The University of Wisconsin system is removing race as a factor in more than 160 scholarships, grants, fellowships, study abroad and hiring programs, according to the system’s director of media relations, Mark Pitsch. Individual universities, he said, are also discussing scholarship criteria with donors who funded specific awards to ensure they comply with the court’s ruling.
The new chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse says he’s focused on “turning the page” after a tumultuous six months for the university.
Chancellors in the Universities of Wisconsin system can receive up to 15 percent raises annually, based on a performance metric, according to a new proposal approved by the Board of Regents Monday.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor will earn more than $1 million by the end of this coming school year.
The UW Board of Regents created a retention bonus system for its chancellors in a closed-door meeting Monday with no public discussion or vote. The board also approved pay boosts for eight of the 13 chancellors to bring their compensation closer to peer universities.
Universities of Wisconsin leaders approved pay raises Monday for more than half of the system’s chancellors, annual bonuses for chancellors that retain freshmen students and six-figure payouts to UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin every year she stays at the flagship university.
The UW Board of Regents, in a closed session meeting Monday, approved a new program that rewards chancellors for retaining students.
Charlie Pietz, a 2024 University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate joined the Student Seats team as Chief Marketing Officer two years ago. He helped Student Seats grow to over 5,000 users in Wisconsin with his work on campus and social media.
Following a showdown between the Legislature and Universities of Wisconsin over funding last winter, a new group will study the future of the state’s public universities and issue recommendations.
Sixty students can’t sustain a college campus. That’s the hard truth that ended classes at the Universities of Wisconsin’s two-year campus in Richland Center a year ago. The closure is sad and difficult, yet justified.
UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone is stepping down from the chancellorship of the Universities of Wisconsin’s second-largest school at the end of the upcoming academic year, continuing a years-long string of turnover in top leadership across the UW system.
Mone will have served as chancellor for 11 years, a tenure he noted exceeded any of UWM’s past chancellors, with the exception of its founder. Mone will return to teaching at the Lubar College of Business, effective July 1, 2025.
Pocan is proposing to double the size of need-based Pell Grants, a federal assistance program that began in the 1970s. Pocan received Pell Grants himself when he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Wisconsin hub focuses on personalized medicine, or tailoring treatments to a patient’s genetic makeup or other individual characteristics. Along with UW-Madison and Madison Area Technical College, partners include Madison companies Accuray and Exact Sciences, GE Healthcare and Rockwell Automation in the Milwaukee area and Neenah-based manufacturer Plexus.
All three of the Universities of Wisconsin’s vice presidents will be serving in interim status come September.
The Wisconsin Biohealth Tech Hub Consortium members include the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), the University of Wisconsin System Administration, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, GE HealthCare, Rockwell Automation, Exact Sciences Corporation, BioForward Wisconsin, Employ Milwaukee, Accuray, Plexus, WRTP Big Step, Milwaukee Area Technical College, Madison Area Technical College, the Madison Regional Economic Partnership (MadREP), and Milwaukee7.
Leaders of Wisconsin’s state universities are weighing whether to update policies on political campaigning in residence halls for the first time since 1988.
College students who earn two-year degrees in certain programs at Moraine Park Technical College can transfer 60 credits, or half of a four-year degree, to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee under a new articulation agreement between the two schools.
Wisconsin colleges have a well-documented demographics problem. Smaller and smaller graduating high school classes have left colleges scrambling to fill seats, squeezing budgets and making painful cuts.
Donald Downs, the Alexander Meiklejohn Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and one of the principles’ developers, said Bobo’s op-ed is “the opposite of everything we stand for.” Downs said the principles—like the more well-known free speech statements—say academic freedom should extend to professors speaking about their own university. He argued university professors are in positions to know more about what’s going on inside their institutions.
Charter schools can be run either by public school districts or independently. Independent charter schools can be authorized by the Milwaukee Common Council, the chancellor of any Universities of Wisconsin (UW System) institution, each technical college district board, the Waukesha County Executive, College of Menominee Nation, Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe University, and the UW Office of Educational Opportunity, according to the DPI.
Sex historian and journalist Hallie Lieberman, who received her doctorate from UW-Madison, has been following the story closely. She worries if Gow is dismissed for sexual activities he pursued in his free time, it will set a dangerous precedent to fire professors for saying and doing things the public doesn’t like.
“When they go after porn and sex, it’s low-hanging fruit. What comes next?” she said. “Freedom of speech is for the speech we hate, it’s for the thought we hate.”
Here’s what guests on the June 21, 2024 episode said about the closing of two-year Universities of Wisconsin campuses, the financial scandal at Milwaukee Public Schools and the past and present of Donald Trump campaigns in Wisconsin.
The Richland campus will officially close at the end of June, since UW system leadership has ended negotiations with Richland County officials over the future of the campus. The real death of the campus came a year ago, when classes ended.
Former University of Wisconsin-La Crosse chancellor Joe Gow pushed back on claims that he used university computers to visit pornography websites during a hearing on whether the university has grounds to dismiss him from faculty.
After two days of fiery exchanges at the Omni Center, former Chancellor Joe Gow and UW-La Crosse officials concluded their arguments Thursday about whether Gow should be allowed to keep his tenured faculty position.
For UW-La Crosse, the hearing is the first step in a two-part process to finally purge Gow from its payroll and move on from what many see as an embarrassing chapter that damaged the university’s reputation.
Former UW-La Crosse chancellor Joe Gow and his former colleagues engaged in a harsh battle of words over Gow’s disputed faculty position Wednesday afternoon.
In Wisconsin, rather than push back against the austerity imposed by the Legislature, the UW System has acquiesced to its own defunding, a pattern that’s led to the closure of several two year campuses, including the recent announcement of the closure of the UW-Oshkosh, Fox Cities campus on June 30, 2025.
Joe Gow was removed as University of Wisconsin-La Crosse chancellor for creating sex videos posted on porn websites. Should he also be fired from his faculty position?
That’s the question facing a group of Gow’s colleagues this week. They will hear Gow and the university administration make their case in a two-day public hearing that will closely resemble a trial with witnesses, cross-examinations and closing statements.
Amid a statewide wave of branch campus shut downs, the Menasha-based campus will close June 2025 due to low enrollment rates.
Murv Seymour talks with Courtney Bell at the Wisconsin Historical Society about leading the Wisconsin Center for Education Research in its work on classroom innovations, challenges and inequities.
New federal funding will help place more OBGYNs in training in Wisconsin’s rural communities.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health will receive a $750,000 grant over the next three years to expand their rural OBGYN residency track.
The UW-L faculty hearing committee will hear arguments from interim chancellor Betsy Morgan and Gow about his tenured faculty role.
UW-Oshkosh Chancellor Andrew Leavitt and UW system President Jay Rothman will shut down UW-Oshkosh’s two-year branch campus in Menasha at the end of the spring 2025 semester. WLUK-TV was the first to report the news Thursday morning.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded $750,000 to the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Thursday, directed toward the establishment of new residency programs in rural communities.
The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh at Fox Cities will shutter at the end of next school year, according to Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson.
It’s the sixth UW campus to close because of budget problems and declining enrollment.
Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson said Thursday the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh is closing the Fox Cities campus in Menasha.
This will be the sixth two-year campus in the UW system to be marked for closure as the state continues to grapple with lower enrollment in its university system.
Universities of Wisconsin officials plan to close another two-year school in the face of declining enrollment, this time in the Fox Cities.
One complaint has resulted in an official Department of Education investigation, he said — a complaint against the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a fellowship program for people of color.
Wisconsin Public Radio is launching a new music station with call letters honoring Gene Purcell, Wisconsin Public Media’s late executive director.
WEPP, which will start broadcasting Thursday on 90.7 FM in Rice Lake, Wis., gets its call letters from Purcell’s given name, Eugene Patrick Purcell. He died due to injuries from a traffic crash in 2021 after more than a decade at the helm of the organizations behind Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin.
The garment industry has long been criticized for low wages and harsh working conditions. As recently as 2010, the University of Wisconsin-Madison ended a licensing agreement with Nike over a wage dispute in Honduras. Pressure from UW-Madison and other universities resulted in Nike making changes that included a $1.54 million contribution to a workers’ relief fund.
Last week, Gov. Tony Evers announced he’s seeking an $800 million budget increase for the Universities of Wisconsin in the state’s next two-year budget. He described it as the largest increase in state funding in the UW system’s history.
Marquette University President Michael Lovell died on Sunday following a three-year battle with cancer and a decade of service to the university, the university announced over the weekend.
The last time University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone saw Marquette University President Michael Lovell in person was about a month ago. Over beers at Cafe Hollander on Downer Avenue, they caught up on their high-pressure jobs, their families and their futures.
Both leaders were diagnosed with cancer in recent years: Mone announced he had lymphoma in 2020 and Lovell revealed he had a rare cancer known as a sarcoma in 2021. The experience bonded the leaders of Milwaukee’s two largest universities even closer together.
Regent Amy Bogost will serve a one-year term as the board’s president, and Regent Kyle Weatherly will serve as the vice president. Both joined the board in May 2020.
Five campuses have already been targeted for closure or a transition from in-person learning — UW-Platteville Richland will be completely vacated by July 1, while UW-Oshkosh Fond du Lac, UW-Milwaukee Washington County, UW-Green Bay Marinette and UW-Milwaukee Waukesha are all slated for closure or a transition to online-only classes.
Monica Smith, who started with the UW system in June 2023, submitted her resignation May 20 to take a job at private liberal arts college University of Richmond in Virginia, UW system President Jay Rothman announced to the UW Board of Regents at its meeting Thursday.
Smith’s resignation comes after a tumultuous year where diversity, equity and inclusion were repeatedly assailed by Republican lawmakers and the subject of a six-month budget standoff. During the standoff, instigated by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, about 35,000 UW System employees saw their pay raises put on pause.
One university has completely depleted its unrestricted reserves — a first in UW System history — that will require the UW System to step in and loan some of its own reserves. And some of the universities projecting to close their deficits in the coming year still need to make “substantial” cuts to achieve that goal, UW officials told the UW Board of Regents at a Thursday meeting on the UW-Milwaukee campus.
The University of Wisconsin System’s chief diversity officer has resigned after a year on the job and amid Republicans’ targeting of campus diversity efforts.
Officers arrested and cited seven people with disorderly conduct, according to UW-Milwaukee spokesperson Angelica Duria. Non-students were banned from the student union through the end of this month.
A year of deep cuts has significantly lowered the Universities of Wisconsin’s total debt, but it’s still projected to be $17.4 million in the red through 2025, according to information shared during the UW Board of Regents meeting Thursday.
Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman is warning that while it’s not precisely clear how delays in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and reduced completions this year will impact student enrollment this fall, one thing is certain: It won’t be good.
UW-Milwaukee said during a Business and Finance Committee meeting with the Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents at the UWM Student Union, a handful of protesters “interrupted” the meeting and were exhibiting “disruptive behavior.”
Fall enrollment at the Universities of Wisconsin will likely be negatively impacted by the delayed rollout of a federal financial aid form, according to Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman.
In Wisconsin, average earnings for a student entering the workforce directly after high school is $40,104, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; for graduates of the Universities of Wisconsin, the average starting salary is $61,221.
Recruiters are turning to college roadshows and prep classes to convince more rural students to go to college.
In the last 18 months, the Universities of Wisconsin has effectively closed five of the system’s branch campuses, most of which predominantly served rural students. The UW system cites declining enrollment, not finances, as the reason, even as the system projects that 13 campuses would be a cumulative $60 million over budget by the end of fiscal 2024.
Several high school administrators told the Wisconsin State Journal that they are seeing increased interest in technical colleges from their students, both in dual enrollment classes, which allow students to earn college credit in high school, and overall interest in those colleges for their post-secondary plans.
Robert “Bob” Atwell, one of the last two of former Gov. Scott Walker’s appointees on the UW Board of Regents, has submitted his resignation to Universities of Wisconsin leadership after Gov. Tony Evers announced a successor and two other new board members last week.
