As the winter weather continues, the University of Wisconsin-Madison welcomes both returning and new students to the spring semester in frigid fashion.
First years this fall enjoyed Wisconsin Welcome events as they learned the campus layout while returning students reacclimated. Returning this winter is no different with a Winter Wisconsin Welcome that not only opens doors for returning students but gives transfers and spring admits opportunities to make connections and meet new people.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison reported nine hazing violations connected to Greek life between 2021 to 2025 after a new federal law required universities and colleges to publicly report hazing incidents.
Under the Stop Campus Hazing Act, universities and colleges were required to begin documenting hazing violations starting July 1, 2025, implement anti-hazing policies and publish their first Campus Hazing Transparency Report by Dec. 23, 2025. UW-Madison went beyond the July requirement by including hazing reports from years prior.
Only the chancellor or someone authorized to act on their behalf has the authority to cancel classes, suspend services or close the campus or any campus building to the public, students and employees.
The university’s general philosophy? Remain open whenever possible.
Wisconsin is lowering the total price of football season tickets at Camp Randall Stadium ahead of a 2026 season that has only six home games.
The listed price of season tickets will drop across the stadium from $399 to $312 before taxes and fees. That is a 21.8% decrease in listed price for a season with 14.3% fewer home games, although that comes with an asterisk.
UW-Madison has picked its first leader of the Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub, the initiative launched last fall to encourage more startups on campus and boost Wisconsin’s economic growth.
Lewis Sheats will serve as associate vice chancellor and executive director. Sheats previously served as executive director of Saint Louis University’s center for entrepreneurship and spent two decades at North Carolina State University as assistant vice provost for entrepreneurship. His first day at UW-Madison is Feb. 2
The University of Wisconsin–Madison began its spring semester during the coldest stretch of the year, sending students back to campus bundled in layers.
One UW Ph.D. student from South India said the frigid temperatures made her feel “like an onion,” layered again and again to stay warm. Her friend from Kentucky said she was not used to wearing boots or layering so much clothing.
Although campus activity slowed with many students home for winter break, news did not stop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Between a conservative law firm filing a complaint on race-based scholarships at UW and a string of burglaries at the UW Law school, here’s what you may have missed while off-campus.
The doors of a new academic building will open, three-year-old scaffolding is expected to come down, and designs are being drawn up to revamp a historic site on UW-Madison’s campus in 2026.
Upcoming plans for development projects at UW-Madison signal another busy year of changes happening on campus. In 2025, UW-Madison notably opened a new building that houses its new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence: Morgridge Hall, a privately funded $267 million, 343,000-square-foot facility.
One of the first signs of trouble came last spring, when the Trump administration abruptly moved to deport scores of international students, including a handful at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
University officials were alarmed, well aware that around 8,000 students, 15 percent of its enrollment, were from abroad. And they worried that the looming deportations might spook prospective international students, said Frances Vavrus, the dean of the international division at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bouncing back from the Iowa loss in the Big Ten opener, the Badgers defeated Maryland, 28-13, at the Field House last Sunday to bring their overall record to 9-1.
It was the UW’s largest margin of victory against a conference opponent since beating Northwestern in February 2024. The Wildcats will be Friday’s challenge at the Field House.
“It is exciting to bring back something so impactful and reimagine it for a new audience,” said König-Tarasevich, a professor of flute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty filed a civil rights complaint against the University of Wisconsin-Madison on behalf of conservative students on campus.
The firm alleges the school is offering about two dozen race-based scholarships. WILL is asking the U.S. Department of Education to investigate “race-based practices” on behalf of its client, the Young America’s Foundation.
The organization is set to provide $206.9 million in total support to UW-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research this school year, including $50 million toward research projects and nearly $36 million for faculty, graduate students and staff.
Now in its second century, the nonprofit faces challenges, though. The Trump administration’s widespread cuts to federal research funding could limit the number of discoveries coming to WARF.
If your impression is that there are more female students than male students at UW-Madison, you’re not wrong.
In 2025, the university enrolled almost 1,000 fewer men (3,800) than women (4,744) as first-year students. Also, according to data from the university’s office of the registrar, male students are less likely to stay at the university and less likely to graduate on time than women.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department (UWPD) is investigating a three-month string of four burglaries at the UW-Madison Law Building, according to a Wednesday crime alert.
The first burglary took place in late October, UWPD Executive Director of Communications Marc Lovicott told The Daily Cardinal in a statement. The most recent incident occurred Sunday. All four burglaries happened after hours, when the building was closed.
It had never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since — the men’s and women’s hockey teams from the same school winning NCAA championships in the same year.
But in 2006, both the men’s and women’s University of Wisconsin hockey teams won national titles, and the teams were led by a brother and sister who grew up playing youth hockey in Madison.
tudents are on track to take classes in a new humanities building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall. And the athletics department plans to finish an indoor football practice facility next to Camp Randall Stadium this summer.
As those two projects wrap up in 2026, Wisconsin’s flagship public university also plans to break ground on a visitor and education center at the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, near Picnic Point.
The UW-Madison Police Department (UWPD) released images Wednesday of people it has identified as persons of interest in a series of e-bike and e-scooter thefts.
The awards are given annually to community members who embody “the values of service, equity, and justice that Dr. King championed.” Gift Akere, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, pursuing a degree in electrical engineering, will be honored with an MLK Humanitarian Award in the category of “Youth Leader.”
The doors of a new academic building will open, three-year-old scaffolding is expected to come down, and designs are being drawn up to revamp a historic site on UW-Madison’s campus in 2026.
Upcoming plans for development projects at UW-Madison signal another busy year of changes happening on campus. In 2025, UW-Madison notably opened a new building that houses its new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence: Morgridge Hall, a privately funded $267 million, 343,000-square-foot facility.
UW-Madison should centralize its human resources operations and consolidate its capital projects into one plan in order to improve oversight, a third-party report commissioned by the university recommends.
The report, which was completed by consulting firm Deloitte, highlighted issues with the school’s HR structure that led to inconsistencies in recruiting, payment and salary adjustment. The university was also found to have limited coordination on capital projects leading to inefficient planning.
Despite restrictions on the city government, there are a handful of Flock cameras set up within Madison, four around Capitol Square maintained by Capitol Police, and eight arrayed across the UW-Madison campus, according to UW-Madison Police spokesperson Marc Lovicott.
In 2025, the Universities of Wisconsin had another packed year.
The fallout from the Trump administration canceling students’ visas, federal funding uncertainty for research, the closure of a branch campus and downsizing of another, the rollout of new policies faculty called controversial and campuswide budget cuts at UW-Madison are just a few of the moments the State Journal covered.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison class started the fall semester with a big question to tackle: Which families are opting not to enroll their children in the Madison school district, and why?
After a semester of conducting background research, analyzing data and reaching out directly to Madison families for interviews, one key finding was that nearly 1,600 middle and high school students open enrolled out of Madison schools into another public school district over the last three years — with white families being the most likely to leave.
Gabby Mullally, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is applying for residencies and plans to specialize in anesthesiology. She knows she would be working with patients during times of heightened anxiety, namely right before someone undergoes surgery.
That’s why she took an improv theater class this past semester.
There were many hot topics in higher education in 2025. Here are five of them.
The consulting firm Deloitte is recommending changes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison following the demotion of the school’s diversity leader over financial concerns.
UW-Madison paid Deloitte $395,000 to evaluate its financial and budgetary controls between March and July 2025, according to Mark Pitsch, a spokesperson for the broader UW system, which signed the contract with the firm.
UW-Madison’s Geology Museum
Glowing rocks, dinosaurs and meteorites await visitors to this free museum, offering visitors an up-close look at the minerals and stones that comprise the natural world around them. Dinosaurs and fossils guide guests through physical history, beckoning those who want to know more about extinct species. The museum is open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Though acting remains the career goal, Nate Buescher is also focused on life beyond the screen. He recently started his freshman year in Madison, studying biology. “I’m already kind of dabbling in the acting portion of my life. Might as well just try something new, just trying to expand my world,” he said.
The decision to come to Wisconsin was an easy one. “I’m really familiar with the Midwest. I like the cold weather, even though that sounds a little weird,” he said. “I was lucky enough to get a pretty good scholarship at Madison, and it’s also been a dream school of mine for a really long time.”
A common quip about nuclear fusion is that the technology is perpetually 30 years from deployment. Fusion research has not been funded to the same levels as other, already-realized clean technologies like solar, wind and fission, but new billion-dollar investments signify interest is picking up.
University of Wisconsin-Madison fusion spinoff company Type One Energy aims to bring nuclear fusion to the grid within a decade, backed by funding and a physics-based model.
A Vietnam War and retired U.S. Air Force veteran received a refurbished vehicle at the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball game at the Kohl Center on December 22.
American Family Insurance, Gerber Collision, and Glass team up to present Mark Knowlton with the car during a first-half timeout. The companies collaborated with Veterans Outreach Wisconsin to select Mark for the gift.
There are a few main ways of looking at attendance for University of Wisconsin football games, and they all produced ugly results in 2025.
The Badgers played in front of the smallest average home crowd in the two decades that it has been tracked using ticket scanners. No-shows climbed to a level never seen in that same period.
Aaron Seligman, a Madison native who previously worked for the Universities of Wisconsin, joined the cohort in February when taking on the new title of director of community relations at Madison Hillel.
The 13 professionals “take on the work of being that adult in the room that models and leads in relationship building with administrators, faculty and other Jewish communal professionals,” Simon said.
Seligman is focusing on areas the University of Wisconsin-Madison found specific needs for in the more than two years since Oct. 7. So far, Seligman has been “collaborating with the university administration on campus policies” and “engaging in media around campus climate and antisemitism,” Seligman said.
Launched in February, the lab is a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. It provides an opportunity for students from across the university to try emerging technologies — including AI, blockchain and virtual reality — and use them to potentially solve real-world problems.
“I love it because I see students progress remarkably,” said Sandra Bradley, the lab’s executive director. “When you give them a lot of … space and then hand them things that they need, the magic happens.”
The Chazen Museum of Art has added 28 photos taken by acclaimed photographer Irving Penn to its collection.
The photos were donated to the museum by the Irving Penn Foundation in Penn’s name. It was a gift in honor of UW-Madison alumnus and former Museum of Modern Art photography director John Szarkowski, according to a statement from museum spokesperson Kirstin Pires.
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are sounding the alarm over a Trump administration plan to dismantle a prominent weather and climate research center, saying it could jeopardize the future of weather forecasting.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research is based in Boulder, Colorado, but is overseen by a consortium of universities, including UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee. The center allows researchers to work together on large projects that no one scientist or university could do alone.
In the Midwest, Indiana, Purdue, and Illinois show similar bottlenecks. In the Northeast, Northeastern’s combined engineering-CS programs have become harder to crack than many Ivy divisions. Even the University of Wisconsin, once known for broad access, now reports sharply lower admit rates in engineering and data science.
For parents and students, the message is sobering: the real competition may not be “between” colleges, but “within” them.
The number of alcohol unit sales at Badgers games at Camp Randall Stadium in 2025 fell 21% compared to the first year of availability at general concession stands in 2024.
That decrease was slightly more than the 20% falloff in the number of fans in the venue between the two seasons. Records obtained through public records requests showed there were slightly fewer alcoholic beverage units sold per ticket scanned in 2025 than in 2024.
Starting in the fall 2026 semester, the University of Wisconsin’s Filipino language program will no longer be offered, according to Filipinx American Student Organization Communications Chair Ethan Ham.
The program’s elimination follows federal funding cuts by the Trump administration and the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education’s International and Foreign Language Education program that administers Title VI funding.
Title VI funding was established as part of the Higher Education Act and is used to support foreign language programs.
Which performers headlined concerts at Camp Randall Stadium in 2025, marking the venue’s first concerts in decades?
Under the terms of her employment contract, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin received a bonus this year for staying in her job and for “satisfactory” performance. How much did she receive from the bonus?
Mnookin’s base pay surpassed $892,000 by 2024 after pay raises for UW system employees and “catch-up base salary increases” for multiple chancellors. Her annual bonus for staying is set to increase each year, from $150,000 this year up to $350,000 in 2029.
A 40-year-old Madison man wearing a Palestinian flag and holding his hand in his pocket as if he had a gun walked into a Jewish student organization on State Street on Monday asking for food, police said Tuesday.
Madison police arrested a man who they said entered a Jewish student organization’s building on the UW-Madison campus Monday evening and gestured as if he had a gun.
The Madison Police Department arrested a Madison man after he allegedly made gestures to make it seem like he had a gun at an event for Jewish UW-Madison students, officials reported on Tuesday.
A man was arrested after causing a disturbance at a nonprofit organization serving Jewish students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Officers responded to the 500 block of State Street around 6:15 p.m. on Monday after reports of a man, wearing a ballistic vest and Palestinian flag, entering the building asking for food, according to Madison Police Department spokesperson Stephanie Fryer.
Madison’s District 8 Common Council seat is up for grabs after current Alder MGR Govindarajan announced he will not seek reelection.
The district, which encompasses the UW–Madison campus and much of the State Street area, is currently the focus of two student-led campaigns. University of Wisconsin-Madison sophomores Ellen Zhang and Robert “Bobby” Gronert have both announced bids to represent the district.
On one of the coldest days of the year, 2,151 graduates packed into the Kohl Center Sunday to walk the stage and celebrate their UW-Madison graduation. The ceremony featured speeches from UW Regent and former American Family Insurance CEO Jack Salzwedel, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin, keynote speaker Grace Vanderhei and student speaker Jeeva Premkumar.
More than a thousand students walked across the stage at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the 2025 Winter Commencement.
UW-Madison student Nai’Taija Williams McMorris is eyeing what’s next. Set to graduate from her nursing program next year, Williams McMorris aspires to enter the master’s program she needs to complete to become a nurse practitioner.
But new federal loan caps going into effect in July may reduce her and other Wisconsin students’ options to enter careers that require a graduate-level degree. The new law lowers the amount of money students seeking some advanced degrees, including nursing, can borrow in federal loans.
Maurice Thomas is chief operating officer at Greater Holy Temple Christian Academy, a 4k-8th grade Christian school in Milwaukee. He is an alum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expects to earn a master’s degree in education leadership from Harvard in 2027.
Jerry Jordan is a nationally-known painter working in the style of contemporary realism. He counts the unsung artists of the Harlem Renaissance as his artistic role models. By day, Jordan is an academic and multicultural advisor with the UW-Madison School of Education. He holds a degree in art from UW-Whitewater.
Dr. Bashir Easter is founder of Melanin Minded, a company that aims to empower Black and Latino communities by culturally appropriate resources and support for individuals affected by Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias. He began his career in elder care nearly 15 years ago with Milwaukee County as an elder abuse investigator, human services worker, and dementia care program specialist, and later served as associate director of the All of Us Research Program at UW-Madison.
The Legislature is releasing $54 million for the Universities of Wisconsin now that the Board of Regents has fulfilled mandated changes to faculty workloads and students’ general education.
Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) is proposing increased law enforcement presence, adjustments to fencing layout and stricter attendance policies this spring to Lily’s Classic, their annual hockey tournament and fundraiser, amid safety concerns. The changes currently await university approval.
A Republican-led state legislative committee approved new teaching requirements for Universities of Wisconsin faculty Thursday, a condition of the bipartisan state budget passed this summer.
Starting next fall, full-time faculty and instructional academic staff at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee will need to teach at least one course per semester and a minimum of 12 credit hours each school year. Employees at the other 11 state universities face higher requirements.
All credits for general education courses must also be transferable and satisfy general education requirements across the universities by September.
A panel of University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty called for higher institutions to rebuild public trust during a panel Dec. 3, sharing both hopeful and pessimistic sentiments about the Trump administration’s threat to higher education.
History professor Giuliana Chamedes said the ability of students, faculty and staff to speak up has been “central” to restoring democracy and academic freedom. She referenced similarities between the Trump administration’s policies and historical attacks on higher education from fascist regimes, highlighting higher education’s historical ability to overcome persecution.
University of Wisconsin-Madison sophomore Ellen Zhang announced her candidacy for the open student seat on Madison’s Common Council Dec. 2, pushing for expanded public transportation, affordable public housing and additional food support for students.
“It’s important to be able to express ourselves through our clothing and kind of use it not only as a statement … that we’re still on campus, but also just have some pride in ourselves and our traditional attire,” said Miinan White, an enrolled member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.
I am devastated that the new Lakeshore Center building that UW-Madison is going to erect at the entrance to Picnic Point will be right at the current entry point, blocking the beautiful stone wall — now delicately outlined in snow. It also will require moving the pedestrian and bike paths, plus the road.
There are other good alternatives, assuming this building is even needed. How about building where the current parking area is, and moving the parking slightly west? Or how about the area near the old Kaiser beach house, which should be renovated, preserved and included.
Their very first assignment is hand carving the utensil out of a block of poplar. But there is a reason that Katie Hudnall — the director of UW’s woodworking and furniture program — calls it the “not a spoon” assignment.
“If the project was just shaping a perfect wooden spoon, they wouldn’t really get the chance to design something for themselves,” says Hudnall. “The assignment is really to create not just a spoon. The design element is what gets them to unlock their art brains.”
As final exam season starts, many University of Wisconsin-Madison students are increasingly turning to a new kind of study partner — one that never sleeps, charges hourly rates or judges a panicked 2 a.m. homework question.
Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT have become embedded in student life with 86% of students using AI in their studies, according to a study by the Digital Education Council, marking a rapid cultural shift in how students prepare for exams and complete coursework.
