The UW Board of Regents has approved a 5.5-percent tuition hike.
The Board voted for the increase at all four-year UW campuses during it’s meeting Thursday. System President Kevin Reilly says it will impact students at the UW-Madison the most, with a $617 tuition hike for the upcoming academic year. The UW-Milwaukee will see a $359 increase and other four-year campuses will see tuition jump about $280.
University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduates from Wisconsin will pay $745 more during the next academic year, under a 5.5 percent tuition increase and new student fee rates approved by the UW Board of Regents on Thursday for four-year campuses.
That means in-state UW-Madison students will pay about $8,300 in tuition and fees annually. Tuition and fees at other University of Wisconsin System institutions will range from about $7,700 at UW-Milwaukee, or $398 more than last year, to $6,246 at UW-Stout, a $307 increase. Mandatory student fees, which pay for things like student unions and health services, vary by campus.
University of Wisconsin System officials said the budget approved by the Board of Regents Thursday will mean larger classes, cuts in student services, tighter reins on spending and an increase in tuition.
UW President Kevin Reilly said there’s no doubt the next several years “are going to be very difficult” on UW campuses.
The operating budget cuts $50 million in state aid, freezes salaries and requires eight days of furloughs for all UW System employees.
Guidelines approved by the board also direct campuses to slow down hiring and travel while they make plans to cut or merge unpopular or redundant academic programs.
MENOMONIE, Wis. — A healthy University of Wisconsin System is essential to rebuilding the state’s economy. Yet glaring discrepancies in compensation for the faculty and academic staff who power UW institutions in the state pose a serious threat to our future viability.
The University of Wisconsin’s touchstone is a plaque on Bascom Hall that reads: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state university of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”
….Now, 115 years later, the state Legislature has removed barriers to organizing faculty and staff (including research assistants) on the UW campus. Members of the current Board of Regents are griping that allowing members of the great state university’s staff to unionize poses a threat to its sound operations and fiscal future.
Richard Ely would be disappointed, and so are we.
A state lawmaker is attacking a five and a half percent tuition hike expected to be approved by University Wisconsin Board of Regents this week. Whitewater Republican Steve Nass is a member of the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities.
Itâ??s an example of “arrogance” for UW officials to force a five and a half percent tuition hike on students in these troubling economic times. Thatâ??s the feeling of state Representative Steve Nass, a Whitewater Republican. “This is going to hurt middle-class families in particular because they are the ones whose sons and daughters don’t get grants. This is going to pound them.” The Board of Regents is expected to approve the increase tomorrow, raising tuition on the Madison campus about $620, to a total of $7300 a year.
An Assembly committee took testimony Wednesday on whether University of Wisconsin System regents should be required to come from all parts of the state.
The Committee on Colleges and Universities is considering the bill that would require at least one member on the 18-member board to come from each of seven different geographical areas.
A proposal at the Capitol seeks to make sure the UW System Board of Regents represents all corners of the state.
There are currently no restrictions on where the 14 citizen members of the UW Board of Regents come from. As a result, state Representative Jeff Smith (D-Eau Claire) says ten of those slots are filled by people from Milwaukee and Dane counties, even though those areas only contain about a quarter of Wisconsin’s population.
The psychology of bigotry is never hard to sort out.
The bigot is scared and weak.
Wisconsinites are still dissatisfied with the way things are going in America, but are less dissatisfied than they were six months ago, right before the presidential election.
The latest Badger Poll, released Tuesday by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Survey Center, showed 73 percent of the 593 respondents were dissatisfied, compared to 81 percent in October 2008.
Dear Editor: Just wanted to say thanks to Mike Ivey for covering the furlough story and offering his views on the inequities and short-sighted aspects of the plan.
I too am one of those professors who is upset about the ramifications. Not for me per se, but for my staff who receive 100 percent of their salaries from non-state, federal sources via grants from the National Institutes of Health.
In the grand scheme of things, news reports that Gov. Jim Doyle and his staff are not always submitting receipts with their travel expenses is mild, indeed, to the types of headlines being written about the nation’s governors these days. Thank goodness he’s not resigning before his term ends, hiking on a secluded state trail or auctioning off a US Senate seat to the highest bidder.
Everyone else has to carefully document their business travel expenses.
So should Wisconsin’s governor.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, with help from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and a UW-Madison journalism class, reported Sunday that Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and his staff failed to properly account for their travel expenses nearly three quarters of the time in 2007 and 2008.
One of Wisconsin’s greatest strengths is its robust university system, which includes 13 four-year campuses spread across the state, from Superior in the north to Milwaukee in the south; from the flagship institution in Madison to west-central Wisconsin’s own UW-Eau Claire, UW-Stout and UW-River Falls.
Unfortunately, the Board of Regents, the system’s governing body, lacks the same geographic scope. Large areas of the state have no direct representation when system policy is set.
A state agency has tentatively approved a University of Wisconsin System plan that would give campuses flexibility in implementing a mandatory furlough order.
Gov. Jim Doyle had ordered 16 unpaid furlough days for all state workers over the next two years to help close a $6.6 billion state budget shortfall.
His plan specified the dates of four furlough days per year.
But UW President Kevin Reilly said some of the days could conflict with class schedules.
Not many people seem to have noticed yet, but buried among the new measures signed into law last week as part of Gov. Jim Doyle’s budget is a trio of family planning initiatives that are expected to expand access to birth control and contraceptive education in Wisconsin.
Advocates who had fought for previous versions of the controversial measures over the past years, only to see them get beat back repeatedly by the Republican-controlled Legislature, are thrilled at the relative ease with which the measures passed this year — thanks to the new Democratic majority.
Gov. Jim Doyle’s travel records were reviewed by a group of reporters and student journalists as part of a joint project involving the Journal Sentinel, a University of Wisconsin-Madison investigative reporting class and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.
The state of Wisconsin is sweeping nearly $2.2 million from a fund at UW-Madison that pays for programs such as University Health Services, the Wisconsin Union, university housing and recreational sports, which could mean an increase in campus fees to avoid service cuts, an administrator said.
The state is taking the money from the universityâ??s reserves to pay for student financial aid. In total, the state is transferring $23 million from similar funds at all UW System campuses to cover financial aid grants, including a new program that will protect families earning $60,000 or less from paying tuition increases.
As part of Gov. Jim Doyleâ??s new biennium budget, all University of Wisconsin System schools must give back money from their auxiliary funds, money that the UW-Madison student government does not have.
Designated Fund 128, the budget calls for a sweep of money from University Auxiliary Units throughout the system, including non-allocable and allocable segregated fees, in order to support financial aid.
Starting now, faculty and academic staff at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and throughout the UW System have the right to organize and vote if they want to form unions on campus.
It may mean a louder, collective voice for these groups, but also has the potential to pit faculty and staff against management according to some UW-L officials.
Gov. Jim Doyle signed a state budget Monday extending collective bargaining rights to UW academic staff and faculty.
Collective bargaining rights give a meaningful voice to UW-L faculty and staff, said Tom Hench, president of UW-Lâ??s local Association of University of Wisconsin Professionals chapter.
With the budget signed Monday by Gov. Jim Doyle, Wisconsin has become the first state with a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions to put in place domestic partnerships for same-sex couples.
Wisconsin also is the first Midwestern state to legislatively put in place legal protections for same-sex couples, according to advocates.
But supporters of the ban still contend the creation of domestic partner benefits violates the constitutional amendment on marriage because it creates a legal status that approximates marriage – and they could file a legal challenge soon.
County clerks around Wisconsin are scrambling to comply with a provision under the state budget that recognizes same sex partnerships and affords some of the same protections as marriage.
Fond du Lac County Clerk Lisa Freiberg says same-sex couples will be able to get a declaration of domestic partnership for the same cost as a marriage license. Unlike a marriage though, the partnership could be nullified through a certificate of termination for the same cost. She says forms and programming information are being developed by the state.
Research assistants at UW System campuses would form unions by signing authorization cards rather than using secret ballots under a provision in the new state budget.
This was a change wanted by the Teaching Assistantsâ?? Association, a UW-Madison graduate workers union, said Peter Rickman, president of the group.
“The notion of free and fair elections with secret ballots is a myth,” Rickman said.
GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) – The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has stopped taking most freshman applications but is still offering to make room for students from 11 counties in the region.
Admissions director Pam Harvey-Jacobs said the university has heard from some students who’ve had to change plans because of the economy and now need or want to attend college closer to home.
If Dane County Clerk Bob Ohlsen’s hunch is correct, the first Monday in August is going to be a hectic day at his office.
That’s the day same-sex couples across the state, including an estimated 1,400 to 2,400 couples living in Dane County, will be able to take advantage of a historic piece of legislation signed Monday by Gov. Jim Doyle that for the first time recognizes domestic partnerships across the state. Along with the recognition come dozens of legal protections that previously were only granted to married couples, including the right to take family leave to care for a sick or dying partner, the ability to access a partner’s medical records and the right to inherit a partner’s property. In addition, Doyle approved granting health care benefits to the same-sex partners of state employees.
Many promises were made and broken during the nearly five-month process of passing Wisconsin’s new two-year budget.
Gov. Jim Doyle said the middle class would be protected while he and fellow Democrats in charge of the Legislature figured out how to solve a $6.6 billion budget shortfall, the largest in Wisconsin history.
Democratic leaders in the Assembly said they would work with Republicans under a new spirit of bipartisanship to pass the spending plan. And there was also talk of the process being more open.
All of the promises sounded good, but most didn’t come true.
Gov. Jim Doyle used his veto pen this week to weigh in on a dispute over whether some University of Wisconsin System staff can be absorbed – without an opportunity to vote – into existing labor unions.
But on Tuesday it appeared the issue may not be decided until it is sorted out before a state regulatory panel and, possibly, in the courts.
Under a provision inserted into the budget, roughly 4,000 currently unrepresented academic staffers at UW campuses could have been reassigned into the unions without a vote on the matter, state officials said last week.
Doyle struck that provision Monday in his budget vetoes.
The new right to unionize for University of Wisconsin System faculty and staff has set the stage for a fight at the state level, as thousands of System employees could get assigned into specific unions without getting a chance to vote.
Several unions say they plan to petition a state agency to bring some 4,000 to 5,000 academic staff into their folds; whether they want to or not.
Some academic staff â?? employees like librarians, advisers, financial aid officers, researchers and many others â?? say they should have a voice on whether to join a union, a concern shared by the System.
Children of parents in this country illegally will be able to pay in state UW tuition, under a provision of the budget signed by Governor Jim Doyle Monday. “Unquestionably it’s a step forward and opens the doors of educational opportunity for those students,” said Christine Neuman Ortiz is with Voces de la Frontera. And it’s a benefit to the state as a whole, as part of a broader strategy to make education more accessible.”
On Monday, the Obama administration announced decisions for two U.S. Department of Agriculture positions for the state of Wisconsin.
Brad Pfaff was named Wisconsin state executive director for the Farm Service Agency at the USDA, and Stan Gruszynski was named Wisconsin state director for rural development at the USDA.
….Before accepting his new position, Gruszynski worked as the director of rural leadership and community development for the Global Environmental Management Center at UW-Steven’s Point College of Natural Resources.
After years of trying, it is likely UW System employees will be allowed to form unions under the next state budget, but it wonâ??t come for free.
UW System officials estimated that they would need to hire 32 staffers at a cost of $2.2 million annually to negotiate and administer collective bargaining agreements for UW faculty and academic staff, according to a May report by the stateâ??s Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
The estimate includes an assumption that there would be 30 separate collective bargaining units across the UW System for some 20,000 employees.
The 68 state lawmakers – 67 Democrats and one independent – whose Friday votes put the next state budget on Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s desk said it was the best they could do, given the worst fiscal crisis in Wisconsin history.
Also quotes UW-Madison political scientist Charles Franklin.
Although state budget details were worked out in secret, it’s no secret many state and University of Wisconsin employees remain boiling mad at Gov. Jim Doyle for ordering 16 unpaid days off over the next two years to help close the $6.6 billion budget gap that keeps on growing.
And while the hit to the pocketbook hurts — especially for those toiling in low-wage jobs — much of the frustration comes from staffers whose pay doesn’t come out of Wisconsin tax coffers.
Quoted: Laura Brown, a senior scientist at the UW Medical School
Thousands of currently unrepresented academic staffers at University of Wisconsin campuses could be assigned into existing unions – rather than having the chance to vote – under a provision included in the state budget, state officials say.
UW System graduate students who are research assistants would have the right to form unions under versions of the budget passed by the state Senate and Assembly.
UW Faculty and staff would also have collective bargaining rights under those bills.
But unlike faculty and staff, unionizing rights for graduate student research assistants were not in earlier versions of the budget.
Many state offices would be closed 11 weekdays – instead of the typical seven – each of the next two fiscal years under a plan to furlough state employees to help chip away at a budget shortfall.
Tuesday’s announcement came as Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle tried to prod lawmakers to act quickly on another budget priority – expanding the hospital tax passed earlier this year to net $74 million in additional federal aid. He called a Wednesday special session of the Legislature to deal with that.
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse biology professor Anne Galbraith typically uses the day after Thanksgiving to grade 40 to 80 six-page papers on the genetics of fruit flies.
Forcing her this year to take the day off without pay as part of mandatory state employee furloughs only pushes the workload to another day, she said Tuesday.
â??If we donâ??t work one day, we have to work twice as hard the next day to finish it,â? she said.â??If they would call it a pay cut, that would be a little more honest.â?
Many state offices would be closed 11 weekdays – instead of the typical seven – each of the next two fiscal years under a plan to furlough state employees to help chip away at a budget shortfall.
Tuesday’s announcement came as Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle tried to prod lawmakers to act quickly on another budget priority – expanding the hospital tax passed earlier this year to net $74 million in additional federal aid. He called a Wednesday special session of the Legislature to deal with that.
State government would mostly shut down for four days a year as part of employee furloughs aimed at fixing the state budget deficit.
“We are anticipating that most of state government will be closed down during these days,” said Jennifer Donnelly, director of the Office of State Employment Relations.
Some state facilities such as prisons, universities and health care units may not be able to shut down on those days and would remain open, Donnelly said.
Don’t count on getting a new driver’s license the day after Thanksgiving. The Division of Motor Vehicles, along with other state offices, will likely close that day under the governor’s plan to furlough state workers.
Gov. Jim Doyle has ordered 16 unpaid furlough days over the next two years as a way to help close a $6.6 billion state budget shortfall. The idea of shutting down state government offices to help achieve that came Tuesday as part of a list of options for state agencies to meet the order.
Betraying some tension with fellow Democrats in the Legislature, Gov. Jim Doyle said he would call a special session for Wednesday at 1 p.m. to approve changes to the state’s hospital tax before a June 30 budget deadline.
â??My preference would be for the entire budget to be completed on time, but the Legislature is now facing critical financial deadlines and I am calling on them to act,” Doyle said in a statement.
Investment losses in the state retirement fund last year will force taxpayers across the state to come up with a combined $79 million more in contributions next year to the keep the system fully funded.
Eric Baldwin, a 26-year-old poker pro who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and played on the school’s 2005 Division 3 national championship baseball team, won a World Series of Poker event worth $521,991 Thursday in Las Vegas.
Baldwin, who was born in Peoria, Ill., but grew up in Beaver Dam, moved to the Las Vegas area about a year ago to focus on playing poker full time, according to a WSOP news release.
This discussion of furloughs for state employees is right in my wheelhouse because, well, been there and done that.
Like everyone on staff at Madisonâ??s favorite daily newspaper, I was directed to take a weekâ??s worth of unpaid days off to help the company balance the books during this economic hitting slump.
Took one for the team, you could say.
Almost all state workers will have to take furloughs, regardless of whether their paychecks come from the state, federal grants, or private sources, under versions of the budget passed by both the state Assembly and Senate.
Some state workers paid with federal grants, particularly university researchers, argued they shouldnâ??t have to take the 16 unpaid days off as mandated by Gov. Doyle over the next two years because it wouldnâ??t save the state money.
An amendment proposed by Rep. Kelda Helen Roys, D-Madison, that would have shielded some of those employees from taking furloughs never made it into the Assembly’s budget.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) – The Wisconsin Supreme Court says a developer that claims it lost a major contract for political reasons cannot sue the state for damages.
The court on Wednesday voted 7-0 to dismiss two lawsuits filed by a development group known as Prism, which was chosen for a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee building project in 2003.
State government, school boards, municipalities and counties may have to increase contributions to employees pension funds by 0.6 percentage point.
The state Employee Trust Funds board is scheduled to vote on that recommended increase at a Thursday meeting. The higher rates starting in 2010 would affect about 90 percent of the 263,000 active workers in the state retirement system.
Mentions that University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers studied bartenders in Madison and Appleton two months before and about one year after smoking bans took effect in those cities on July 1, 2005. Among non-smoking bartenders, “the prevalence of eight upper respiratory symptoms was significantly lower,” according to the study, which predicted that a state ban would result in 1,900 fewer bartenders experiencing wheezing or “whistling” in the chest.
Zebra mussels are being muscled out of the Great Lakes by cousin quagga.
Research done by a University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral candidate showed the quagga mussel to have become the dominant of the two species in the calm waters of the Great Lakes while the zebra mussel covers the bottoms of faster-moving waters in rivers and streams, UW-Madison announced in a news release.
The reason? Grip.
The University of Wisconsin System is as close as it’s ever been to offering full benefits to domestic partners, which it considers a critical factor in the increasingly competitive faculty hiring process.
The UW System has pushed for full benefits during the past two state budget processes. Both times, the measure was removed, once in the Joint Committee on Finance and once by a special conference committee after it had been removed by the Finance Committee and then reinserted by the Senate.
The Wisconsin state legislatureâ??s Joint Finance Committee has approved 36 projects in the University of Wisconsin system, the Associated Press reports.
The power line that American Transmission Co. plans to build across Dane County is pegged to cost about $215.2 million, ATC spokeswoman Sarah Justus said.
The project was slated to cost $214 million, but several changes made by the commission — including requiring shorter towers near the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum and landscaping and other transmission changes near the Odana Hills Golf Course — added about $1.2 million to the project cost.
The state budget begins debate on Friday at 10:00 a.m. in the State Assembly.
The Assembly was supposed to start budget debate on Thursday morning but Democrats have been meeting in secret all day on possible changes.
Democrats who control the Assembly did not make any changes to the state furlough plan in their amendments to the state budget, despite a proposal by a legislator earlier this week.
Rep. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) this week proposed an amendment to the state budget that would only furlough state employees if doing so would result in a net savings to the state.
In unusual move, UW-Madison officials apparently asked legislators to remove a $47 million School of Nursing building from the state budget, said Rep. Spencer Black, D-Madison.
Assembly Democrats voted to cut funding for the project during a closed-door meeting Wednesday night, following a motion sponsored by Black.
â??It was great that it was put in because nursing was a high priority,â? said Julie Underwood, interim provost at UW-Madison. â??We also understand with the stateâ??s fiscal situation, itâ??s hard to get all sorts of things. We understand the balance.â?
The University of Wisconsin athletic department’s contribution to the state’s effort to trim its $6.6 billion deficit will be about $3 million.
The state informed the Badgers athletic department that it must pay the state $1.499 million in each of the next two years, said John Jentz, UW’s associate athletic director for business operations. That money will cover Gov. Jim Doyle’s mandated 16 furlough days, the 2% raise state employees were scheduled to receive as well as a 1% operating expense fee imposed on self-funded state agencies.
A new $47 million nursing school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison would not be funded in the state budget if Assembly Democrats get their way.
Democrats voted to remove funding for the project from the budget during a closed door meeting Wednesday night. The full Assembly is to take up the budget on Thursday followed by the Senate next week.
The proposed nursing school was not requested by the UW or included in Gov. Jim Doyle’s original budget.
If you smoke, if you send your children to public school or if you and your spouse together earn more than $300,000 a year, the $62.2 billion state budget to be taken up today by the Democratic-led Assembly will affect you.
Highlights for the University of Wisconsin System and UW-Madison:
â?¢ Allows faculty and staff to unionize.
â?¢ Provides health insurance benefits to domestic partners of university and other state employees at a projected cost of up to $6.7 million annually.
â?¢ Provides $113 million for tuition grants for System students, reducing grants by about $300 per student this fall from Gov. Doyleâ??s proposal.
â?¢ Borrows $978 million for construction projects, including a new nursing school building at UW-Madison.
â?¢ Provides $15 million to retain talented faculty.
Rep. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) has proposed an amendment to the state budget that would only furlough state employees if doing so would result in a net savings to the state.
University of Wisconsin System officials have questioned furloughs for researchers and other staffers whose salaries come from federal sources — cases where unpaid time off for these workers might not actually save the state money.
