The University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of 45 universities the U.S. Department of Education is investigating for using what the department calls “race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs”.
Wisconsin farmer Andy Diercks sits on a red Memorial Union Terrace chair in the middle of a farm field, holding a potato in his left hand. “It’s amazing all the work that goes into growing this little guy,” he says to Amanda Gevens, UW-Madison chair of plant pathology, who sits across from him. “The research you’ve done over the past decades is critical to grow a good quality crop.”
Inside Higher Ed also contacted the two dozen institutions under investigation, and their responses varied. The University of Wisconsin at Madison and Carnegie Mellon University said they had yet to be formally notified of any complaint by the OCR and were awaiting more information to determine how to comply with an investigation.
A UW spokesperson also pointed to fallout in 2020 in the University of Alaska system when then-president Jim Johnsen stepped down after he emerged as the sole finalist to lead the University of Wisconsin system. Johnsen withdrew from the Wisconsin search after criticism that the process lacked transparency. He then resigned from the Alaska presidency mere weeks later.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s former chief diversity officer displayed a “significant lapse” in judgment and fiscal responsibility, according to a report, as state and federal lawmakers seek to root out diversity, equity and inclusion programs in education.
Committee members quizzed the leaders of several state agencies — including the Department of Public Instruction, the Department of Administration and the Department of Health Services — as well as the University of Wisconsin and several private companies.
Meyerhofer requested all documents related to the UW Board of Regents vote that day and the dismissal of the unnamed UW-Stevens Point faculty member.
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.
Celebrating 100 years of excellence at University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing! With a growing nursing shortage, Badger nurses are stepping up—pursuing advanced degrees to educate, advocate, and transform healthcare for the future.
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.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s chief diversity officer made a series of poor financial decisions, including approving substantial salary increases and authorizing excessive travel spending, according to newly released records that shed light on the employee’s demotion earlier this year.
“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.”
This canceled grant — which funded research into retirement that informed federal policymaking — has impacted the work of more than 50 people at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, including the termination of five senior researchers, says Ghilarducci, who anticipates more job losses at the other centers.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of 60 universities across the nation that receiving notice Monday from the U.S. Department of Education for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students.
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.
The committee heard testimony from agencies with employees who telework, including the Department of Public Instruction and the Department of Safety and Professional Services, in addition to the University of Wisconsin System and private-sector companies.
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.
“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.”
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.
“This order is fairly vague and attempts to touch on multiple areas that an administration could potentially oppose,” said Taylor Odle, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies federal education policy.
UW-Madison is among 60 universities nationwide that received letters this week from President Donald Trump’s Department of Education warning of unspecified “potential enforcement action” if the administration determines they are not sufficiently combatting antisemitism on their campuses.
The legislation that would bar transgender women from playing University of Wisconsin System school sports received pushback from Democrats and community members.
Gov. Tony Evers is recommending the state take a wrecking ball to numerous aging state facilities, including the Green Bay Correctional Institution and UW-Madison’s Mosse Humanities building, as part of his $4.1 billion capital spending plan.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent out letters on Monday to 60 universities, including UW Madison, saying they are under investigation for Anti-Semitic Discrimination and Harassment.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Gov. Tony Evers unveiled a capital budget Monday that calls for $4.1 billion in new building projects around the state, with the largest chunk going toward Universities of Wisconsin campuses.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison was among a list of 60 schools the U.S. Department of Education warned Monday about a potential loss of federal funding if they fail to protect Jewish students.
The Tribal Education Promise at UW-Madison, which provides financial aid to Indigenous students from Wisconsin’s Native nations, is intended to help address a history of coercion through treaties.
Randy Kimple, a professor of human oncology at UW-Madison, has two Ph.D. students in his lab supported by grants, called “supplements,” meant to promote diversity among researchers. The supplements fund not only students of color, but also first-generation college students and those from rural areas or low-income neighborhoods.
Kimple expects to lose that funding — roughly $150,000 — in the summer, given the Trump administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Leaders from Wisconsin’s top universities, including University of Wisconsin System President Jay Rothman and UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin, urged Congress to reverse federal research funding cuts at a press conference Wednesday at the UW-Madison’s Health Sciences Learning Center.
Wisconsin receives roughly $654 million per year in National Institutes of Health grants, which supports more than 7,700 jobs and $1.4 billion in economic activity, according to United for Medical Research.
Without additional funds from elsewhere, UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said the capping of indirect costs would have a “ripple effect” on the state’s economy.
Thursday afternoon, University of Wisconsin staff and various members of the scientific community gathered to address concerns of cuts in medical research funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Life-saving work in biomedical research is on the line, University of Wisconsin System and UW-Madison administrators said, if the National Institutes of Health makes cuts to its funding to the system.
“Taking a meat cleaver to this funding is simply wrong,” Universities of Wisconsin System President Jay Rothman said Thursday.
Researchers at the Universities of Wisconsin defended their work in medical research on Thursday as they face uncertainty amidst federal funding cuts.
UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin warned of the danger of “indiscriminate reductions in research funding,” and medical and scientific researchers argued that funding from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, is critical to their work.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Sterling Johnson leads one of the world’s largest and longest-running studies of people at risk for Alzheimer’s disease. His team aims to diagnose the disease years before people even develop symptoms and identify ways to slow its progression. He finds his work meaningful and rewarding.
But over the past seven weeks, as President Donald Trump’s administration proposes deep cuts to biomedical research, Johnson has encountered a new feeling. Something he’s never felt since he started studying studying Alzheimer’s in 1997.
In February, a UW-Madison teacher training program lost its funding from the federal government, citing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“It’s unfortunate that the approach toward sort of rooting out programs seems to have overlooked what the program is really doing and its value to the high need communities that are being served by those programs,” said program director, Kimber Wilkerson.
My confusion arises because the Legislature also required UW-Madison to create an endowed chair for a “conservative” professor. To me, that sounds exactly like DEI. Were Vos and colleagues requiring the university to potentially choose a less-qualified person as a professor because that person was “conservative”?
University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin indicated during a Faculty Senate meeting Monday the university would walk back hiring and rethink grant-making if a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding cut is implemented.
His high school grade point average (GPA) was an exceptional 4.42, much higher than the American average of 3.0, and he was one of only around 2,000 students to score 1590 or higher on the SAT, out of more than two million students who take the test every year.
Yet after sending off his applications, he was rejected by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell University, Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin.
Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin and other campus leaders are evaluating different scenarios for how federal funding cuts and policy changes could affect the University of Wisconsin-Madison financially.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison advised its deans in a letter late last month that it should not eliminate commitments already made to students, but that it should consider decreasing the number of admissions offers and “carefully consider” whether to move down the wait list if a prospective student declines acceptance.
Under the radar, but also a critical threat to Social Security is the recent cancellation of Social Security research and evaluation contracts with six university-led research consortia, including College of New York (CUNY and The New School, Boston College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Those efforts have increased first-time undergraduate enrollment by an average of 50 to 100 students per participating campus in Idaho, with the strongest gains at community colleges, according to a 2022 study of the state program. Taylor Odle, assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and co-author of the study, said the results show that states shouldn’t solely focus on high-achieving students when designing direct admissions programs.
“This behavioral nudge is going to be most effective for the people who didn’t know that college was an option for them, and those are most often students who fall further down the academic gradient,” Odle said.
In announcing the committee, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told the Cap Times he wanted to better tailor the work of government to a 21st century context.
“We need to deliver services in a different way than we have,” Vos said. “You know, how many (Universities of Wisconsin) campuses do we need? How many school districts do we need? How many townships do we need? All the things that we’ve never really thought about.”
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the provost and the dean of the graduate school sent a memo to college deans on February 23 advising them to “consider decreasing the number of admissions offers” and also to “carefully consider” whether to make any offers to candidates on their applicant wait lists should students who were initially accepted decline to enroll. While it was not an order to reduce graduate admissions, it was a clear suggestion to move cautiously as the university evaluated its available resources in light of continuing worries about federal funding.
UW-Madison deans should admit fewer graduate students, given the uncertainty of federal research funding going forward, leaders say.
But graduate school Dean William Karpus also this week reiterated his commitment to current grad students.
Essentially, the University of Wisconsin-Madison wants the authority to borrow money for construction projects that are funded by the university and don’t involve state tax dollars. Currently, that authority rests with the state.
A state appeals court ruled a Wisconsin college grant program restricted to certain students of color was unconstitutional and ordered the state to end administering the program.
On February 10, 22 of the states sued over cuts to the National Institutes of Health. It was filed in Massachusetts, but is filled with details on which programs at the University of Wisconsin are being the most impacted.
“Making sure that information is being included and considered as part of these cases is what I see as sort of a key role for us and for other states,“ said Wisconsin’s Attorney General Josh Kaul.
DOGE’s federal spending cuts could also jeopardize state programs ranging from cancer research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to the upcoming tourism season at the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
College leaders are scrambling to assess the ramifications Trump’s orders would have on their institutions and come up with a long-term strategy to defend higher education, which has long been a political punching bag for Republicans. They are trying to respond in a way that appeases students and professors, who tend to be progressive, without antagonizing the conservatives now in charge of the federal government.
“The chancellor is trying to thread a very, very narrow needle,” said Michael Bernard-Donals, a UW-Madison professor of English and Jewish studies.
University of Wisconsin System President Jay Rothman and UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin emphasized the mission of the Wisconsin Idea and the value of higher education during the Wisconsin Counties Association Legislative Conference Tuesday.
School districts across the country are struggling to hire and retain enough special education teachers to meet the growing need for them. A new partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is working to bridge the gap.
An announcement from the National Institutes of Health earlier this month said the agency would slash support for indirect research costs paid to universities, medical centers and other grant recipients.
The change could leave research institutions like the University of Wisconsin-Madison scrambling for millions of dollars from other sources to support labs, students and staff.
“This is clearly a loophole which is now used to stall the reviews,” said Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, vice chancellor for research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The impact of the postponement won’t be felt immediately, she said. But if the meetings can’t continue, it will have an impact in coming months.
“At the minimum, a delay. At the most extreme case, maybe funding won’t happen,” Grejner-Brzezinska said. “At the moment, we hope that it is just a delay. And are watching what’s going to happen next.”
