Assembly Republicans passed two bills Tuesday that would ban the consideration of race in some college financial aid programs and would hold higher education institutions financially liable for violating a person’s free speech.
Under the bill, which passed 63-34 in the Assembly, state high schoolers who graduate in the top 10% of their class would be guaranteed admission to UW schools. Those in the top 5% would be guaranteed admission to UW-Madison.
WISCONSIN NEWS Wisconsin Assembly to pass Republican bill banning race, diversity factors in financial aid for UWNOVEMBER 7, 2023 / 3:29 PM CST / APThe Republican-controlled Wisconsin Assembly was scheduled to pass a bill Tuesday that would ban Universities of Wisconsin officials from considering race and diversity when awarding state-funded financial aid.
A recent report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum shows Wisconsin households are shrinking at a rate slightly faster than the national average over the last five decades. We talk about some of the factors behind that trend with Kurt Paulsen, a UW-Madison professor of urban planning.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison kicked efforts to persuade the Legislature to come up with nearly $200 million for a new engineering building into higher gear Monday.
People looking to become special education teachers in Milwaukee have a new paid opportunity to do so.
UW-Madison is partnering with Milwaukee Public Schools on a Special Education Teacher Residency program.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin came to connect with University of Wisconsin-Madison student leaders on Friday as a part of Democrats’ weekend of “One Year to Win” events, a get-out-the-vote effort in the lead-up to the November 2024 elections.
Assembly lawmakers on Tuesday approved a wide range of proposals that would affect higher education in the state, including an automatic-admission policy for the flagship campus at the Universities of Wisconsin and standardized rules around free speech on state campuses, which Republicans argued would expand intellectual diversity and Democrats warned would have a chilling effect.
Earlier this summer, the Healthy School Meals for All coalition and UW-Madison Professor Jennifer Gaddis released the first statewide survey of the Wisconsin school nutrition workforce.
That report found that of the approximately 5,089 K-12 school nutrition workers across the state, 94% were women, and 88% were white.
It also found that four out of five school food workers who were not managers worked part-time, and that a quarter of schools across the state offered poverty-level starting wages for school nutrition workers.
The UW–Madison Special Education Teacher Residency Program comes with a commitment: three years working in MPS after finishing the master’s. Those teachers continue receiving mentorship and guidance for at least the first two years of teaching after finishing the degree.
The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Assembly passed a bill Tuesday that would ban Universities of Wisconsin officials from considering race and diversity when awarding state-funded financial aid.
Assembly Republicans have voted to bar University of Wisconsin system officials from considering race when deciding how to distribute publicly funded financial aid to students, setting up a likely veto by Gov. Tony Evers.
The bill, which passed 62-35 along party lines Tuesday, seeks to eliminate race-based criteria for college scholarships, grants and loan programs.
Timothy Van Deelen is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. He said the breeding season increases the likelihood of human-deer interactions for three or four weeks each fall.
“The male deer is almost a different animal during the breeding season, behaviorally,” Van Deelen said. “Bucks will dramatically extend their home range, and mature bucks are moving through their big home range trying to find does who are receptive to being bred.”
The Assembly passed a Republican bill Tuesday to guarantee admission to Universities of Wisconsin schools for the top 10% of Wisconsin high school graduates and guarantee UW-Madison admission for the top 5% of high school graduates.
Public universities and colleges in Wisconsin could be liable for up to $100,000 in damages if they have been found by a judge to have violated a person’s right to free speech under legislation the Republican-led Assembly passed Tuesday.
Employee Kenneth Sabbar said he feels the political infighting will drive people not only out of Madison but Wisconsin as a whole, contributing to a “brain drain” of educated workers leaving the state.
Wisconsin Assembly lawmakers unanimously voted Tuesday to approve Republican-led legislation to guarantee certain rights and protections for K-12 and higher education student journalists.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers announced last week he was suing legislative Republicans, in part because they blocked raises for University of Wisconsin System employees.
Higher education officials would be prohibited from factoring in race when considering grants, loans and student retention plans, and public universities and colleges could be liable for up to $100,000 in damages if they have been found by a judge to have violated a person’s right to free speech, under legislation the Republican-led Assembly will take up Tuesday.
Announced Monday, the proposal splits the $32 million among the system’s 13 four-year schools. All schools would use the funding toward educating students in engineering, nursing/health care, business/finance and computer/data science.
The Universities of Wisconsin on Monday proposed using $32 million the Legislature withheld earlier this year over the UW system’s refusal to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion programs to expand training in several high-demand fields at 13 schools in the UW system.
A campaign launched this week by the Wisconsin Alumni Association, a nonprofit arm of UW-Madison that facilitates much of its fundraising efforts, is encouraging business leaders and others around the state to contact their legislators and push them to take up legislation to construct a new engineering building.
Sunday’s edition of the Wisconsin State Journal contained a piece of writing that will be of interest to some of Wisconsin’s elected leaders.It wasn’t an article or an editorial, but instead a full-page advertisement paid for by the Wisconsin Alumni Association.
It may be too harsh to call it a death spiral. But the University of Wisconsin System is in trouble and it’s not clear when or how it can turn things around. Consider what’s happening.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos nixed a 6% pay raise for UW System employees while allowing it to go through for other state employees. He’s trying to put pressure on the UW to discontinue its diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
This week, the State Legislature debated a series of election-related amendments to the state Constitution. The Republican-led proposals would outlaw private funding for elections, prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in local elections and have current voter photo ID requirements written into the state constitution.
Interview with Howard Schweber, professor of political science and legal studies at UW-Madison.
Gov. Tony Evers filed a lawsuit against Republican state lawmakers Tuesday, claiming their decisions to block pay raises for employees of the Universities of Wisconsin, conservation projects and updates to the state’s commercial building standards are unconstitutional.
In a lawsuit that could upend how the state Legislature operates, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is suing Republican lawmakers over decisions to withhold pay raises for University of Wisconsin System employees and to block conservation projects, arguing such actions made by legislative committees rather than the full Legislature violate the state Constitution’s separation of powers requirements.
Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center, said the situation in the state is not as black and white … er, blue and red, as Walker claimed.
“It seems factually incorrect to call Wisconsin a blue state,” he said via email, adding Wisconsin is actually remarkably balanced between Democrats and Republicans.
In fact, the UW Health spokesperson said the hospital isn’t certain if its decrease in applications is an indication of a trend – though she noted that some applicants have asked about the 1849 law in their interviews.
Dr. Ellen Hartenbach, chair of the OB-GYN department at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, also told Wisconsin Health News in May that the university is uncertain if abortion restrictions caused this year’s decrease in applicants.
Governor Tony Evers announced Tuesday that he has filed a lawsuit to sue Wisconsin Republicans in the state legislature after an ongoing feud that has left more than 35,000 UW System employees without pay raises.
Evers said it was “a bridge too far” and “just bull s—” that Republican state lawmakers were telling 35,000 University of Wisconsin employees who were expecting pay raises to “stick it.”
Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, has sued Republican legislators for allegedly defying the state Constitution and undermining his executive powers by withholding approved raises for University of Wisconsin system employees.
The Wisconsin governor, now in his second term, has reportedly attempted to bypass the lower courts, asking the state supreme court to take up the case directly.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, outlines Evers’ allegations that Republican members of the Legislature are holding hostage the pre-approved raises for 35,000 University of Wisconsin System employees and misusing the legislative veto process to block executive actions outside the bounds of normal budgetary operations.
Legislative committees controlled by Republicans are violating the state Constitution by blocking pay raises for around 35,000 Universities of Wisconsin employees and stalling conservation projects, Gov. Tony Evers argues in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The governor accused Republicans of an intrusion into executive powers and violating the Wisconsin Constitution.
“I’m not recalling a newspaper or news outlets suing someone for defamation,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, an associate journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Nothing is leaping to my mind.”
A new financial aid initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is aimed at making the cost of college more affordable to Wisconsin-based students from low-income backgrounds.
Wisconsin’s public universities and colleges could be liable for up to $100,000 in damages and institutions could be cut off from state grants under a Republican-authored bill seeking to add civil penalties for violating a person’s right to free speech.
The Assembly’s higher education committee considered a bill Thursday that sets free speech policies at Wisconsin’s public universities and colleges and provides penalties for violating them. Another bill taken up by the committee would eliminate race-based higher education loan and grant programs.
Steven Deller, the report’s author and an agricultural and applied economics professor at UW-Madison, said he attributes the state’s inability to return to the low poverty rates it saw in the late ’90s and early 2000s to a shift away from more highly-paid manufacturing jobs toward a more service-based economy, the state’s decline in unionization and a slow recovery from the Great Recession.
Republican lawmakers are advancing a bill for a fourth time that would punish Wisconsin universities and technical colleges for free speech violations.
Dorothea Salo, an instructor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Information School, said the bill goes against “really bedrock, standard library ethics about letting people read what they want without interference, and without sharing that information.”
“The party majorities are sufficiently large that the legislature can get away with being completely unresponsive to anything a majority of voters want,” said Ken Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. “If you can’t lose, you don’t have to care. If you run the risk of losing, based on not caring, you will start to care.”
Over the next three years, Milwaukee Public Schools will have help securing candidates for some of its toughest-to-fill teaching jobs.
A new partnership between MPS and the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides on-the-job training through a 10-month teaching residency, paired with a special education teacher preparation master’s degree program.
Lola Loustaunau, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers, said that “it would really open the door for a lot of protections for workers” if OSHA consistently inspected small dairy farms that provide housing to immigrant workers.
“If they are politically interested in doing something,” she added, “it looks like they have all the basis to do it.”
In recent years, conservatives have set their sights on higher education, arguing that liberal attitudes at campuses across the country suppress more conservative viewpoints.
In 2022, Wisconsin saw a record-setting increase in domestic violence-related suicides and homicides, up 20 percent compared to the previous year. We talk to Mariel Barnes, an assistant professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison, about why Wisconsin’s domestic violence problem is worsening, and what we can do to improve outcomes for victims.
Wisconsin Republicans are pushing a bill that would end consideration of race in college scholarships, grants and loans, arguing the practice perpetuates stereotypes in higher education.
Payne received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in communications and urban and regional planning.
One 2017 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggested the ID law depressed turnout in the 2016 contest between former President Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, although it did not measure which party affiliation non-voters may have aligned with.
Written by Ken Brosky, an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Political Science Professor Barry Burden told WPR that, unlike Wisconsin, most states have banned losing primary candidates from running in general elections.
“I do wonder if this is coming from Republicans, in part, because of a concern that there might be candidates who splinter off from the Republican Party if Trump is the nominee next year,” Burden said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of the partners behind the tech hub application, and contributes to the biohealth industry through academic research and providing an educated workforce through its medical physics, biotechnology and medical engineering programs.
In a statement, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said the university is thrilled to be part of the collaboration that helped secure the federal designation.
“Our culture of innovation and strong collaborative spirit, both within the university and across the state, make us well-positioned to make the most of this important opportunity,” she said.
In 2018, the UW-Madison’s Division of Extension received a $2.5 million five-year grant from the CDC’s High Obesity program to address obesity in Menominee County. The funding led to the Kemāmaceqtaq: We’re All Moving initiative, which worked with county and tribal government and community groups.
Gauthier, who helped lead the initiative, said the last five years of work have focused on changing policies and making environmental improvements to support healthy choices. The initiative has helped local government buildings, schools and community groups adopt new nutrition policies, supported a local farmers market program and led a walking audit of the county to identify how to improve infrastructure for walking and biking.
Amber Canto is director of the Health and Wellbeing Institute with the UW-Madison’s Division of Extension and project director for the High Obesity Program grant funding. She said they’ve received another five-year award to continue their work in Menominee County and begin work in Ashland County, which now also has an obesity rate of more than 40 percent.
Canto said they’ve tracked increases in healthy food options and recreationally-accessible miles, but the bigger impacts are harder to quantify this early on.
“That data has shown, from a theory perspective, that if these opportunities are present that the behavior and therefore the health outcomes will shift over time,” she said at Monday’s hearing.
Two Republican lawmakers are seeking to eliminate race-based criteria for college scholarships, grants and loan programs under a draft bill released Monday.
The bill, authored by Rep. Nik Rettinger, R-Mukwonago, and Sen. Eric Wimburger, R-Green Bay, comes after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that public and private universities could not use race as an admissions criterion. Republicans in the state Legislature have hinted they would eliminate race requirements within state statutes following the Supreme Court’s ruling.
The Republican led Joint Committee on Employee Relations voted to separate employees of the University of Wisconsin system from other state workers who will receive a pay increase.
UW System President Jay Rothman is disappointed with the outcome and says they will make the best of this difficult situation.
The tax credit provides the biggest benefit to families “who can afford to spend a lot on child care,” says Tim Smeeding, an economist and emeritus professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin. The proposal doesn’t help people for whom the cost of child care is out of reach, he added.
“This is a very pressing issue for many people in Wisconsin,” said Laura Dresser of the Center for Wisconsin Strategy, which has published “Can’t Survive on $7.25,” a report that explores the impact and issues of low wages for Wisconsinites.
“We know that there are fewer people working very close to the bottom of the wage floor – that $7.25 per hour minimum wage – today than there were even three years ago,” Dresser added, “but there are still some in the state who do and others who don’t make much more than that.”
