The state public university system is leaning heavily on a low national ranking in a bid seeking $855 million from the Legislature.
Wisconsin ranks 43rd among 50 states in funding its public four-year universities, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. The advocacy group represents the UW System, as well as other state university systems.
President Jay Rothman said during a brief Zoom news conference Monday that his administration plans to ask regents on Thursday to approve asking for the money as part of the 2025-27 state budget. The request is only the first step in a long, winding budget-making process.
Universities of Wisconsin schools would keep in-state undergraduate tuition steady for the next two academic years if lawmakers hike state aid by $855 million of state dollars as part of the upcoming budget cycle, UW system President Jay Rothman said in a budget request Monday.
The Universities of Wisconsin’s top priorities in its next capital budget are tearing down and replacing two failing 1960s-era monstrosities: Cowley Hall at UW-La Crosse, and the towering concrete fortress known as Mosse Humanities building at UW-Madison.
Wisconsin Department of Transportation Secretary Craig Thompson is leaving his position next month for a position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, marking the end of nearly five years as the head of the agency.
Thompson, who took on the role as Wisconsin DOT secretary five years ago as one of Evers’ first department head appointees, will leave the agency on Sept. 11 to take a position at UW-Madison, Evers said. On Sept. 16, Thompson will begin his new role as vice chancellor for university relations at UW-Madison, university officials announced Friday.
In 2021, the Tribal Elder Food Box program began in response to a shortage of food for Native elders, said Carolee Dodge Francis, who chairs the department of civil society community studies in the school of human ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
175 years after UW-Madison was founded, it continues prioritizing teaching, research and public service across the state. Now, the university is celebrating its impact while thanking Wisconsinites in the Chippewa Valley and beyond for their support.
Students have been working on various projects that have to do with river bank stabilization, conservation plans for the next 50 years, and green technology to prevent blue-green algae blooms.
“Either the messaging from Republican and conservative leaders did not fully penetrate or the confusing legal language led some Republicans to vote ‘no’ rather than enact something they were unsure about,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center. “Democrats did put some money into the campaign to defeat the amendments and their message appears to have reached their primary voters.”
Eighty years later, Stevens was finally buried in Florida National Cemetery. His daughter attended the service in March, along with Ryan Wubben and other members of a University of Wisconsin-Madison group who helped find Stevens’ remains.
“It’s an interesting feeling that the success of your project results in a funeral,” said Wubben, the field physician for the University of Wisconsin Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project.
According to the University of Wisconsin Division of Extension, cranberry marshes cover 21,000 acres in 20 of Wisconsin’s central and northern counties where more than 250 cranberry farms produce nearly 61 percent of the nation’s supply.
Weeks before a deadline to submit budget requests to Gov. Tony Evers, Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman provided a glimpse of his ambitions for increased state funding of higher education.
The Republican-led effort is primed to double down on the austerity logic behind the UW’s problems.
While the amendments are most clearly aimed at power over undesignated and unanticipated federal dollars, they could impact other types of funding, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
“It’s been a very quiet contest in a district that is not likely to elect a Republican anytime soon,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said of the GOP primary race. “But this is at least an opportunity for the party to pick a favorite and try to make a stab at winning a difficult seat.”
In February, March, and May of this year, Wisconsin led the nation in “inflation adjusted hourly earnings growth,” the release said, citing data from the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That means “wages are going up faster than prices” — a very good thing, said Ross Milton, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in state and local finance.
Madison serves as the innovator – home to the University of Wisconsin-Madison where research is king. The school ranks eighth in nation for research expenditures among public and private universities according to the National Science Foundation with more than $1.5 billion invested annually. UW also ranks high in patents granted – 12th in 2023. Additionally, the city’s startup scene is consistently ranked within the top-150 ecosystems globally. This innovation leads to products that need to be manufactured. Enter Milwaukee.
Written by Christine Durrance ,a professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies health economics and policy, with particular interests in risky behavior, including substance use and the opioid crisis; maternal, infant, and reproductive health; child maltreatment and domestic violence; and competition in health care markets.
Almost 90% of Wisconsin residents with a bachelor’s degree from the Universities of Wisconsin were still living in the state five years after graduation.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is awarding $11 million to 15 organizations, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to establish new medical residency programs in rural areas.
One such proposal will come from the WiSys, a nonprofit supporting organization of the Universities of Wisconsin. It is the technology transfer office for 11 public universities, meaning it protects the intellectual property of academic inventors and aims to move such discoveries into the marketplace. The WiSys proposal, which got a Phase 1 nod from NSF, seeks to make Wisconsin a global leader in sustainable agriculture and involves about 30 partners.
In Wisconsin, only 17 percent of 2,769 people surveyed last December support a hunting season on sandhill cranes. That’s according to a study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and funded by the International Crane Foundation. The organization has said crop damage by cranes should be solved by other means, saying a hunt wouldn’t have any significant benefit for farmers.
Wisconsin researchers are among a select few to document manure spill trends.
In 15 years, reported incidents statewide jumped from about 40 to roughly 200 annually, but Department of Natural Resources and University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension staff don’t believe their frequency actually increased.
In addition to the cost of a monthly internet subscription, other barriers exist for households that have the internet infrastructure but don’t connect. Task force member Gail Huycke said barriers include a lack of digital literacy, not knowing how to use the technology, poor reliability and fear.
Huycke is a professor of practice and broadband specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Division of Extension. As part of the Connected Aging Communities initiative, she worked with seniors on using the internet and found people over age 65 are the most likely to be disconnected.
Howard Schweber, who for years taught political science and law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told WPR that Wisconsin once had a reputation for having “mostly apolitical courts, but that fell apart in the 2000s.” He said he believes the politicization of state Supreme Court elections started in 2007 with the election of conservative Chief Justice Annette Ziegler.
“It really took the Democrats Wisconsin a long while to realize that these were not your father’s judicial elections anymore, and they have indeed become highly politicized,” Schweber said. “Because, just as with the Supreme Court, people realize that if you can capture the court, you can promote your ideology in a very effective way.”
“Very often these tools can invent false facts,” said UW-Madison Assistant Professor Annette Zimmermann. “That’s very misleading and very dangerous, particularly in professions that impact a lot of people.”
Zimmermann researches the ethical implications of AI at UW. She says it’s crucial to give workers a seat at the table when making decisions about how to use AI.
Federal funds received by the Universities of Wisconsin are not expected to be affected should the constitutional amendments pass.
County fairs around the state have already gone through the additional testing requirements for avian flu this summer. The Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory has received nearly 400 samples every week since June, according to director Keith Poulsen.
Poulsen said they could accommodate more tests, but there hasn’t been the demand.
Lindsay resides in Cedarburg with his family and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin Law School. Prior to his legal career, he worked in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel from 2006 to 2008.
The state Legislature has formed a study committee to discuss possible reforms and restructuring of the Universities of Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin turkey reintroduction was a partnership of the DNR and NWTF. Tom Yuill, a University of Wisconsin professor and wildlife disease expert, provided health testing of the birds.
Christine Remucal, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UW-Madison, graduate student Sarah Balgooyen and other researchers looked at foam and surface water samples collected between 2020 and 2023, from areas across the state.
Barbara Bowers, a long-term care researcher and professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing, said she is “astounded” by the medical complexity of the people in assisted living today.
“They look a lot like, 10 years ago, the people in nursing homes,” she said.
A partnership led by the Great Lakes Intertribal Food Coalition and the University of Wisconsin-Madison received $10 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agricultural Systems program earlier this summer.
Co-authored by Morgan Edwards, an assistant professor with the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison. She also leads the Climate Action Lab and holds an affiliation with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Zachary Thomas is a graduate student in UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and member of the Climate Action Lab.
Phillips broke a long list of barriers as the first Black woman to graduate from the UW-Madison Law School, to win a seat on the Milwaukee City Council and to become a judge in Wisconsin. Then she became the first woman and Black person elected to statewide office in Wisconsin, serving as secretary of state from 1979 to 1983. She died in 2018 at age 95.
In the past decades, there has been a significant increase in the number of immigrants entering Wisconsin which has greatly increased the state’s Latino population — from 93,000 to 447,290, according to a Dairy Workers Study conducted by the School for Workers at UW-Madison.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Student Success Through Applied Research lab, which has focused on rural college access since 2020, has expanded its work since joining the STARS network, Betley said. The lab has produced an interactive mapping tool and report to document which rural areas have access to postsecondary programs and provide new insights into rural college enrollment trends. The findings even helped the university identify districts where students can use support and launch a statewide college-access program called College for Rural Wisconsin.
UW-Madison researchers have teamed up with a group of the university’s tribal partners for a new project to support and expand Indigenous food traditions and practices of Great Lakes tribal nations.
“It seems like Biden has released (the delegates from their pledges). He didn’t say that formally, but they’re also not formally bound to him,” Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Now, for the first time, the UW system is turning to a decade-old faculty layoff policy that expands the circumstances under which tenured faculty can be laid off and outlines the process for doing it. With Milwaukee’s branch campuses closing, the UW system is eliminating the College of General Studies and putting Decker and about three dozen UW-Milwaukee tenured faculty at risk of being laid off.
COVID-19 is “still circulating and continuing to mutate on a fairly regular basis,” said Dr. Jim Conway, medical director of the UW Health immunization program.
“It opens up a whole new world of possibilities,” said Kate Walsh, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and part of a team assessing the effectiveness of the statewide pilot project.
The UW-Madison team is gathering survey data from 68 housing recipients across the program’s nine pilot sites. More than half of the participants across the nine sites reported a reduction in exposure to domestic violence and higher satisfaction with their living situations, according to preliminary findings.
Dennis Hancock is center director at the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center, which will administer the new facility in partnership with the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. He said part of the decline in Wisconsin dairy farms can be attributed to workforce shortage and a possible solution is replacing some of the workforce with technology.
“One of the ways to save smaller farms, in my opinion and those that have actually made the conversion would agree, is through the use of robotics,” Hancock recently said on WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “Robotics are quite expensive, but they do save a lot of labor.”
“We had the warmest February on record and our soil moisture was down to 16% in some areas. And now we’ve gone from one of the most severe deficits to one of the most severe surpluses (of moisture) in just a couple of months,” said Kevin Jarek, University of Wisconsin Division of Extension Crops and Soils educator for Outagamie County. “In my 25 years with Extension, this is unbelievable.”
Following December’s deal between the University of Wisconsin System and the Republican-controlled budget-writing committee, a new committee will recommend legislation to address future plans for the UW System.
“We sampled several dozen different lakes and rivers in Wisconsin, and so we were looking at PFAS in foam,” said Christy Remucal, a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and interim director of the University of Wisconsin Aquatic Sciences Center. “It’s the white stuff you sometimes see on the side of the lake or in the river.”
Communities that have lost a two-year Universities of Wisconsin branch campus will be eligible for up to $2 million in grants.
The state Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved releasing $20 million to the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation for a grant program to assist communities in redeveloping shuttered campuses.
The state budget committee on Tuesday approved the release of $27 million for the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation to cover grants aimed at creating a regional tech hub and to help communities affected by UW shutdowns. The committee also approved money for the Department of Corrections to cover the costs of youth who are serving adult sentences.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that naturally occurring foams on state waterways have PFAS levels as much as thousands of times higher than waters that lie below.
The findings are part of a new study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. She said the PFAS concentrations in foam were “jaw-dropping.” Samples of foam collected from Lake Monona showed PFAS levels up to roughly 328,000 parts per trillion.
A Dane County supervisor, a public health expert and a pharmacist are making the case they can best represent some of the state’s youngest voters in an Assembly district anchored by UW-Madison.
Professor Michael Childers specializes in labor education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said he thinks the likelihood of the case going to the Wisconsin Supreme Court is all but guaranteed.
“This finding — if it was allowed to stand — would, in essence, remove the changes to collective bargaining laws and allow for the provision for all the public sector workers to again collective bargain similar to all the private sector workers in Wisconsin are able to do,” Childers said.
James Tinjum, an engineering professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison who said he had concerns about Biden’s energy levels during the debate, was reassured Friday. He said he has faith in Biden’s ability to “get things done” and noted concerns about Trump’s age, as well. Trump turned 78 last month.
“He had more confidence, more strength in his voice and a positive message that I’m looking for,” Tinjum said.
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.
In fact, the issue unifies all Wisconsinites — Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. It ranks at the top of issues residents rated as most significant problems they face. And while it is a common problem for all, inflation has an outsized impact on the young, according to the “WisconSays” survey of nearly 4,000 residents conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Survey Center in partnership with the La Follette School of Public Affairs.
Steph Tai, law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said the decision means that litigants, regardless of whether they’re conservative or liberal, will likely bring cases before courts that align with their own political preferences despite claims that judges are impartial.
“They’re going to pick judges that are more likely to be sympathetic to their argument that whatever federal regulation should be overturned,” Tai said.
I recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in Life Sciences Communication. With the opportunity to serve as Alice in Dairyland, I am so excited to travel across Wisconsin for a memorable and rewarding year, connecting communities with agriculture and learning more about this diverse industry across our state.
“They’re under more scrutiny in a presidential race, when Wisconsin will be one of the key swing states in the Electoral College,” said Barry Burden, who directs the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “An error, a small mistake, or a delay caused by a clerk can lead to suspicion or misinformation or even conspiracies about something that’s going wrong in the election.”
