The University of Wisconsin-Madison would be required to admit all high school students who finish in the top 5% of their class, and other campuses would have to admit those in the top 10%, under a bill passed Tuesday by the state Senate that’s part of a deal reached between the Legislature and university
Written by Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a Professor of Public Affairs with the La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Vaughn Bascom Professor of Women, Family, and Community in the School of Human Ecology.
In fact, my great-grandfather’s tenacity for Wisconsin’s youth inspired his daughter, my grandmother, to help set up a research center and scholarship program at UW-Madison to focus on neuroscientific research regarding child development and well-being. The center, named after my great-grandfather Willis Jones, recognizes that “adolescence is a period when the brain is more sensitive” and prepares young people in leadership, including in conflict resolution.
State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, and state Rep. Deb Andraca, D-Whitefish Bay, were approached by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison professors and asked to strengthen campus firearm laws.
Jack O’Meara represents the Public Representation Organization of the Faculty Senate, or PROFS, a nonprofit advocacy organization of UW-Madison faculty. He said there was increased concern after the Feb. 13, 2023, mass shooting at Michigan State University. In that incident, three students were killed and five others were injured when a gunman entered a building on the East Lansing campus.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel talked to Marquette University research fellow John Johnson and University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden about what common redistricting concepts mean and how they apply to the case.
“Wards are usually viewed as the building blocks of districts, so that gets done first,” Burden said. Because there are only 72 counties, “some of them are going to have to be sliced in order to make districts. Especially the more populous ones, like Dane, Milwaukee and Brown are going to have multiple districts in them.”
The Universities of Wisconsin hopes a new one-stop shop for online degree programs across its 13 universities will boost enrollment and graduation rates, especially for adult learners and traditional-age students looking for virtual options.
“I do not think this is about fairness – premiums are set based on accident rates and risks associated with different demographic groups and would be higher if the groups are involved in higher rates of accidents or other damages,” said Nancy Wong, Kohl’s Chair in Retail Innovation, Professor of Consumer Science, Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Explore how Wisconsin’s Ho-Chunk people fought back against devastating attacks on their land and culture. Interview with Stephen Kantrowitz, professor of history at UW-Madison.
The UW Board of Regents is planning to eliminate application fees at most Universities of Wisconsin schools, a proposal that is set to go before the board later this week.
The journalism fellowship program would be administered by the University of Wisconsin System. Under the program, a panel of UW journalism professors and industry experts would choose 25 fellows to match to participating newsrooms for a one-year fellowship.
Participants, who would be required to hold a two- or four-year degree in journalism, media, communications or a similar program, would receive a $40,000 salary.
Wisconsin colleges and universities will play a key part of the housing puzzle this summer when the city hosts thousands of visitors for the Republican National Convention.
Vos said in October the raises would not be approved until the UW System made concessions on it’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, according to The Badger Herald. The Board of Regents voted to accept a deal in December exchanging pay raises and other funding for the “reimagining” of certain DEI positions, according to The Badger Herald’s previous coverage of the deal.
A lawsuit filed by Gov. Tony Evers against Republican lawmakers who blocked pay raises for university employees and funding for conservation projects has been accepted by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Gov. Tony Evers signed two bills, now 2023 Wisconsin Act 92 and 2023 Wisconsin Act 93, on Friday that will release long-awaited pay raises to employees of the University of Wisconsin System.
Low-wage workers have found it especially hard to afford higher housing costs, even before a spike in prices in 2022, explained Laura Dresser, associate director of the High Road Strategy Center (formerly COWS, a left-leaning think tank) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dresser’s research has found that increasing the minimum wage to $15 over the next five years would increase wages for one in seven workers in Wisconsin. That includes one of every four Black and Hispanic workers.
The bill also has backing from the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where around 365 students are currently enrolled in video game development programs. While 60% of that university’s graduates stay in Wisconsin, less than 20% of the video game program graduates stay, according to testimony from professor Andrew Williams, who has taught game design classes at UW-Stout and worked as an art director in the video game industry.
One of the legislative vetoes blocked conservation projects selected by the Department of Natural Resources. Evers also challenged a veto that blocked already approved pay raises for 35,000 University of Wisconsin system employees, but after he filed the lawsuit, Republicans and the university system reached an agreement approving raises if the school cuts back on diversity initiatives.
Wisconsin state agencies — including the Universities of Wisconsin — would be barred from doing business with certain government-run companies under a GOP bill circulating in the Capitol.
Rep. David Murphy, one of the resolution’s authors, wrote in a statement submitted for a public hearing on Tuesday that the amendment would restore “merit, fairness, and equality not only to hiring by the University of Wisconsin system, but to hiring by all governmental entities statewide.”
The first bill would provide funding for a fellowship program to place 25 journalists in participating local newsrooms across the state. The fellows would be selected by a committee of University of Wisconsin journalism professors and news industry experts, the bill sponsors said. The bill would provide funding for each fellow to receive a $40,000 salary for one year.
The Republican-authored legislation passed the Assembly along party lines in November and the Senate held a committee hearing on its version of the bill Wednesday.
A proposed constitutional amendment limiting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts throughout Wisconsin received a public hearing on Tuesday.
The amendment — AJR 109 — would prohibit governmental entities, including the UW System, technical colleges and governmental offices and agencies, from discriminating against or granting “preferential treatment” to people and groups on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in public employment, public education, public contracting or public administration.
In 2022, there were at least 13 lawsuits filed related to election administration, according to a tally from the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
Questions of election administration landing in court isn’t a new phenomenon, said Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative. But there’s been an uptick in such cases since the 2000 presidential election, when a razor-thin margin in Florida “brought attention to the actual defects in how we run our elections.” The U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore halted a Florida recount because of time constraints, effectively awarding the presidency to George W. Bush.
This estimate from the bureau included spending that has passed since June, as well as bills currently working their way through the legislature. That includes $423 million for building projects on University of Wisconsin system campuses and other items.
Republican leaders said the new estimates show there is still enough of a surplus to deliver more tax cuts.
He also noted state history: a petition by state residents helped lead to a ban of the pesticide DDT. The petition, filed in 1968 with the DNR, requested a “declaratory ruling on whether DDT was an environmental pollutant” within state statutes, according to a University of Wisconsin law review article.
Millions in revenue and state aid dollars could bolster the Universities of Wisconsin’s budget as soon as February, if lawmakers take up two provisions of the deal struck between UW system officials and Republican legislative leadership that gave UW system about $800 million in exchange for changes to diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
A pair of Wisconsin Republicans want to give the Universities of Wisconsin $500,000 a year to ensure conservative voices on public campuses are heard.
It’s estimated that a quarter of school districts in the state will put a referendum on the ballot in 2024, according to Julie Underwood, a dean emerita with the University of Wisconsin-Madison who focuses on education policy.
Mandatory University of Wisconsin Law School seminar tells students ‘there are no exceptional White people’
More than a dozen state legislatures have introduced or passed bills reining in DEI programs in colleges and universities, claiming the offices eat up valuable financial resources with little impact. Last month, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents voted to cut back diversity initiatives in exchange for state funding in a deal with GOP lawmakers.
Rep. Scott Johnson, R-Jefferson, and Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, are circulating a bill that would provide the UW system with $500,000 annually to run its free speech office, the Wisconsin Institute of Citizenship and Civil Dialogue.
Though the UW system is struggling with millions of dollars in structural deficits, Rothman said the decision was not a cost-cutting measure but instead driven by dwindling enrollment.
“If we’re thinking about how we want to manage or protect groundwater resources in the future, we really need to be thinking about what’s happening on the land surface. And if you look at Wisconsin, greater than 90% of the land is, really, rural land,” said Michael Cardiff, a professor in the department of geoscience at UW-Madison. “Rural water users are probably most connected to the largest area of land in Wisconsin, and could probably tell us about what sort of concerns they’re seeing.”
The rising trajectory of Snapshot Wisconsin could make it the largest such wildlife monitoring project in the world, said University of Wisconsin Professor of Forest and Wildlife Ecology Phil Townsend.
Preparations are well underway for the 2024 Republican National Convention, which will be held at Fiserv Forum from July 15-18. A big part of those preparations revolves around public safety and security.
Mounted patrol officers from the Milwaukee and Madison Police departments, as well as the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin State Fair Police departments, are getting ready for the big event.
“It’s a really unusual dynamic where neither party has a competitive primary process this year,” said Eleanor Powell, associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I’m hard pressed to think of a cycle where there was this much lack of interest or competitiveness.”
There will be other races and measures on the primary ballot. Some municipalities will see elections for county boards or local school funding measures, said Barry Burden, director of the UW-Madison Elections Research Center.
“So even if the presidential race doesn’t look competitive, hopefully there’ll be other things that’ll draw voters out,” Burden said.
Madison’s population will still be less than half that of Milwaukee in 2040, according to official population projections by the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2013. The 2040 projections estimated a Madison population of 281,150, compared with 627,400 for Milwaukee.
A regional study from 2022 projected larger growth figures for Madison, with estimates of 306,521 for 2035 and 345,675 for 2050. That’s still much smaller than the state’s largest city.
Sen. Kelda Roys of Madison and Sen. Jeff Smith of Brunswick, along with Rep. Deb Andraca of Whitefish Bay and Rep. Alex Joers of Middleton, said the bill would exclude student loans from Wisconsin state income tax by adopting the student debt loan relief tax exclusion passed under the federal American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
Nearly 15 percent of Wisconsin children ages 2 to 17 years are obese, according to data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health. The data show rates of obesity continue to climb until middle age, peaking at 47 percent of residents age 55 to 64.
“(Nicotine) literally alters the makeup of the brain as it’s developing,” explained Chris Hollenback, the communications director for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention. “You have these receptors saying ‘more, more, more.’ When you’re under the age of 17, it’s easier to get addicted and harder to quit.”
“Some of these programs are focused on racially minoritized students,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The hallmark is the Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant and it gives students $2,500 per year. What is not mentioned, I think, in a lot of dialogue, is that they not only have to qualify as a racially minoritized student, but they also have to qualify on the basis of financial need.”
Steve Vavrus, director of the Wisconsin State Climatology Office, said Wisconsin tied 1987 to become the fourth-warmest year on record since 1895. The statewide average temperature for the year was 46.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which was roughly 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the long-term average. Only 2012, 1998 and 1931 were hotter.
Data from UW Health urgent care centers indicates a 4.5 percent increase from 2022 in visits for acute respiratory infections during a 9-week period spanning June and July last year.
Claire Allen runs the office at UW-Madison every Tuesday from 10 to 4. She’s been staffing it for nine months as a housing counseling specialist.
“For a lot students, their first time renting is in college,” Allen said. “Lease questions, roommate conflicts, security deposit questions, options to end a lease if it’s not working out,” Allen said. “Questions about landlords not addressing repairs, that’s a big one.”
UW-Madison political science professor and Elections Research Center director Barry Burden details the plan and timeline set by the Wisconsin Supreme Court for creating new legislative district maps.
So far this decade, the state has experienced about a quarter of the population growth it saw between 2010 and 2020. But the COVID-19 pandemic led to a spike in deaths that altered the state’s trajectory, said David Egan-Robertson, demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory.
“It actually may be a case that population will grow a little bit faster because there will be fewer deaths going forward in the state,” Egan-Robertson said.
Democrat Gov. Tony Evers told the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he supports the bill to lower tuition for DACA recipients.
The Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance held a public hearing Thursday on legislation to provide funding for the UW System capital projects that were used as bargaining chips in the system’s debate with legislative Republicans late last year over diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
The bill would provide more than $400 million from the state’s general fund to pay for new campus buildings, renovations, additions and the demolition of aging infrastructure. The marquee project included in the bill is funding for a new engineering building at UW-Madison.
No longer tied to milking cows herself twice a day, Hinchley says both she and her dairy cows are happier with the robotic milkers operating 24 hours a day.
“It’s not necessarily something that you would have to do in order to stay in the dairy business,” said Chuck Nicholson, a UW-Madison professor of animal and dairy sciences. He noted only about 8% of Wisconsin’s dairy farmers have implemented the new technology, typically family farms that want to save on labor costs. “The labor shortage is definitely a key motivating factor.”
“This judge seems to be a very activist judge,” said John Gross, a clinical law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “He seems to want to insert himself into the resolution of cases in ways that are often not appropriate, or at the very least, not authorized by any statute.”
Gross also raised concerns the restitution order, which directed money to the county that supported the victim after the assault, could set a dangerous precedent in which judges or district attorneys could use restitution to fill government coffers.
In less than six years, the number of dugout canoes known to exist in Wisconsin rose from 11 to nearly 100. Locating and studying these vessels, ranging from about 150 to 4,000 years old, is the mission of the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project. Interview with Sissel Schroeder, a professor of anthropology with a specialization in archaeology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose lab hosts the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project which she heads up with state maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen.
Wisconsin lawmakers are considering ending “gain-of-function” research at all higher education institutions in the state.
The rare practice of modifying risky pathogens to make them more harmful to people during research has become political and controversial since the COVID-19 outbreak.
“That language is pretty categorical, so my sense is that no recall election could be held until new maps are adopted or the court takes some other authorizing action,” Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in election and constitutional law, said.
The closures of three Universities of Wisconsin branch campuses have left empty buildings and hundreds of acres of unused land in Richland, Washington and Fond du Lac counties.
A proposed GOP bill could give those communities $2 million to redevelop the former two-year campus sites.
This week, Republican legislators unveiled a proposal to legalize medical marijuana in Wisconsin. We get reaction to the proposal from Lucas Richert, a pharmaceutical historian at UW-Madison.
A bill that would prohibit higher education institutions in Wisconsin from conducting “gain of function” research on “potentially pandemic pathogens” received a public hearing on Wednesday.
The bill — AB 413 — was introduced by Rep. Elijah Behnke (R-Oconto) and Sen. André Jacque (R-DePere), who cited several incidents at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and controversy over the origins of COVID-19.
Gracz declined to criticize the mayor or the Common Council. But he emphasized that he has a business degree from Marquette University, was a union leader for 20 years, spent seven years on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, did labor negotiations for the county and was head of employee relations for the state.
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education said the school had not been made aware of the bill before Monday and was still reviewing it.
For more than 150 years, debtors prisons have been illegal in the United States. However, that restriction only applies to private debts; a recent study found that between 2005 and 2018, eight thousand Wisconsin residents were jailed for failing to pay court debts each year. We talk to John Gross, director of the Public Defender Project at UW Law School, about the causes and consequences of modern-day debt imprisonment.
Local governments and state agencies would be prohibited from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to anybody on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin under a proposed constitutional amendment Republicans began circulating last week.
Lawmakers will bring forward a bill to fund the construction of UW-Madison’s new engineering building, among other projects, that was one of the most significant aspects of the deal struck last month between the Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman and Assembly Speaker Rep. Robin Vos, R-Rochester.
