fleet debuted in November 2019, which turned out to be good timing. The robots offered students a dining option without needing to set foot in a busy dining hall during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last school year, UW-Madison received nearly 80,000 orders, said UW-Madison spokesperson Brendon Dybdahl.
“The Starship robots have become a very popular fixture on our campus,” he said. “Students take pictures with them, help them when they occasionally get stuck, and treat them almost like people.”
Quoted: Jack Williams, a climate scientist and chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Geography, explained that prairie plants, with their deep roots and soil horizons, can store carbon and mitigate climate.
“There’s a lot of below-ground carbon sequestration in grasslands,” Williams said. “So a healthy grassland can also be a good climate mitigation strategy.”
Ellen Damschen, a UW-Madison professor in the department of biology, echoed that view, stressing that it’s important because small, local seed populations are at greater risk of getting wiped out.
“If seeds move, they’re moving their genes. You want to allow population sizes to get bigger, and you want to allow movement between sites,” she said.
Today, a new exhibit is being opened to the public at the Chazen Museum of Art on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The culmination of multiple years of research and planning, the UW-Madison Public History Project exhibit looks to ask questions about the real history of UW-Madison itself. The Public History Project looks to give voice to a lesser-known history of UW-Madison through students, staff, and associates of the university who have been affected by marginalization across identities.
Twelve years after its creation, Wisconsin’s Equity & Inclusion Laboratory (Wei LAB) at the University of Wisconsin—Madison has a new director: Dr. Brian A. Burt.
Burt, a 2019 Diverse Emerging Scholar and associate professor of higher education at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (UW—Madison), was previously assistant director and research scientist at the Wei LAB. He takes the reins from founder Dr. Jerlando F. L. Jackson, who is now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education.
The publication announced its 2022 best college rankings which had UW-Madison at No. 38, tied with the University of California, Davis and the University of Texas at Austin. The Madison campus came in at No. 42 in 2021.
A campus free speech survey that spurred the resignation of a University of Wisconsin System chancellor will be sent to students at all state colleges this fall, according UW System President Jay Rothman.
Noted: Danielle Nabak is the healthy communities coordinator for the University of Wisconsin Extension Milwaukee County’s FoodWIse program. Like some other experts, she prefers the term food apartheid to food deserts because of histories including redlining, economic disinvestment and freeway expansions that isolated marginalized communities.
“I think that really gets at more of the active disinvestment and the active oppression that occurred to create the conditions that we’re really talking about when we talk about a food desert,” Nabak said.
Quoted: Roe, which prohibited states from banning abortion before viability, allowed doctors to offer patients options of how they wanted to be treated. “Now that patient autonomy has gone away,” said Dr. Abigail Cutler, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I’m compelled by my conscience to provide abortion care, and I have the training and the skills to do so compassionately and well,” she said. “And so to have my hands tied and not be able to help a person in front of me is devastating.”
Quoted: You should be concerned about your data privacy in general, especially when seeking an abortion, said Dorothea Salo, a professor who specializes in information security and privacy at the Information School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Be especially wary of most commercial search engines, she said.
“We know they collect and retain search data, including search queries; we know they associate that data with individual searchers; we know they share, aggregate and sell it all over creation; we know that law enforcement agencies access it,” said Salo, who uses DuckDuckGo but notes that other search engines provide similar benefits.
Quoted: David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said head-to-head races also provide more incentive for candidates to directly attack their opponents.
In an at-large race, candidates might hope voters will choose them alongside a variety of other candidates, so attacking other candidates could hurt their own odds.
“If you’re competing across all the candidates, it’s not as likely you’re going to be singling out one person for an attack; rather you’re more likely to be making a positive appeal to your voters about why you should vote for me,” Canon said.
A proposed settlement that would avert a nurses’ strike at one of Wisconsin’s largest hospitals was reached Sunday by the negotiating teams for UW Nurses United and UW Health hospital officials in Madison.
Antisemitic messages were written at various spots across the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on the first day of classes this week, prompting an apology from frustrated administrators at the school, which has a significant Jewish population.
Noted: The panel discussion, held over Zoom, was organized by COWS, the University of Wisconsin center that measures the economy from the perspective of workers. It followed the release last week of COWS’ latest State of Working Wisconsin report. The report’s key finding was that, for many reasons, Wisconsin workers have reached a turning point where they have discovered their potential power to improve the conditions of their jobs.
“It isn’t a time of retreat from work, it is a time of engagement and workers taking this moment to recognize the power they have,” said labor economist Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS and co-author of the report, as she set the stage for the discussion.
Mary Jorgensen, a nurse at UW Health involved in the three-year campaign to reinstate union representation at the health care system, agreed. “We’ve had deteriorating working conditions since we lost our contract in 2014,” Jorgensen said. “The pandemic just exacerbated all the problems that we did have.”
Quoted: Maxine McKinney de Royston, an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that tests were constructed as part of a system that has failed students of color. She also said tests aren’t completely predictive of future success.
“We use these tests to say, ‘Oh, now we’re in crisis,’ as opposed to saying, ‘Well, are we actually evaluating or assessing that which is important to us? Are we actually evaluating learning?” McKinney de Royston said.
Noted: The state has a dire need for teachers; the University of Wisconsin-Madison even pays for tuition and fees for teacher education students who agree to work in the state for several years. But there’s little agreement on what qualifies a teacher to impart reading to youngsters.
What did Yung Gravy wear when he performed in Wisconsin recently? Kwik Trip merch, of course.
On Sunday, the 2017 University of Wisconsin-Madison alum performed at the state’s capitol for Taste of Madison.
Noted: A University of Wisconsin economics professor estimated an annual loss of more than 6,000 jobs and roughly $5 billion in lost economic output due to reduced production or closure of refineries in the Upper Midwest. Experts for the tribe dispute those findings.
Quoted: “The months of August, September and October are a period in which there’s a really rapid transition in the avifauna of Wisconsin,” said Stanley Temple, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus who specializes in birds and wildlife conservation. “Some birds that spent the summer with us are leaving for the winter. Some birds that bred further north during the summer are passing through on their way to wintering grounds further south.”
For students living in foster care, or those who’ve experienced homelessness, navigating college can be daunting. But a program to support those students is expanding across the University of Wisconsin System — in hopes of increasing school success and retention.
Fostering Success began at UW-Stout in 2013. The program is designed to support students by offering help navigating financial aid, academic advising and tutoring. Angie Ruppe, director of the program at UW-Stout, said Fostering Success is important because “the students are deserving.”
Quoted: The effectiveness of methods like goats, mowing and herbicides to control invasive species like buckthorn and bush honeysuckle is something that University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are studying. It’s part of a multi-year project that’s underway at two plots in Sun Prairie and Prairie du Sac.
Researchers are examining how each of those management techniques work when used alone or together, according to Mark Renz, professor and extension specialist in UW-Madison’s agronomy department. He noted a study by researchers at Purdue University in Indiana previously found goat grazing could reduce invasive species over the span of five years.
“So it works, it just takes time,” Renz said. “And the challenge as a land manager like the Brule Forest is trying to figure out is it worth it to do that approach with goats or is an integrated approach better or what works best for their situation?”
Quoted: “It’s a puzzling, probably multi-faceted problem, and getting a handle on it is tough, but it’s not just chimney swifts that are declining,” said Anna Pidgeon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor in forest and wildlife ecology.
“Birds that depend on insects solely for their food for the whole annual cycle are declining as a group. Swifts are not maybe a flagship, but an important one,” Pidgeon said. “They’re pretty conspicuous, and they’re conspicuous in their decline as well.”
As a teenager in the 1990s, Erika Rosales moved from a small town in Mexico to Madison. Then, as she grew older, her immigration status risked creating barriers for her education and work.
Rosales now leads The Center for DREAMers at UW-Madison, which provides resources to immigrants living without documentation across the state.
“I’m happy that I’m at a point where I can support others that have a similar story,” she said.
In October, Rosales collaborated with Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the UW-Madison Law School, to create the DREAMers center. It’s funded by a two-year grant offered from the university.
“We will never turn someone away if they are undocumented,” Barbato said. “If someone contacts a school and says, ‘I want to apply for this program’ — whether it’s law school or medical school — those administrators can contact us for the information before giving someone incorrect information or the runaround.”
With the Fall semester just days away, college students have returned to the Madison area.
And on Sept. 2, 137 of them were cited for underage drinking.
Freshman enrollment at UW-Madison is up 16% compared to last fall. A record 8,465 freshman students will begin studying in just a few days; many of them have already moved in.
Quoted: “A lot of the companies in the United States that practice in the renewables area have shifted a lot of their efforts to large-scale solar design,” said James Tinjum, who researches environmental sustainability and renewable energy at the University of Madison-Wisconsin. “The economics has, in the last decade, made it possible.”
Quoted: According to University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of political science Barry Burden, Republican voters in the state can be quite receptive to candidates who share Trump’s politics, but they do not always vote for such candidates when they don’t explicitly reference him.
“In races where the former president did not make an explicit endorsement such as the contest for attorney general, the ‘trumpier’ did not prevail,” Burden said.
A staffing shortage on the UW-Milwaukee campus led the university to make an unusual ask of its professors: Come help in our dining halls.
Faculty and staff received an email asking for volunteers to clean tables, serve food and replenish buffet bars, all in an effort to keep the thousands of students who moved into dorms last week fed.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center, detailed shifting racial demography and white suburban backlash to the Trump era as central elements to the increasingly leftward tilt of what was once a bastion of Wisconsin conservatism.
“I think the population has changed over time, and that’s has made them (the Milwaukee suburbs) more politically competitive,” Burden said ” There’s also some evidence that white suburban voters became disenchanted with Donald Trump as a Republican candidate. Voters who normally would automatically vote for the Republican candidate for president were not comfortable with Trump.”
There’s a renewed push to restore Academy Award-winning actor Fredric March’s name on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
A student-led group voted in 2018 to remove the UW alum’s name from a theater in Memorial Union because of his association with a student group that shared a name with the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century.
Noted: Loudenbeck graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and previously worked as a chamber of commerce executive, environmental project manager, supervisor in her hometown of Clinton and firefighter before working in the Legislature.
Quoted: Beth Martin is a Professor of Pharmacy Practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As Walgreens continues to struggle with recruiting pharmacists, Martin explained there has been a national decline in students interested in attending pharmacy schools. She said the pandemic has also put a strain on the system, however, that time was also used to push the field forward.
“A lot of our community pharmacists innovated,” Martin said. “They made new connections. They saw new problems to solve, so I think if we all continue to use that frame of reference, that perspective, we can get through this.”
The Latino community is the fastest-growing segment of the population in Wisconsin, but the number of physicians from that community has been declining nationwide over the past 30 years. Fewer than five percent of physicians in the US identify as Hispanic or Latino.
“We know in medicine that if you see a physician that looks like you, that understands culturally where you’re coming from, the health outcomes are better,” UW Health family physician Dr. Patricia Tellez-Girón told Madison365. “But we need to start growing our own because we don’t see that the society at large is really aiming for that.”
Walking down the hallway on the first day of school can be nerve racking for students.
“It’s a large transition between the freedom of flexibility of summer to more of the routine and rhythm of school,” said Dr. Shilagh Mirgain, a Distinguished Psychologist at UW Health.
Dr. Mirgain said anxiety can start to creep up and impact a child’s sleep, mood and focus. However, parents can step in before school starts this week by paying attention to routine.
The head of athletics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this week defended a proposed $300 million practice facility and backed two West Coast teams joining the Big Ten Conference.
UW athletic director Chris McIntosh made the comments Monday during an interview with Shereen Siewert on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Morning Show.”
Glendale-based Sprecher Brewing Co. may not be the first private company to land a name, image and likeness deal with a university student-athlete, but the craft beverage producer known for its Sprecher root beer as well as being the oldest craft brewery in Wisconsin since prohibition, may have produced a first-of-its-kind deal with University of Wisconsin-Madison’s football program.
Noted: Now retired, Skjolaas says she fell into her career as Senior Outreach Specialist with the UW Center for Agricultural Safety and Health quite accidentally. Prior to coming back to the Madison area in 1990, she worked as a 4-H Youth Agent first in Pierce County and then St. Croix County.
Quoted: “We have an opportunity, actually, to sort of prevent this from becoming a long-term issue,” Dr. Dan Shirley, medical director for infection prevention at UW Health, said.
A recent study looked at the relationship between meth and opioid use with non-fatal drug overdoses in rural areas across 10 states, including Wisconsin. We speak with an author of the paper on who uses multiple drugs and how they can best receive treatment, Dr. Randall Brown.
Quoted: UW-Madison education professor Nick Hillman leads a research lab that’s dedicated to understanding how student loan debt impacts borrowers after they leave college.
“1 in 5 are clear of debt in 5 years, 1 in 5 struggling and in default within 5 years, so that means you have 3 in 5 who are kind of in this muddy middle,” he said.
Hillman’s research shows nearly 50 percent of Wisconsinites between the ages of 18 and 34 have student loans, but that steadily decreases among older age groups.
UW Varsity Band Concert 2022, 8 p.m. Monday, Sept. 26
Third-year director Corey Pompey leads the UW Varsity Band through a mix of new material and familiar favorites, including a tribute to the music of Queen and a salute to members of our nation’s armed forces.
Quoted: In such cases, people have a hard time gauging what the majority believes because often the minority tends to be very visible and loud, said Dominique Brossard, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies public perception on controversial science, who was not involved in the study.
“We actually use cues around us to make sense of what’s going on,” said Brossard, so if someone lives in a neighborhood that is fairly conservative, they will tend to think more people are conservative than they are.
Quoted: As someone who’s a registered dietitian who also works in the dairy field, it’s ironic that Andrea Miller deals with lactose intolerance herself. She’s a registered dietitian and outreach program manager for the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“For most people, cultured products as a whole will digest and absorb well because of what they contain (natural enzymes) and the fact that lactose has been eaten up in the process of culturing,” she says.
Noted: “We don’t like to speak about mortality, but it’s a fact of life,” said Henning, who has worked in language preservation for his tribe since graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in linguistics. “We’re going to get to a situation where I’m going to be saying, … ‘I wish I would have asked when they were here.’ “
Noted: Meghan Savaglia is a spokesperson for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s student government group, the Associated Students of Madison. She told Wisconsin Public Radio students have shared a wide range of reactions about the president’s announcement with one wondering if potential students might have thought more about college knowing some of their debts would be forgiven in the future. She said others indicated that loan forgiveness will help them provide better futures for their families.
“I know that there is definitely a push for more, at least from what I’ve seen,” Savaglia said. “While this is a relief in many ways, there’s a long way to go in terms of solving this problem.”
On Aug. 18, the UW System Board of Regents approved a two-year budget request that includes a tuition waiver program for students from low-income families. If approved by the state Legislature, the Wisconsin Tuition Promise would waive tuition costs left over after federal and state financial aid for those from families making less than $62,000 per year in fall of 2023 and beyond.
The program is modeled after UW-Madison’s Bucky’s Tuition Promise program, which has used private donations since 2018 to offer four years of free tuition and fees for students from families with adjusted gross incomes of $56,000 or less.
Former UW System President Tommy Thompson was the first to pitch the statewide tuition waiver as part of his 2020 UW System budget request, but it was rejected by Republican members of the state Legislature’s powerful Joint Finance Committee.
