Noted: Mitchell, who lives in Windsor, is the presiding judge of the juvenile division in Dane County and oversees cases within the county’s high-risk drug court program. He is a former prosecutor for the county and was the director of community relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before first being elected judge in 2016.
Quoted: Rob Yablon, University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor and redistricting expert, disputes that.
“Even at that late stage, I do think it’s an exaggeration to say that there weren’t any other options that were available,” he said.
Yablon said the state Supreme Court could have taken more evidence or reconfigured the Milwaukee districts. They also could have drawn a whole new map. These are things courts do, Yablon said.
Welcome to Wisconsin: Legislative leaders immediately slammed the newly named chancellor for the university’s flagship campus for being too liberal.
Quoted: Barry Burden, the director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, said the Republican candidates’ focus on elections or Democratic incumbent Gov. Tony Evers’ push to show himself as a goalie fending off anti-democratic legislation could resonate, but the complicated nature of the issue might blunt the impact when compared to other matters that animate voters.
“Most of the public would say they think there were things that could be done to improve the election system and to tighten it up. That tends to be what you see in surveys. But, as I said, people were also contradictory,” Burden said. “They want voting to be easy, and they like getting ballots by mail … and I think the average member the public just hasn’t put all these pieces of the system together to think about how it all interacts.”
Noted: Vos in 2005 was a sponsor of legislation that would have prevented the University of Wisconsin System from advertising, prescribing or dispensing emergency contraception. The Assembly passed it 49-41, but the state Senate never took it up and the measure died.
Co-authored by Barry C. Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: The new maps, drawn by the Wisconsin State Legislature, are considered the most partisan-biased, court-adopted maps in the nation. That’s according to a new analysis from the University of Wisconsin Law School. The maps heavily advantage Republican politicians, all but guaranteeing Republican-rule in the state Legislature, regardless of what most voters want.
The analysis looked at four metrics: partisan-bias, efficiency gap, mean-median difference and declination.
“On every one of these standard partisan fairness metrics, these new maps are the worst, court-adopted maps that we’ve seen anywhere in the country,” says Rob Yablon, an associate professor at the law school, who published the analysis.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say a second wolf hunt last year would have risked Wisconsin’s wolf population dropping to undesirable levels that include the wolf possibly becoming endangered or extinct in Wisconsin.
Quoted: Patrick Remington, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, severely criticized Johnson and called his persistent questioning of medical science irresponsible.
“If he had a medical license these would be grounds for malpractice,” said Remington, a former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But since he’s not trained in medicine, he should stay in his lane and focus on things he knows about.”
Quoted: Jenny Higgins, a professor and director of the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says it’s more difficult to get an abortion in Wisconsin than it is in many other states.
“We have gone from a supportive state to a hostile state in a relatively short period of time,” she said.
Gov. Tony Evers appointed three new members to the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents on Wednesday, replacing two former members of the board leadership who were appointed by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker and were in charge of the system’s failed search for a new president in 2020.
Co-authored by Jenny Higgins, PhD, MPH, a professor of gender and women’s studies and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has included provisions in both of his state budget proposals to allow Wisconsinites who entered the country illegally to obtain driver’s licenses and identification cards, and to allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition to attend college in Wisconsin. Republican lawmakers stripped those provisions from the budget in both cases.
Asignificant expansion of transfer degree options between technical colleges and the University of Wisconsin System marks a major shift in the state’s higher education landscape and may lead more residents to pursue college degrees.
The outsized influence of state politics on the University of Wisconsin-Madison and other UW campuses was debated during a campus forum on Thursday, where topics ranged from state funding for the state’s flagship university to Republican legislation aimed at discouraging teaching of critical race theory.
The conversation at the Discovery Building — moderated by Cap Times Capitol bureau chief Jessie Opoien — included state Sen. Kelda Roys, Sen. Joan Ballweg, regent Amy Bogost and UW-Madison economics professor Ananth Seshadri.
UW-Madison was front and center on the Capitol Square on Wednesday. Alumni, faculty and friends attended UW-Madison Day – a celebration of the university’s success.
Quoted: “Michels’ entry mostly signals a sense of discontent among Republicans with frontrunner Rebecca Kleefisch,” says University of Wisconsin political scientist Barry Burden. “She is the leader for the nomination in terms of traditional indicators such as fundraising, visibility, and conservative credentials. In an earlier political era, her connections to Scott Walker and success as a statewide candidate would have made her a no-brainer for the nomination. Many in the GOP are now pining for someone who will challenge the party establishment and take on other familiar institutions.”
Quoted: Lisa Naughton is a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an expert in tropical biodiversity conservation who has also studied wolf recovery in the state.
“We have to work with private landowners. That inevitably involves some compromise, but it’s urgent,” she said. “We need to keep an eye on biodiversity beyond protected areas. We need to keep our eye on agricultural land use and industrial land use that may have cascading effects for biodiversity.
“And with effort, we can push back,” she continued. “We can turn things around for some species.”
Noted: At the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s school of nursing, Associate Deans of Academic Affairs Barbara Pinekenstein and Lisa Bratzke said several students graduating this year had already accepted job offers at the end of the fall semester.
Admissions applications are also starting to stack up. Though it may be too soon to tell if the pandemic has caused more people to be interested in nursing as a career, Rentmeester said 367 people applied for Bellin College’s undergraduate and graduate nursing programs for the upcoming fall, up from a usual of about 320 pre-pandemic.
Noted: Olikara is a Brookfield native and University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate who gave up his job to run for U.S. Senate. He was the founder and chief executive of Millennial Action Project, a Washington-based nonprofit devoted to “post-partisan political cooperation.”
More than 75 people attended a reception to honor outgoing UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank hosted by legislators at the Wisconsin State Capitol Tuesday afternoon.
The use of liquid brine is more effective at keeping highways safe during the winter months, a new report says.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s Traffic Operations and Safety (TOPS) Lab looked at data from 143 storms occurring in 10 counties across Wisconsin. It compared brine-cleared routes to those nearby cleared with a traditional granular rock-salt method. The researchers found use of liquid brine in winter highway maintenance cleared Wisconsin highways faster, provided better friction on roadways, and reduced overall salt usage.
In the last few years, northeastern Wisconsin workers and companies have told us they want education targeted for today’s students, employees, and parents. They want education that leads directly to good jobs. We agree. On April 11, our two campuses, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College and the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, announced a plan to meet their needs.
Tommy Thompson has decided not to launch a fifth campaign for governor.
Thompson — who was elected governor of Wisconsin four times, served as President George W. Bush’s health secretary, and led the state’s system of universities through a pandemic — said Monday he has decided against a new run for his old job but believes he would have been a formidable candidate.
Measures Evers vetoed also would have eliminated income and enrollment limits for the private school voucher program, limited liability for gun and ammunition manufacturers and prohibited the teaching of the concept known as critical race theory at the University of Wisconsin System and Wisconsin Technical College System.
The Wisconsin Republican race for governor is still up in the air four months away from the primary election as two potential candidates — a political icon and an owner of an international construction firm with personal wealth — decide whether to reshuffle the race.
Quoted: Robert Yablon, University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor and redistricting expert, said the court’s decision had reinforced a map that was “strikingly” gerrymandered.
“And it means that although this state is often a 50-50 state one where Democrats have frequently managed to win statewide races, they are going to have virtually no chance of taking control of the Legislature,” Yablon said in an interview with PBS Wisconsin.
Here’s what guests on the April 15, 2022 episode had to say about the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling on legislative redistricting, the difficulties faced by homebuyers and a model for K-12 summer school programming in Green Bay.
Quoted: “It is an honor and a privilege to be here today to celebrate a revolutionary change, a revolutionary paradigm shift,” said Dr. Tiffany Green, assistant professor of population health sciences and obstetrics and gynecology at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and co-chair of the Black Maternal & Child Health Alliance of Dane County. “It is a program and this is a process that’s going to center the lives of Dane County’s Black women and birthing people in solving our persistent and frankly shameful disparities in birth outcomes.”
Noted: The virus’s spread has accelerated northward with the spring migration of many North American bird species, explained Ron Kean, a poultry specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
The amount of tuition costs at Wisconsin colleges covered by state and federal financial aid for students has shrunk over the last two decades, according to a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
The average amount of federal Pell grants and state Wisconsin grants together covered 91.4 percent of tuition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002, for example, but only 69 percent in 2021.
Quoted: Native plant curator Susan Carpenter with the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison said they detected the rusty patched at the Arboretum about 10 years ago. “That started us on this voyage of discovery,” she said. When the rusty patched was declared endangered, she said, “people just went crazy on that.”
Wisconsin doctors are seeing a steady increase in the number of children diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes — a disease that primarily affects adults — which may be linked to COVID-19.
Data released last week by UW Health Kids shows a nearly 200 percent increase in the number of cases of Type 2 diabetes over the past four years.
While this is a trend medical experts have noticed for years, Dr. Elizabeth Mann, a pediatric endocrinologist and director of the Type 2 Diabetes Program at UW Health Kids, said it’s taken a worrisome turn recently.
Noted: Anne Marsh serves in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health. Her 8-year-old son Ryan is transgender.
“Our son has grown up in a household where from the day he shared with us who he is, he has faced nothing but unconditional love and welcoming and celebration of who he is,” Anne said. “How do you teach a child that the world is going to perceive them differently and treat them differently? It’s a hard conversation to have with a young child as a parent.”
Wisconsin’s stagnant — and in some cases declining — investment in state financial aid has led to college students and their families having to pay for a larger portion of the cost of a degree, according to a new report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
The policy forum’s report, issued Tuesday, is the latest in a series of analyses by the forum that have sought to dive into the challenges the state’s colleges and universities face in preparing the workforce of tomorrow amid declining taxpayer support and, in many cases, declining enrollment trends.
The nonpartisan research center found that state lawmakers have not prioritized financial aid in recent state budgets. Instead — in the University of Wisconsin System’s case — they took the approach of freezing tuition for in-state undergraduates for nearly a decade.
In the last decade, total state financial aid to Wisconsin’s college students has declined, causing the state to fall further behind other states in financial aid levels, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum.
Wisconsin’s financial aid funding hasn’t kept pace with inflation or the rising cost of college over the past decade, a new report found, raising questions about the state’s ability to enroll and graduate enough students to meet long-term workforce needs.
Noted: Evers vetoed five higher education bills, several of which were a reflection of major cultural and political debates of the time.
Among those was Assembly Bill 884, which would have required the University of Wisconsin System to accept a course on the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights to satisfy the diversity or ethnic studies requirement in place for core general education requirements.
Evers also vetoed AB 885, which Republican legislators said would allow students to sue University of Wisconsin System and Wisconsin Technical College System employees for violating students’ First Amendment rights. UW-Madison in a statement said the measure was “unnecessary and could be problematic in application and employee retention.”
Noted: With rapid at-home tests becoming much more widely available since late 2021, an unknown but potentially large number of positive test results are going unreported. While this dynamic may pose a challenge to public health officials tracking COVID-19, the challenge is not insurmountable. That’s according to Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The fact that we have home-based testing is a good thing,” Sethi said. “While it may compromise our ability to have a good record of cases that are in the community, we don’t necessarily want to abandon this very important way that people can test and take action, so we have to find a workaround.”
Written by Joe Peterangelo, a senior researcher for the Wisconsin Policy Forum and Ned Littlefield, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a research fellow with the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
“It appears that while hiking alone, she had ventured off the trail/observation area at the Potato River Falls in an attempt to get closer to the river,” the release said. “It appears that the ground beneath her collapsed, bringing her down the bank along with clay and rocks.”
Noted: University of Wisconsin Law School professor Robert Yablon unpacked the Voting Rights Act and how the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Wisconsin Supreme Court to approach its redistricting rulings.
Former Foxconn executive Alan Yeung has been hired by the University of Wisconsin-Madison to “jump-start technology entrepreneurship efforts” within its College of Engineering.
Yeung was heavily involved in Foxconn’s failed pledges to invest $10 billion into a high-tech manufacturing hub in Racine County and donate $100 million to UW-Madison.
An announcement posted Thursday by UW-Madison’s College of Engineering announcing Yeung’s hire lists him as an author, college alum and technology executive — it has no mention of Foxconn.
A missing UW Health surgeon was found dead Sunday morning, according to officials in Iron County.
Quoted: Panelist David Noyce, who is the executive associate dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering, said consumer worries about not being able to recharge an electric vehicle — what the industry calls range anxiety — is still one of the biggest barriers to electric vehicle adoption.
Noyce said vehicle makers are working to improve batteries as a remedy to this problem. But he said making charging stations more available is the other half of the solution.
“That’s where the emphasis is going on as we speak,” he said during the panel. “The federal government has jumped into the fray here … because of the market demand, but as well as climate goals, decarbonization, reduction in the use of fossil fuels and so forth.”
Patrick Remington, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Preventive Medicine Residency Program, said doctors who do not prescribe ivermectin to COVID-19 patients are upholding the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm to patients by making decisions according to the consensus of available credible medical research.
“We strive to get it right. We do the best job we can to do no harm and this is an example that would be unthinkable to me to ask a physician to prescribe a medicine that is at best, ineffective and at worst, harmful,” Remington said. “There are valid debates about the best ways to treat serious illnesses and science is iterative, that as we go along we learn by experimentation, we learn by carefully conducted research.”
In 2020, the University of Wisconsin-Madison opened the new Meat Science and Animal Biologics Discovery building, a $57.1 million facility designed for education, research and outreach. (It’s also home to Bucky’s Varsity Meats.) UW introduced a two-year Master Meat Crafter Training program in 2008, aimed in part at those already in the field.
Quoted: Laura Albert is a professor of industrial and systems engineering with University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said business travel in particular is slower to return to pre-pandemic levels.
“We found ways to do things remotely that are quite effective,” Albert said. “There’s not a substitute for everything, but some of that, I think, will stick around, and that might affect where routes are selected, because a lot of routes follow where business travel is needed.”
Quoted: Wisconsin producers primarily grow winter wheat, which is planted in the fall and harvested in the summer, making it unlikely farmers will plant more this spring in response to potential shortages or to capitalize on higher prices, Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.
But farmers in the state will likely spend more time managing the wheat fields they do have planted this spring, he said.
“More fertilizer, maybe more concerned about fungicide applications if you’re looking at a problem with disease. That’s what we might see, is farmers more willing to spend money on managing the planted crop for winter wheat,” he said.
Noted: Instead of limiting milk production, the plan focuses on reducing the negative impacts of uncontrolled expansion and sending stronger market signals to farms about whether they should produce more milk. The group worked with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create models for what a mandatory management program could look like and how it would affect farmers’ and consumers’ prices.
A dozen of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ appointees to the boards overseeing Wisconsin’s higher education systems remain unconfirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, a status unlikely to change this year now that the legislative session has ended.
Quoted: Essentially, the U.S. Supreme Court was saying that the Wisconsin Supreme Court didn’t properly show its work,” said Professor Robert Yablon, a redistricting expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.
But Yablon said the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling did not close the door on the governor’s plan if he can demonstrate to the Wisconsin Supreme Court that the additional majority-Black district was necessary.
“The U.S. Supreme Court said that the Wisconsin Supreme Court was free to consider additional evidence about the governor’s map,” Yablon said. “And I expect that they will try to more fully explain why the lines in the Milwaukee area should be drawn the way that they drew them.”
The Journal Sentinel and USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin will livestream several democracy-focused programs this spring from the University of Wisconsin-Madison LaFollette School of Public Affairs.
The first, today at 5 p.m., features Harvard University Professor of Government Daniel Carpenter, who will discuss his book “Democracy by Petition,” which traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across the North American continent.
Quoted: Hart Posen, a professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said while concerns of negative effects from a buyout aren’t unfounded, he sees it as a positive story in an industry that has had few positive stories in the past decade.
“This is all happening because Kohl’s is, of department store retailers, one of the best positioned department store retailers,” Posen said. “This is (a) department store that has real potential. Some folks think they can pull more out of it, which may or may not be true.”
UW-Madison will receive $1 million to begin advanced planning and design work for a new engineering building under a measure Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signed into law Friday.
Dr. Angela Fernandez is an Assistant Professor at the UW-Madison School of Nursing, and member of the campus Native American Environment, Health, and Community faculty cluster.
Tommy Thompson is set to leave the University of Wisconsin System on Friday, closing a 20-month presidential tenure in which he brought stability and some momentum at a time of internal and external challenges.
Quoted: Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the university’s Elections Research Center, said Vos’ statement will make it even more difficult to assuage concerns within his party over the 2020 election.
“To suggest that it was sort of endemic it was everywhere and substantial. That’s a big statement,” Burden said.
“Even if none of this other stuff had been happening, the investigations, or (Rep. Tim) Ramthun’s (decertification) efforts or anything else, but the speaker of the assembly to say there was widespread fraud in a statewide election is a real statement and a real change.”
