Milwaukee lawyer Jay Rothman was selected as the next president of the UW System on Friday in a unanimous vote by the UW System Board of Regents. The decision ends the system’s second search for a new president in a multi-year process that has frequently sparked derision and criticism from members of campus communities about the openness and transparency of the search.
We talk with Greenville Rep. David Murphy on UW systems free speech policy and the state of a new system president. Then, the Wisconsin Supplier Diversity Program director talks about how to increase diversity in the state’s business contracts.
Within hours of Milwaukee attorney Jay Rothman being named the 8th president of the University of Wisconsin System, the first online petition was making the rounds.
To be fair, it was milder than the furious petitions of a year and a half ago, when thousands of faculty, staff, students and alumni called on the system’s Board of Regents to withdraw the single — and in their eyes, deeply flawed — finalist for the job and restart the search from scratch.
A business-minded Milwaukee attorney with no higher education administration experience will lead the University of Wisconsin System as its next president.
The Board of Regents voted unanimously on Friday to offer him the position.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents selected the chairman and CEO of a Milwaukee law firm to lead the state’s public universities into the future. On Friday, regents voted unanimously to offer the system’s top job to Jay O. Rothman after the 62-year-old received the recommendation of their Special Regent Committee.
Rothman, age 62, is an attorney from the Milwaukee area, where he has served as the CEO and chairman of the law firm Foley & Lardner LLP since 2011 after initially joining the firm in 1986. Rothman is a Wisconsin native and holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Marquette and a law degree from Harvard law school.
Law firm CEO to take over as UW System’s eighth president in June.
The next University of Wisconsin System president could be named as soon as Friday. Meanwhile, organizations representing campus employees are criticizing the UW Board of Regents for not holding public interviews with the two finalists.
The Board of Regents is slated to meet Friday afternoon to make their choice between UW-Eau Claire Chancellor James Schmidt and business attorney Jay Rothman.
Tommy Thompson, interim president of the University of Wisconsin system, plans to resign in March.
The University of Wisconsin’s Board of Regents is facing some pushback after the UW System announced Friday that there would be no public interviews of the two finalists named for the role of system president.
Multiple faculty groups are calling on the University of Wisconsin System to hold public forums with the two finalists in its presidential search, a measure that was included even in the widely criticized search that failed two years ago.
A Senate committee passed seven bills Wednesday related to the state colleges, including two that would expand eligibility for in-state tuition and three that are aimed at preventing foreign influence in higher education.
The only bill to pass the Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges with unanimous support was Senate Bill 557, which expands the ability of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and the UW System to invest certain revenues.
Emails obtained by The Washington Post reveal that Schlissel may not have understood the full extent of public records laws. In an email conversation with Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Schlissel suggested that Blank could delete emails to avoid potential FOIA disclosures.
“Mark and others—please note that anything that arrives in or is sent from my email can be requested as a public record. I know I’m not the only one for whom this is true,” Blank wrote in an email, according to the Post report. She was alluding to the fact that each state has different sunshine laws that dictate which records can be made publicly available.
Two men from Wisconsin have been named finalists in the search for the next University of Wisconsin System president. A special UW Board of Regents committee has forwarded UW-Eau Claire Chancellor Jim Schmidt and Milwaukee law firm CEO Jay Rothman from a field 44 applicants.
The University of Wisconsin System has named two finalists for the role of system president: UW-Eau Claire Chancellor James Schmidt and Jay Rothman, chairman and chief executive officer of the Foley and Lardner law firm in Milwaukee.
Jay Rothman, chair and CEO of Foley & Lardner, and UW-Eau Claire Chancellor Jim Schmidt were announced Friday as the finalists for the job leading the state’s public university system, its more than 160,000 students, 39,000 employees, 26 campuses and $6.6 billion budget.
UW-Eau Claire Chancellor James C. Schmidt and law firm CEO Jay O. Rothman are the candidates being considered for the position, according to an announcement made Friday.
The two finalists are Jay O. Rothman, chairman and CEO of the law firm Foley & Lardner LLP in Milwaukee, and James C. Schmidt, chancellor at UW-Eau Claire.
The three largest University of Wisconsin System campuses are reporting spikes in positive cases of COVID-19 weeks before the start of spring semester classes. While some of the state’s smaller, private colleges push start dates back, UW campuses say they’re starting on time and in-person.
A bill aimed at punishing colleges and universities for violating free speech and academic freedom rules set by Republicans has passed a legislative committee by a party-line vote. This comes after a GOP author amended the legislation to remove provisions that were potentially unconstitutional.
UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank told a faculty committee during a Monday meeting that she didn’t know what percentage of the campus community is boosted beyond those who received it at University Health Services. The university will be encouraging students and staff to report if they have been boosted off-campus to get a better picture of booster status across UW-Madison.
I focused on counties with smaller populations, and Sauk County, Wis., came up in my query; I’ve previously suggested Baraboo (the county seat and home to a small two-year institution that is part of the University of Wisconsin system), and it’s just a bit bigger than what you described.
“I’m not going to go off in the sunset and do nothing, I will be looking at my opportunities in the month of April and make a decision,” Thompson told News 3 Now.
The pandemic’s negative impact on enrollment was not ubiquitous, however. Enrollments at elite universities, such as Harvard and Stanford, held steady during the height of the pandemic. Several of the more-prestigious state flagship campuses, such as the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, recorded record freshman-class enrollments. Amid the adversity caused by the pandemic, in that sense, the rich simply got richer.
Tommy Thompson, who is the interim president for the University of Wisconsin System, announced his resignation Jan. 7 in a letter to UW System Board of Regents President Edmund Manydeeds III. Thompson will leave his role on March 18, 2022.
Thompson’s departure is the second major resignation within the UW System that has taken place since this past fall. University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank announced in October that she will also be leaving the UW System at the end of the spring academic term, vacating another crucial spot.
A series of bills with bipartisan support could give the University of Wisconsin System a new sustainable source of money that is nearly three times more than what campuses received in funding increases in the most recent state budget.
After nearly two years serving as the University of Wisconsin System’s interim president, Tommy Thompson will leave his role on March 18. Thompson, an 80-year-old former Republican governor, has held the position since July 2020, after the UW System failed to hire a permanent successor for Ray Cross.
And while Evers’ seven unconfirmed appointees to the UW Board of Regents have been serving without the Senate’s stamp of approval, the Republican lawmaker chairing the committee charged with confirming them recently warned that some may be in trouble.
Some private colleges and universities in Wisconsin are delaying the start of spring semester classes, requiring negative COVID-19 tests or vaccinations and boosters for students and employees amid a rapid surge of new COVID-19 infections. At the same time, the University of Wisconsin System says students “will return on-time and as normal” for classes starting this month.
University of Wisconsin System interim President Tommy Thompson plans to resign from the position March 18.
The former Wisconsin governor took on the role July 1, 2020, after being hired that June by the system’s Board of Regents. Thompson has been filling the void after a failed search for a replacement for former UW System President Ray Cross, who retired in 2020 after serving as president since 2014. Thompson was 78 at the time of being hired for the interim role.
UW System interim President Tommy Thompson is resigning from his post, effective March 18.
He announced his impending departure to the UW Board on Friday, as the search committee tasked with finding a permanent president anticipated it would name a hire sometime in February.
Tommy Thompson announced that his last day leading the University of Wisconsin System will be March 18. His resignation announcement came Friday, the same day that a committee of UW Board of Regents members meet to select finalists in the presidential search.
The use of online-proctoring tools has exploded since colleges went remote in the spring of 2020. Proctorio’s business reportedly increased ninefold from April 2019 to April 2020, with nearly three million active weekly users as of March 2021. It and other proctoring companies — such as Honorlock and ProctorU — permeated the news cycle just as quickly, drawing widespread ire over concerns with student stress and allegations of bias against people with disabilities or darker skin tones. Students at more than a dozen universities, including the City University of New York, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Washington State University, have circulated petitions protesting the use of the tools.
Data from the University of Wisconsin system show there were 1,710 fewer new first-year, full-time-equivalent students in 2020 compared to 2019. In Ohio, the number of public high school graduates enrolling in a public institution peaked in 2018 at 51,075 students and declined 4 percent to 48,451 in 2020. The Kansas Board of Regents shows enrollment for first-time entering students declining from 16 percent in fall 2019 to 14 percent in fall 2021.
The university announced on Thursday upcoming dates for a series of listening sessions that will take place throughout January, hosted by a 21-person search committee of Regent members, community representatives, administrators, students and faculty.
The committee leading the search for the new University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor is holding listening sessions for the UW-Madison community this month.
A new program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture will give youth in three Wisconsin counties the chance to work with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension to explore post-high school educational and work opportunities.
UW-Madison’s semester starts Jan. 25. There are no changes to campus operations at this time, university spokesperson Meredith McGlone said Wednesday.
Research funding organizations like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation encourage and/or require faculty researchers to use IDPs with doctoral student trainees. The practice has gained traction beyond the STEM disciplines within the past six years. A quick online search will reveal that the IDP has increasingly become a recommended mentoring tool for humanities and social sciences graduate students at both the master’s and doctoral levels.The following are a few of the possible IDPs available to graduate students: Individual Development Plan (all disciplines), University of Wisconsin
Thankfully, we’re starting to see positive changes in higher education. In some cases, individual professors are stepping up, establishing on-campus centers for the study of American political ideas and institutions. At the Jack Miller Center, where I work, we partner with public-minded scholars who have created such centers at the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, American University and dozens of others. Many of them, in turn, have launched programs for K-12 teachers.
UW-Oshkosh biology professor Greg Adler was working on research near the Panama Canal in 2001 when he found a mouse possum with a longer tail than usual and a brownish rather than the common salmon-colored belly, Oshkosh Northwestern Media reported Thursday.
About 1,000 University of Wisconsin students working on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic will be eligible for a new tuition incentive.
The University of Wisconsin system will offer healthcare students new incentives for working on COVID-19 front lines.
President Tommy Thompson announced Wednesday that a thousand students will be eligible for a $500 tuition incentive for working in hospitals and other healthcare settings.
At UW-Madison, “we communicate directly with students each semester about campus policies on alcohol and illicit drugs as well as resources for getting help,” spokesperson Meredith McGlone said in a statement.
“Our students have stepped up in the past,” Thompson said in a statement. “This is another opportunity for them to gain valuable experience while helping Wisconsin combat the latest coronavirus wave.”
The University of Wisconsin System wants to give $500 tuition credits to hundreds of students for joining the front lines in the battle to contain the worsening COVID-19 pandemic.
We hear from a graduate student working to learn, and tell, stories of indigenous people who attended and worked at UW-Madison — stories that have so far been missing from the university archives.
University of Wisconsin System officials have dramatically increased salary ranges for top leaders, giving them more leverage as they search for the next system president and UW-Madison chancellor.
The state Legislative Audit Bureau released its annual financial audit of the University of Wisconsin System Tuesday.
The bipartisan Joint Committee of Employment Relations voted unanimously to approve the pay plan.
The planned renovation of the facility brings One City Schools closer to its goal of offering a tuition-free public charter school, authorized by the University of Wisconsin System, for students in grades 5-12. One City Schools currently offers a tuition-based independent preschool that serves 2- and 3-year-olds as well as 4K students and a tuition-free public charter school for students in K-4.
The tentative timeline, laid out for the first time by search committee chair Karen Walsh, includes an application deadline in mid-March, semifinalist interviews in mid-April, campus finalist visits during the first week of May and a recommendation to the full UW Board of Regents by mid-May.
The UW Board of Regents on Monday increased salary ranges for top leaders between 5% and 32%, a move that will give them more negotiating power amid two high-profile searches for the next University of Wisconsin System president and UW-Madison chancellor.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents has approved increasing salary ranges for top university positions in order to match ranges at peer institutions. The vote Monday came after UW System interim President Tommy Thompson said he favors smaller, successive increases for top executive pay ranges.
The first time professor Elizabeth Bearden asked the University of Wisconsin-Madison for permission to teach remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she heard back in three days.
It was fall 2020. Bearden’s fears about contracting the virus were as high as ever.
The board on Friday signed off on the layoff of a UW-Platteville associate professor in the School of Education. The professor’s name is not included in the board documents.
State Superintendent of Schools Jill Underly said Monday she is “mixed” on the University of Wisconsin System’s recent move to remain ACT/SAT test-optional for another two years.
