UW Health does not have to recognize a union that nurses have fought to restore, according to a ruling from the state’s labor commission released Friday.
The decision is a setback for the health care workers who have spent the last few years pushing for recognition. However, the effort is far from over.
The University of Wisconsin women’s volleyball team once again earned a bid to the NCAA tournament for the 10th-straight season.
The team was selected as the top regional seed and No. 3 seed overall.
For the first time ever, an international team of scientists has traced neutrinos coming from the galaxy NGC 1068 in the constellation Cetus. The “ghost particles” appear to be accelerated toward Earth by a supermassive black hole.
In a scientific breakthrough, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s 1-billion-ton IceCube Neutrino Observatory, buried around 1 mile under the ice at the South Pole, detected the neutrinos.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has hired Luke Fickell as its new head football coach. Fickell comes to Wisconsin from the University of Cincinnati’s football program and will replace interim Badgers coach Jim Leonhard.
A proposed development that would bring a new soccer stadium to downtown Milwaukee should include guarantees of good wages and a path to union representation for workers in the stadium district in return for public subsidies, a new report recommends.
The report, “Worker Power Levels the Playing Field,” was released Tuesday by COWS, a think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It says taxpayer-funded support for the proposed Milwaukee soccer stadium project, dubbed the Iron District, should come with strings that ensure local hiring and strong job standards even after the project is built out.
“It’s important for Milwaukee to see itself as a national leader in this way and to reapply the lessons from the Deer District as new development is considered,” says Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS. Dresser is coauthor of the report along with Pablo Aquiles-Sanchez, a COWS research analyst.
University of Wisconsin officials on Monday posted five job openings involving the football program, including three coaching positions.
Both coordinator positions have been posted, as well as an assistant coaching position, the head of strength and conditioning and an assistant strength and conditioning position.
Noted: At UW-Madison, the most selective school in the state, it’s too early to say what, if any, academic recovery will be needed, according to John Zumbrunnen, the university’s vice provost for teaching and learning. There hasn’t been a spike in tutoring sessions. Nor has there been a higher rate of D and F grades awarded. But the university offered two semesters of a pass/fail grading policy, which “muddies the data picture for us.”
That’s not to say Zumbrunnen hasn’t fielded concerns from some instructors. In math, there’s been a slightly larger share of students placing into pre-calculus instead of calculus. A STEM instructor told him this year’s crop of students scored lower on a basic exam than in past years. He’s heard from a social sciences instructor who felt that students this fall weren’t quite as ready to read at a college level than in past years.
Luke Fickell’s coaching staff will be a work in progress for the next few weeks.
One area that the University of Wisconsin’s new football coach plans to hit the ground running is recruiting.
Fickell was set to return to Cincinnati on Monday night and when he gets back to town Tuesday is expected to bring a couple of key pieces of his old staff: recruiting assistants Max Stienecker and Pat Lambert.
Quoted: “It just is really not possible to engage in much fraudulent activity without being noticed very quickly,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS, a University of Wisconsin-Madison think-tank, said there’s also been a fundamental change in how employers and employees navigate illness.
“There is this thing that’s changed about what we do when we’re sick, when our kids are sick, what our child cares will accept or tolerate when our kids are sick,” Dresser said. “I think people send their kids or themselves to school or work sick less often than we used to.”
She expects people having more access to sick time hasn’t had a major impact in their decision to take time off.
“The fact that more workers get paid now when they’re sick than used to makes it slightly more likely that they’ll stay home,” Dresser said. “But even in the olden days, they stayed home when their kid was sick, they just didn’t get paid.”
When Audrey Evans works from home, a throaty warble is her soundtrack.
Her building for graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison isn’t air-conditioned, so during the warmer months, Evans likes to open the windows.
“I’ll be working away at my computer, and I’ll hear turkey noises,” said Evans, who created the Instagram account “Turkeys of UW Madison” as a fan page dedicated to the urban birds. “It’s always like the perfect opportunity to take a break and go look out my window to see the turkeys right underneath it.”
The state commission that oversees employment relations ruled Friday that UW Health hospital is not required by law to negotiate a collective bargaining contract or recognize its recently created nurses union.
A fair number of famous musicians have called Wisconsin home. Les Paul. Al Jarreau. Steve Miller. Justin Vernon.
Now, there’s Yung Gravy.
Matthew Hauri didn’t actually grow up in Wisconsin; he was born in Rochester, Minn. But the now 26-year-old was a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison when he uploaded his first Yung Gravy EP to SoundCloud in 2016. A year later, he signed a deal with Universal Music Group’s Republic Records (the label behind Taylor Swift, the Weeknd and other A-listers), before graduating in December 2017.
The reactions on Luke Fickell, and not Jim Leonhard, set to become the next head football coach at Wisconsin, are pouring in across social media.
Many are stunned by the hire, with plenty praising the move, while others are surprised by UW deciding not to go with Leonhard, the hometown player turned interim head coach.
An anti-war student activist at UW-Madison became a union organizer on Milwaukee area factory floors in the 1970s and ‘80s. Now a retired lawyer and author of “Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War,” Jon Melrod finds common cause with the workers’ rights movement of today.
The University of Wisconsin System’s smallest campus next fall will no longer offer face-to-face instruction to students, with UW’s top leader citing low enrollment and financial pressures making the sustainability of the campus’ traditional education model “untenable.”
Noted: My mother moved to Madison from Chicago just over 50 years ago to pursue a college degree and provide a brighter future for my sister and me. The Gee family now consists of three generations of University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates. The university, and a small but thriving community of Black UW alumni, offered opportunities, resources and friendships that allowed us to create lives of unlimited promise, rooted in Black excellence and Black culture.
Noted: Well over 200 law enforcement agencies have signed on to the pledge, including five others in Wisconsin: the Dane County Sheriff’s Office and police in Madison, Fitchburg, Middleton and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Young voters made their voices heard during the midterms last week, turning out in relatively high numbers in an election that produced the first congressperson from Generation Z. But university students and voting rights advocates say voters on college campuses faced far too many difficulties trying to cast their ballots.
J. Michael Collins is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs and School of Human Ecology director. He also serves as the director for the Center for Financial Security.
Quoted: “It seems like a very remote possibility. No one’s really talked about it in a meaningful way. However, in the last four years, we’ve really seen the rise of hardball tactics between Republicans in the Legislature and Gov. Evers,” said Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the university’s Elections Research Center.
Burden said though the bar is high to impeach state officials, especially high-ranking ones elected statewide, politics in Wisconsin has become even more of a blood sport in recent years under divided government, making anything a possibility.
“The last four years have not really been cooperative lawmaking in any way,” Burden said. “There really is not a premise for cooperation between the branches and now Republicans have a bigger and more conservative majority, they’re going to feel emboldened. So it’s possible that some of what seemed like extreme tactics, like impeachment, might be on the table.”
Noted: Additionally, $174,000 in funding will go toward scholarships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Nursing to establish a pipeline for future school nurses.
A University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire employee has filed a racial discrimination complaint that alleges she was harassed and demoted because she is white.
The complaint follows the firing of a former vice chancellor for equity, diversity, inclusion who alleges students and employees of color were opposed to white individuals having leadership roles in the campus’s multicultural affairs office.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin–Madison urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen describes the overarching narrative in Dane County as a shortage of housing, which means prices are rising and affordability will continue to be a struggle in Madison.
“On the extreme end, people who have [lower] income spend more than 50% of their income on rent,” said Paulsen. “You see people being doubled up [which] is overcrowding the housing. Young people can’t afford to buy a starter home. You see homelessness and of course it manifests itself in tremendous racial disparities in housing burdens and homeownership.”
Quoted: Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the labor shortage may make some companies more likely to violate protections for minors.
“It is probably the case that tight labor markets mean that there may be more sorts of violations like this because firms are desperate to fill jobs and may cut corners in order to do so,” she said.
Child labor laws help to ensure that minors are able to gain an education and receive a high school diploma, Dresser said.
“If we’re going to prioritize and require that students be enrolled in school and do everything we can to encourage them to graduate, then kids shouldn’t be working on overnight shifts (and) they shouldn’t be working excessive numbers of hours,” she said.
Noted: Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimated in an August report that patients in 42 of the state’s 72 counties would see the distance they have to travel to get an abortion increase by an average of 82 miles, one-way. In Milwaukee and Dane counties, which accounted for 56% of the state’s abortions before the Dobbs decision, residents would have to travel 70 and 120 more miles to reach an abortion clinic, respectively. In the state’s 30 other counties, the distance to an abortion clinic didn’t change because they were already closest to an out-of-state clinic.
Noted: Triggiano, a Racine native, graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in 1984 and the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1988.
Quoted: Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, attributed high turnout in recent congressional elections in part to the effect of former President Donald Trump, who was elected in 2016.
“Increasing turnout everywhere, not just in Wisconsin, really is a phenomenon that happened after Trump took office,” said Burden, who directs the university’s Elections Research Center. “He’s no longer in office, but I think is enough of a presence in American politics and it was enough of a factor in this year’s elections that it continued to bring out lots of Democratic voters and lots of Republican voters.”
Quoted: In fact, the state’s higher education system is a major reason the industry is thriving, according to Dr. Zachary Morris, a researcher and associate professor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health.
He said colleges and universities throughout Wisconsin are producing the highly-skilled workers that the biohealth sector needs, and research being done at those institutions also is helping to strengthen the industry.
“The universities, through the faculty, are in many cases steering or developing innovative technologies that these companies are then helping to spin out and commercialize,” he said.
An unconventional yet burgeoning project looming on the horizon of the grow-your-own movement is the development of cultivated, or cultured meat. It is real animal meat and seafood that is produced by cultivating animal cells, according to the Good Food Institute (GFI). Backers say it reduces the land and water pollution caused by large-scale meat agriculture.
Masatoshi Suzuki is a researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In recent years, Suzuki’s lab has worked in collaboration with GFI to create a prototype of a beef patty grown from the stem cells of a cow.
The University of Wisconsin System sent a survey to students on Monday looking for their feelings about the state of free speech on the system’s campuses across the state.
The survey had previously been planned for May, but objections from chancellors, including by UW-Whitewater Chancellor James Henderson, who criticized the survey when he resigned from his post, caused it to be delayed.
Noted: Sneha, the narrator and protagonist, is a young Indian immigrant and University of Wisconsin-Madison grad who comes to work in Milwaukee in 2013. She’s a low-level contract consultant doing dehumanizing work at a corporation. Every boss encounter is fraught, because she’d like to be sponsored for permanent residency in the United States.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is launching a search for a new provost, an administrative position ranking just second to the chancellor in terms of importance.
The current provost, John Karl Scholz, will serve until the end of the school year and then return to the economics department, where he has taught since 1988. A new provost is expected to start sometime next summer, UW-Madison announced Tuesday.
Quoted: At American Family Children’s Hospital, RSV is contributing to a very busy time at UW Health Kids. Currently, RSV hospitalizations make up approximately 10% of the patients admitted, according to Dr. Joshua Ross, the chief medical officer and pediatric emergency medicine physician, UW Health Kids.
“We are seeing a record number of patients in our pediatric emergency department, with most coming in due to upper respiratory illnesses like RSV,” Ross said.
It looks as if the University of Wisconsin-Madison is getting ready to close down the School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers, which has graduated almost 600 budding farmers after training them in grazing practices as well as business planning for their new operations.
The school was founded and directed by Dick Cates, a Spring Green beef farmer who also served on the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection’s citizen policy board and various state sustainability panels.
Quoted: “There is substantial voter engagement in this year’s elections,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “but the larger number of early votes compared to 2018 is more a sign of changing preferences about the method of voting than a sign of much higher turnout,” Burden said.
Noted: The University of Wisconsin estimates there are about 770 million ash trees in Wisconsin — 765 million trees in wooded rural areas and about 5 million in urban areas.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, said this election may see a “different style of observer” who is more aggressive about wanting to have close inspection of the process and is potentially disruptive about challenging voters.
“These are not nonpartisan, disinterested people hoping to help out the voting process,” he said. “These are people who start with the premise of denying or being skeptical of the results in 2020 and that’s what’s motivating them to be involved.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison was within its right to hide some negative comments from its social media platforms because the criticisms were off topic to the posts at hand, a federal judge ruled this month.
Noted: Over 270 sessions were offered at the conference, including a keynote address by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, one of the world’s most prolific educational researchers. Ladson-Billings is Professor Emerita and former Kellner Family Distinguished Professor in Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The widening racial disparities between Blacks and whites is dramatic, noted Ladson-Billings, who pointed out that in 2019, about 30% of Black children lived in poverty, with 1 and 4 Black children facing severe food insecurity. With regard to public schools, she noted that 45% of Black students attend high-poverty schools compared to 8% of white children.
During the COVID pandemic, a number of Black children were only able to access the internet through their smart phones.
“Think about remote learning,” she said, adding that children struggled to receive their lessons via a small phone screen. “But that’s the reality.”
Additionally, Ladson-Billings noted that 75% of Black students who are considered eligible for advanced placement (AP) courses never take one, in part because so many of these students are enrolled in schools where these accelerated courses are not even offered.
“They’re bright enough, but there’s no access,” she said, adding that too many Black students are frequently discouraged from achieving their full potential by schoolteachers and administrators, even as suspension and expulsion rates for Black children steadily inclines.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, said there is not a lot of pressure on Michels to provide more details because he will be working with a Republican-controlled Legislature.
“Michels has not served in government, so he is getting educated during the course of the campaign about what he might do as governor,” Burden said.
Burden also said a broader trend emerging in 2022 is candidates “not really making themselves open to public questioning,” noting the race’s single debate, which hasn’t happened since the 1990s.
“Candidates have decided to package themselves through press releases, controlled events and social media, which means they’re not really called upon offer specifics,” Burden said. “That’s not just a Wisconsin thing — that is happening across the country this year.”
Noted: There has also been a spate of recent threats towards facilities providing gender-affirming care. In late September, The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant followed one week’s worth of news on anti-LGBTQ threats, documenting attacks on Boston Children’s Hospital, Akron Children’s Hospital, the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University, one specific doctor at a University of Wisconsin hospital, and an adolescent clinic at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, in that order.
Noted: Nick Buttrick is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Parenting tweens can be challenging for parents, because their ‘little kid’ who liked to cuddle, learn about the world around them, and was generally happy has suddenly been replaced with a moody, impulsive, physically maturing little human says Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, associate professor of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. As frustrating as this might be sometimes for parents, it is all developmentally normal.
Quoted: “There could likely be big changes to election law in Wisconsin between 2022 and 2024,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “There’s an array of things that have been proposed in not very concrete ways.”
Quoted: Ross Milton, an assistant professor at La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the pass-through provision is “still a hotly debated topic among tax policy people.”
“I think these pass-through provisions have been criticized because much of the benefit of them goes to very high income and/or high wealth households,” Milton said. “And presumably the Johnson family is a high-income household.”
Noted: I started as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in September 2021, and instantly I found the men’s water polo team to be of my homes on campus. I have never been the fastest swimmer or the highest scorer on the team, and most of the guys are at least half a foot taller than me. But I love this sport and I love my team to pieces, whether it is the exhilaration of setting up my teammates up for a great goal or joking with them on the pool deck. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. They accept me as their teammate
Unfolding like a political thriller, American Experience: Taken Hostage is a riveting four-hour, two-part documentary film about the Iran hostage crisis, when 52 American diplomats, Marines and civilians were taken hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979.
Ahead of its premiere, PBS Wisconsin spoke with writer, producer, director and University of Wisconsin-Madison alum Robert Stone about the film.
Quoted: Prior to the Great Recession, University of Wisconsin-Madison applied economics professor and community development specialist Steven Deller said there was a typical “flow” of new houses being developed.
Construction of new housing “plummeted” after the housing bubble burst in 2008 and never came back, Deller said.
He said many of the developers in the starter home market were crushed during the Great Recession, banks have become hesitant to make loans for starter home developments and the cost of building materials continues to rise.
“The economics are just not in favor of building those starter homes,” he said. “And that’s where a lot of communities are really struggling because the developers that they do have that are interested are saying, ‘I just can’t make it pencil out.'”
Quoted: Administrators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are also coming up with ways to solve the current training problem, but they’re also beginning to worry about future recruitment.
Dr. Laura Jacques, an assistant professor and the director of medical student education at UW-Madison’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, said the repercussions could be felt for years.
“I’m worried that we’re going to have a challenging time recruiting the best residents to our program because of these concerns, and not just for obstetrics and gynecology, but for all types of medicine,” she said.
Quoted: Julie Underwood, former dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Education, said the proposal would require a massive amount of money to fund while also meeting constitutional obligations to provide adequate public school education.
“If you take the 133,000 students that are in private schools right now and give them vouchers, and you run two parallel structures, I don’t know how the Legislature would would manage to fund that,” Underwood said. “And if they further reduce the amount of funding giving to schools at this time, I really think that we’re going to go below the standard that the Wisconsin Supreme Court set.”
In one of her first public appearances since being diagnosed with cancer this summer, former University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank received recognition from another Big Ten school with a room named in her honor.
Jim Leonhard, preparing for his fourth game as Wisconsin’s interim head football coach, didn’t duck the questions.
Have you concluded you are capable of handling the responsibilities that come with leading the program as full-time head coach and do you want the job?
Or, do you still have questions you need answered?
“I know I’m capable,” Leonhard, who turned 40 last week, said Monday during his weekly news conference. “It’s been really exciting for me to see the response of the coaches, of the players. It has been exciting to see certain little changes you’ve made and the buy-in of the messaging and the play on the field.
Autonomous flying drones could deliver life-saving defibrillators to people experiencing cardiac arrest, says a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who’s been involved in the research.
Ambulances aren’t always fast enough, especially in rural areas where an automated external defibrillator, or AED, isn’t available.
Survival rates drop by as much as 10% for each minute that passes without treatment, according to Justin Boutilier, an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering and co-author of several medical journal articles on the use of drones to deliver AEDs.
Noted: The state’s two other OB-GYN residency programs − at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, and Aurora Sinai Medical Center in Milwaukee − are vulnerable as well.
An Aurora spokesperson said Thursday the hospital also plans to send OB-GYN residents out of state, though they would not provide specifics of the arrangement. A UW doctor said they are in the process of determining a course of action.
“We are committed to following the ACGME mandates of training our residents and putting out well-trained obstetrician gynecologists,” said Dr. Laura Jacques, an assistant professor and academic specialist in obstetrics and gynecology. “We are actively exploring options.”
The University of Wisconsin-Wisconsin Police Department released statistics of the citations they handed down on the game day Saturday.
During the Purdue Game, UWPD said they ejected 43 people, with 24 of them being students.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Gender and Sexuality Campus Center (GSCC) works to support and foster community among UW’s trans and queer students. The organization planned a day-long community-building event and trans film festival on Oct. 24, the same time as conservative commentator Matt Walsh’s talk at Memorial Union. GSCC organized several other initiatives throughout the fall to support LBGTQ+ students on campus.
UW-Madison police reported that 43 people were ejected from Camp Randall Stadium and 20 people were arrested during Saturday’s game between the Badgers and Purdue.
Of the 43 people ejected, 24 were UW students, and of the 20 arrested, 12 were UW students, police said in a statement detailing the numbers.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) announced the monetary amount it will contribute to research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the 2022-23 academic year last week. A total of $130 million will be used to support its programs.
The potential for adults returning to school to reach goals of obtaining degrees and knowledge is often most affected by external factors that can make everyday life and returning to academics a difficult balance. The UW Odyssey Project is a remedy to that problem, and over their 20 years working to bring adults to higher education, they have gone the extra mile every time.
The Odyssey Project started in 2002 and quickly started changing lives. Acting as an avenue for adults to return to higher education through the resources and knowledge that run throughout UW-Madison has allowed the Odyssey Project to serve a plethora of people each year to achieve their academic, career, and personal goals. A celebration at the UW-Memorial Union was only fitting.
