The spending plan also would: Require state technical colleges and University of Wisconsin System schools to ensure they issue IDs that are valid for voting purposes.
The counties, who jointly manage the UW-Oshkosh at Fox Cities campus, are requesting a guarantee that, if they sink millions into renovating the campus’ 60-year-old cafeteria, and then the University of Wisconsin System shuts down the campus within the next five years, the System will pay the counties back for the renovations.
UW-Madison will aggressively seek a new College of Engineering building as its top priority in the upcoming state budget cycle as growth stagnates and faculty compete with one another for coveted and increasingly limited lab space.
The Bucky’s Pell Pathway program, introduced on Thursday, will meet full financial needs for four years for new first-year Wisconsin residents students who quality for Pell Grants. Transfer students can also take advantage of the program and receive funding for two years if they meet the same criteria.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is expanding its tuition promise program to cover not only tuition for some low-income students, but nearly all other college costs that can derail progress toward a degree, such as room and board.
The program, which Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin introduced Thursday to the Board of Regents, will meet the full financial need for those who qualify for Pell grants. Those federal dollars are limited to undergraduates with exceptional financial need but often don’t cover the full cost of school, causing many recipients to take out extra loans.
The goal of the program, called Bucky’s Pell Pathway, is to help alleviate the disadvantages students from low-income families frequently face. The assistance is only available to in-state students, and no state funds are used for either the Pell Pathway or the Tuition Promise program.
Proposal includes $2.8 million over the biennium to University of Wisconsin System campuses to provide services tailored to veterans, military personnel and their families.
While the difference was offset in some years with aid that did not apply to the revenue limit, public school advocate and former University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education dean Julie Underwood said numbers like that justify a major increase in budgets ahead.
She characterized the state of education funding in Wisconsin as “really abysmal,” suggesting that the state is “so far behind” where it should be given the increasing costs of the past decade. “We need a ladder up to where we should have been,” Underwood said.
Christy Remucal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UW-Madison, said addressing PFAS can be “very tricky.” While the chemicals can be tested for and identified, there is not yet a way to conduct large-scale removal and destruction of the contaminant.
Quoted: “The election is primarily an opportunity for liberals and a risk for conservatives,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Referendums are increasingly being used by both political parties, particularly with non-partisan spring elections, which sneak up on people after the holidays and don’t typically generate great voter turnout, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“These elections just don’t generate the same level of media coverage or public discussion so these gimmicks are one way to get the attention of the voter,” Burden said. “The effect on overall turnout probably won’t be great, but in Wisconsin, most people assume elections are going to be close, so even a change in the balance of things by a percentage point or two could tip the race and tip the balance of the Supreme Court itself.”
Quoted: At the 2023 Wisconsin Agricultural Outlook Forum this week, Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said part of the decline is likely from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s move to stop past-due debt collections and farm foreclosures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Quoted: Steven Deller, professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said U.S. and global economic activity is expected to decline in 2023. Deller cited the Wall Street Journal’s Monthly Survey of Economic Forecasters, which averages 68 economic forecasts from individuals, organizations and universities, in a recent presentation.
“There’s pretty much consensus that we’re going to go into a slowdown, and that, if we go into a recession, it is going to be a very mild recession,” he said. “There’s actually a significant number of economists that are actually saying, ‘No, we’re not going to go into a recession. We’re going to go into a serious slowdown.'”
Noted: Wisconsin’s wolf population fell around 14 percent to 972 wolves after the 2021 wolf hunt, according to the Wisconsin DNR. Even so, state wildlife managers say data indicates the state’s wolf population is stable. However, some researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say the agency is overestimating the state’s wolf population.
Jermika Jackson believes her son is destined for greatness. From a young age, D’Marion Jackson seemed wise beyond his years. He was a voracious reader who quickly finished handfuls of library books.
He is now a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and that was made possible by the college’s in-state tuition guarantee. D’Marion is one of about 800 freshmen receiving Bucky’s Tuition Promise.
Noted: The term was coined by Lisa Ellinger, the outreach director at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as we debriefed our first Main Street Agenda event in September. During that town hall, our panelists were crowded around a table sitting on stiff, uncomfortable plastic chairs. The set-up wasn’t exactly conducive to our goal of having relaxed conversations where people felt comfortable sitting talking about complex and often deeply held convictions about democracy, inflation or climate change.
The University of Wisconsin System is banning use of the popular social media app TikTok on UW-owned devices, a spokesperson said Tuesday.
The decision comes about 10 days after Gov. Tony Evers signed an executive order banning the TikTok app on most state-issued devices. The mandate applied only to the executive branch, which consists of most of the state’s agencies but not the UW System.
In the first State of the State address of his second term, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on Tuesday proposed boosting mental health spending and increasing funding for public education and local governments — proposals that may see some support from the Republican-controlled Legislature, depending on the price tag.
University of Wisconsin System officials said Tuesday that they will ban the use of TikTok on system devices.
The University of Wisconsin System, which employs 40,000 faculty and staff, is also exempt. But a UW System spokesperson said despite the exemption, the university was conducting a review and moving toward placing restrictions on the app being used on devices in order to protect against serious cybersecurity risks.
The group (Farm Well Wisconsin), founded in 2020, is funded through a five-year grant associated with the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Through trainings, community members work on building empathetic listening skills, connecting people with resources and discussing issues related to farm culture.
Quoted: Andrew Stevens, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said this percentage has been fairly consistent over time and includes forestland, pasture and cropland.
“The analyses that have been done with the data that are currently available really show that foreign ownership of agricultural land in the United States is a pretty miniscule issue, if it’s an issue at all,” he said. “There are no systematic differences across communities with more or less foreign ownership. Land prices don’t seem to systematically differ.”
Noted: In the episode, first airing Jan. 20, Brown tastes “sophisticated Wisconsin cheeses,” is a judge in a mustard-tasting contest and learns about the University of Wisconsin, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed First Unitarian Society meeting house, her first supper club (Tornado Club Steak House) and the joys of curling and its Madison roots — the latter with help from Olympian Becca Hamilton, according to publicity material on the episode.
Noted: In a letter to North Shore Classical Academy officials, Vanessa Moran, the University of Wisconsin System’s Office of Educational Opportunity director, said the school’s application “was lacking the necessary detail in each of the five sections of the application to demonstrate that the school would be able to open successfully.”
There might be a new way to think of one particular species of invasive snail being found in Wisconsin’s water: as a part of a gourmet meal.
At least that’s the approach Minneapolis chef Yia Vang and Titus Sielheimer, a fisheries outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, made this summer, when they filmed themselves harvesting and cooking up Chinese mystery snails in northern Wisconsin.
Noted: Christensen said he chose to open a clinic in Rockford because it would provide a closer option for women in the Madison area than Chicago-area abortion clinics. Rockford is about an hour and a half south of Madison.
He said he also envisioned the yet-to-be-opened surgical clinic as a potential training location for OB-GYN residents in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. The Dobbs decision created new hurdles for OB/GYN residency programs across Wisconsin, because the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education requires them to teach abortion-related procedures or face losing accreditation.
The newly crowned Miss America, Grace Stanke, said she wants to spend her term promoting nuclear power as a cleaner way to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
“It doesn’t use a lot of land,” said Stanke, a Wausau native and University of Wisconsin-Madison senior studying nuclear engineering. “As our population continues to grow, we can continue to use that land for farming and agricultural purposes, and we can use that clean, zero-carbon energy coming from nuclear energy to power our cities.”
Noted: Sarah Barry will continue to serve as deputy secretary. Barry holds a master’s degree from the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin and a Bachelor of Science degree from the UW-Oshkosh and spent 15 years as chief of staff for several state senators.
Wisconsin will join the growing list of states to ban the use of the popular social media site TikTok on all state-issued devices over cybersecurity concerns.
Gov. Tony Evers said Friday he would issue an executive order by early next week. As of Friday, it wasn’t immediately clear what the executive order would include or if the University of Wisconsin System would have to abide by the TikTok ban
Noted: For young voters in Dane County, it was a message that worked. Abortion access was regularly listed to NBC News a top issue motivating voters.
University of Wisconsin student Valerie Howell, who said she supported Democratic candidates, told NBC News that she likely would have turned out to vote in any case, “but I wouldn’t have been as passionate about it.”
Noted: According to an analysis of a national study by the University of Wisconsin Collaborative for Reproductive Equity, health care providers have not performed any abortions in the state since the fall of Roe vs. Wade.
“In April and May of 2022, Wisconsin abortion providers reported 590 and 620 abortions, respectively. In July and August, those numbers fell to zero,” it said.
Scientists at UW-Madison are working to better understand how toxic “forever chemicals” move through the ground, which could help communities like Madison find and clean up the manufactured compounds before they contaminate drinking water.
Christy Remucal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UW-Madison who specializes in PFAS but was not part of Gnesda’s study, said the research is a critical first step to being able to focus cleanup efforts.
Quoted: At the heart of Great Lakes medical physics research is the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Medical Physics. It was the first such department in the country and is the largest in terms of faculty members and graduate students, said Brian Pogue, department chair and a professor in the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
“We have close to 100 grad students working on medical imaging technologies,” Pogue said. “We have an army.”
Medical Physics’ faculty are among the university’s top royalty recipients and have developed world class technologies like the tomotherapy radiation technique, the ubiquitous pinnacle radiation treatment planning software, and lunar bone mineral densitometry to detect osteoporosis.
Stanke, a student at the University of Wisconsin, impressed the panel of judges with her classical violin skills. She played “Storm” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Stanke revealed she was eager to follow in her sister’s musical footsteps.
Miss Wisconsin has won the title of Miss America 2023.
Wausau native Grace Stanke, a 20-year-old nuclear engineering student at UW-Madison, is the third woman from Wisconsin to be crowned as Miss America. The others are Laura Koeppeler of Kenosha, who was Miss America in 2012, and Terry Meeuwsen of De Pere, who was Miss America in 1973.
Quoted: “Farm fatality numbers remain alarmingly high, and because a farm is like any other dangerous industrial workplace, the types of hazards are many,” said John Shutske, Ph.D., professor and agricultural safety specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Many continue to be concerned with the high number of deaths on public roadways. Clearly, as farms get bigger and farmers need to spend more time on the road moving from farm to farm/field to field, we are going to see more and more risk on roadways.”
Quoted: “It may be hard to set another record in 2023, but there is a possibility of increased exports,” Robert Cropp, professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Extension professor said in a recent column.
Each dollar of net farm income results in an additional 60 cents of economic activity as farmers spend money in their local communities, according to University of Wisconsin research.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison student from Wausau will be the first nuclear engineer to compete in the Miss America contest Dec. 15. Grace Stanke, who was crowned Miss Wisconsin in June, is using her platform to advocate for nuclear energy while showing women they can succeed in male-dominated industries.
It was a very welcome thing to me that the Journal Sentinel along with the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Public Radio brought the Main Street Agenda to “We the People” in Pewaukee.Many people I know (regardless of political affiliation, economic status, or cultural background) are fed up with the incessant blaring ads and speeches blaming whoever the “other” is in order to get us vote for them.The ads say very little of substance about what the core issues are, and even less about how they would go about resolving them, only who to blame − again, so you vote for the candidate running the ad. Nothing useful is gained by them.
Quoted: Burying critical transmission lines is one method to make the grid less vulnerable, according to Vicki Bier, an energy expert and professor emerita in industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“But, that again, is expensive and not something we want to do every place all across the country,” Bier said. “Maybe just a few places might justify that kind of investment.”
Bier said it would likely take insider-level knowledge of the power grid to have a high likelihood of success on a larger scale than the incident in North Carolina. Federal documents obtained by one media outlet indicate other attempts to disrupt Duke Energy substations that authorities say likely involved inside knowledge of critical substations. She noted one of the largest threats facing the grid is that it’s spread out.
“There are not a small number of critical electric facilities where after you’ve protected those, the risk is really small,” Bier said. “There’s a very wide range of facilities and all pose potential risk.”
Quoted: Amy Williamson is the associate director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Collaborative for Reproductive Equity, or CORE. She said even before Roe ended, it was difficult for many abortion seekers to raise the funds needed for the procedure, as well as any necessary childcare and time off work. The added requirement of traveling to another state makes it all the more difficult, she said.
“We know that some pregnant Wisconsinites are traveling hundreds of miles to other states at great expense and difficulty in their lives to access the care they need, or they remain pregnant when they do not want to be,” Williamson said.
Quoted: “I’ve been privileged to see it hundreds of times, and I can tell you it never gets old,” said Stanley Temple, Beers-Bascom professor emeritus in conservation in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and science advisor to the Aldo Leopold Foundation board. “It’s simply spectacular.”
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer examined the geographic phenomenon and found the bunching of Democrats in cities accounted for a 2- to 3-point Republican advantage, nowhere near the current split.
“There will be people who deny it to you with a straight face, but there is no empirical doubt that this remains the most gerrymandered state in the country,” Mayer told Wisconsin Watch.
This fall, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs was excited to team up with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Wisconsin Public Radio on the Main Street Agenda project. It is part of our mission to bring people together to solve the problems affecting our communities, and our faculty have remarkable research and expertise to help inform those public policy discussions.
Written by Susan Webb Yackee is a professor of public affairs and director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison.
Noted: Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimated in an August report that patients in 42 of the state’s 72 counties would see the distance they have to travel to get an abortion increase by an average of 82 miles, one-way. In Milwaukee and Dane counties, which accounted for 56% of the state’s abortions before the Dobbs decision, residents would have to travel 70 and 120 more miles to reach an abortion clinic, respectively. In the state’s 30 other counties, the distance to an abortion clinic didn’t change because they were already closest to an out-of-state clinic.
Quoted: Republicans closely tied with Trump have been losing support in suburban areas, said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center. He said that goes for the 8th Sen. district as well.
“Now, I think the party has become somewhat concerned about Trump’s presence in the party, given how the Republicans did in this midterm election,” Burden said. “But there still is a lot of enthusiasm for him among the base, especially the activists who turn out in primaries and who give money to candidates.”
More broadly, Burden said election deniers running for statewide office in swing states this year were roundly defeated in November.
“But Brandtjen will be running in a district that is a little redder than the state as a whole. And so there might still be room for someone with her profile to be successful,” Burden said.
Quoted: “We as a state need to say, ‘This is not okay for our moms, for our babies, and we can do better. And we have to do better,'” said Dr. Nathan Lepp, an associate clinical professor of neonatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, noted that vaccines “save tens of thousands if not millions of lives each year.” Remington added that the scientific community’s knowledge of COVID has continued to evolve. While vaccines might not prevent infection from COVID, he said, they have been shown to reduce risk of serious illness or death.
“I would encourage any investigation to be non-partisan but also focused not simply on identifying problems, but understand what’s worked,” Remington said. “If a hearing went into identifying the reasons for the success that we’ve seen, then that hearing could be balanced with opportunities for improvement.”
The WPF analysis also noted that funding budget requests from the UW System and the Wisconsin Technical College System would cost about $377 million. Increasing general K-12 school aids by 1% in each year of the budget would cost about $157 million, and increasing shared revenue to local governments by 1% in each year would cost about $25 million.
Dear Editor: Wisconsin’s projected surplus of $6.5 billion is an opportunity to realize Wisconsin values.
The University of Wisconsin is also valued by citizens. The surplus must support at least an inflationary budget increase, offsetting a continued freeze in undergraduate tuition. The UW educates thousands, supports businesses and farmers statewide, and its research and knowledgeable graduates are valuable to businesses.
Noted: And analysts — and even one of the co-sponsors — doubted its constitutionality. The nonpartisan Wisconsin Legislative Council and Legislative Reference Bureau advised that the liberty and privacy rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey would likely outweigh the state’s interest in “unborn human life before fetal viability,” according to the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The cancellation of in-person classes at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville’s Richland campus next year” should not be read” as a cautionary tale for other branch campuses.
That’s according to UW System President Jay Rothman, who appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Morning Show” Thursday. He said the decision was “based on facts” specific to that location.
Quoted: It is a highly consequential election because it’s going to determine the balance of the court until at least 2025,” said Robert Yablon, an associate professor at the University Wisconsin-Madison Law School.
Although Wisconsin’s Supreme Court elections are officially non-partisan, UW-Madison political science professor Howard Schweber notes highly partisan issues are at stake. That includes abortion rights, gerrymandering and the way elections are run.
“Even 15 years ago, Wisconsin judicial elections really were kind of genteel affairs,” Schweber said. “And then they got very, very viciously partisan, primarily because Republicans and conservative groups made a very concentrated effort to capture the court, through what in Wisconsin, at least, were really unprecedented styles of campaign ads, highly partisan appeals.”
Schweber said that strategy proved largely successful, although Democrats were able to narrow the court’s conservative majority in 2020 when Democrat-backed Jill Karofsky beat former Justice Kelly. Kelly, who’s running this again this year, was first appointed to the state highest court by Republican Gov. Scott Walker to fill a vacancy.
Noted: The survey is not a scientific poll, and its results cannot be generalized to the entire population of Wisconsin, but the responses do provide a snapshot of what was on the mind of voters during the survey period from June 28 to Nov. 8. The project is a collaboration of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (and USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin papers), Wisconsin Public Radio and the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A proposed development that would bring a new soccer stadium to downtown Milwaukee should include guarantees of good wages and a path to union representation for workers in the stadium district in return for public subsidies, a new report recommends.
The report, “Worker Power Levels the Playing Field,” was released Tuesday by COWS, a think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It says taxpayer-funded support for the proposed Milwaukee soccer stadium project, dubbed the Iron District, should come with strings that ensure local hiring and strong job standards even after the project is built out.
“It’s important for Milwaukee to see itself as a national leader in this way and to reapply the lessons from the Deer District as new development is considered,” says Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS. Dresser is coauthor of the report along with Pablo Aquiles-Sanchez, a COWS research analyst.
Noted: At UW-Madison, the most selective school in the state, it’s too early to say what, if any, academic recovery will be needed, according to John Zumbrunnen, the university’s vice provost for teaching and learning. There hasn’t been a spike in tutoring sessions. Nor has there been a higher rate of D and F grades awarded. But the university offered two semesters of a pass/fail grading policy, which “muddies the data picture for us.”
That’s not to say Zumbrunnen hasn’t fielded concerns from some instructors. In math, there’s been a slightly larger share of students placing into pre-calculus instead of calculus. A STEM instructor told him this year’s crop of students scored lower on a basic exam than in past years. He’s heard from a social sciences instructor who felt that students this fall weren’t quite as ready to read at a college level than in past years.
Quoted: “It just is really not possible to engage in much fraudulent activity without being noticed very quickly,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The state commission that oversees employment relations ruled Friday that UW Health hospital is not required by law to negotiate a collective bargaining contract or recognize its recently created nurses union.
Noted: My mother moved to Madison from Chicago just over 50 years ago to pursue a college degree and provide a brighter future for my sister and me. The Gee family now consists of three generations of University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates. The university, and a small but thriving community of Black UW alumni, offered opportunities, resources and friendships that allowed us to create lives of unlimited promise, rooted in Black excellence and Black culture.
