Schools in the University of Wisconsin System pledged to return to in-person learning next fall. At a meeting of the UW System Board of Regents on Thursday, individual school chancellors gave more details about what that will look like.
Quoted: “For our future up here, broadband is the single most important thing,” said Christopher Starks, retired from the aerospace industry and now working with University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension in the Northwoods.
Wisconsin employers couldn’t require employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, and so-called vaccine passports would be prohibited under GOP-backed bills that received a public hearing at the state Capitol Wednesday.
Another proposal would prevent the University of Wisconsin System from requiring COVID-19 vaccines or testing.
Can you see the 17-year cicadas in the Midwest? What’s with all the black flies? How can you protect yourself against ticks? What will this year be like for mosquitoes?
PJ Liesch — the “Wisconsin Bug Guy” and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab — told us what insects are emerging this time of year in Wisconsin.
Quoted: “It is in fact the most powerful position in the criminal justice system,” said Lanny Glinberg, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. “Prosecutors wield considerable discretion in the decision whether to charge, what to charge and how to resolve cases.“
Quoted: Wisconsinites have bifurcated politics, said Mike Wagner, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Rural and Republican Wisconsinites value independence, hard work and feeling respected, but tend to distrust urban centers and government institutions. They are also more likely to live in less information-rich environments, Wagner said, including cities without daily newspapers. This has spilled over into Wisconsinites’ response to the pandemic.
“The best predictor of skepticism about vaccines, from our early analyses, is a belief that the election was stolen from President Trump,” Wagner said.
Republicans who control the Legislature set in motion a plan Thursday to end the freeze on in-state tuition that has been in place for eight years at University of Wisconsin schools.
The University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute has released its 2021 County Health Rankings and found that every county in Wisconsin has a high percentage of excessive drinkers.
Wisconsin is the only state in the country where every county reported excessive drinking among 23% of its adult population or higher.
The Wisconsin Legislature’s powerful budget committee declined to extend a tuition freeze for in-state undergraduate students, a move that would allow the University of Wisconsin System to raise the costs for attending its institutions for the first time in eight years.
The Republican-controlled budget-writing committee declined to extend a tuition freeze at University of Wisconsin System schools for the next two academic years, setting the stage for students to potentially pay more for their education as soon as this fall.
The Legislature’s Republican-led budget committee has voted to end a University of Wisconsin tuition freeze that has been in place for eight years and long been a GOP priority that had bipartisan support.
A second bill, AB 195, would require the same policies at University of Wisconsin System schools and state technical colleges for women’s teams. The State Senate has similar bills, SB 322 and SB 323, respectively.
The two proposed bills cover K-12 athletics and college athletics, and would prohibit schools from allowing students to join teams that don’t correspond to their biological sex assigned at birth unless schools created a “coed” sport opportunity. The bills are almost sure to receive a veto from Gov. Tony Evers if they make it through the Legislature.
University of Wisconsin officials warned a Republican-backed bill aiming to bar employees from performing or assisting with abortions as part of their work would pose “a serious threat to the future of our ob-gyn residency training program.”
Quoted: Health experts highlight that incarcerated individuals are at higher risk for COVID-19 outbreaks due to a limited ability to social distance and other societal factors, said Dipesh Navsaria, a physician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
“People who typically are in carceral settings like jails and prisons (that) are disproportionately people of color, people with lower educational attainment and people who come from backgrounds of poverty, trauma, stress, and are often subject to racial bias and discrimination,” said Navsaria. “And all of these elements tend to play into just being at higher risk.”
Quoted: Evers’ bid to bolster Medicaid is less an “expansion” and more of a “restoration,” according to Donna Friedsam, a researcher with UW-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty.
Friedsam says that, prior to the Affordable Care Act, Wisconsin’s medicaid program covered parents and caretaker adults at up to double the federal poverty level.
“So, when the ACA came along, it said all states should cover everybody, no matter who they are, up to a certain level of 138% of the federal poverty level,” she told WORT. In 2021, 138% of the federal poverty level is about $17,700 for a single person.
The president of the Wisconsin Senate doesn’t want to increase general aid for schools in the next two years because they have received billions of dollars in federal aid since 2020.
The Wisconsin bills would allow students to join teams only that correspond to their biological sex as assigned by a doctor at birth, unless the sport is classified as “coed.” It would apply to public and private schools, as well as the University of Wisconsin and technical colleges.
All University of Wisconsin System and UW health workers would be banned from performing abortions or training others to perform abortions under a Republican bill up for a public hearing Wednesday in a state legislative committee.
A second bill, AB 195, would require the same policies at University of Wisconsin System schools and state technical colleges for women’s teams. The State Senate has similar bills, SB 322 and SB 323, respectively.
Noted: Olikara, whose parents are immigrants from India, is a Brookfield native who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012.
Noted: The Wisconsin Latinx history collective is an organization created in partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) and the UW–Madison Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Program and will spend the next five years documenting the history of Latinx people in the state of Wisconsin.
Officially created in January of last year, the collective began with the meeting between Arenas and four other academics, including historian and UW–Madison assistant professor Dr. Marla Ramírez Tahuado; UW–Madison Associate Professor with the School for Workers Dr. Armando Ibarra; cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of geography and Chican@ & Latin@ studies Dr. Almita Miranda; and assistant professor of Latinx Studies at Marquette University Sergio González.
Nearly a year and a half after nurses at UW Health failed to get union recognition from management, they are supporting a bill from two Madison Democratic lawmakers that would give them input on workplace conditions.
Noted: The Second District Democrat has requested nine earmarks for road and bridge projects totaling $20 million and 30 earmarks for community projects totaling $56 million. The most expensive of these community projects is a $24 million plant research facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to replace a plant breeding facility that Pocan described as an “outdated World War Two building.”
Some of the other requests: $4 million to support the replacement of a 69-year-old hospital in Darlington (Lafayette County); $2.2 million for technology and equipment for the Baraboo fire and ambulance service; $1 million for a new Madison homeless shelter; $1 million toward a new Center for Black Excellence and Culture in Madison; $2.5 million for traumatic brain injury research at UW-Madison; $220,000 for a Reedsburg community center, $848,000 to upgrade Fitchburg’s stormwater management; and $400,000 for a machine shop and shed at the Wisconsin Cranberry Research Station in Black River Falls.
UW-Madison continues to require masks while indoors, while riding a campus bus and when in a university vehicle with at least one other person. An announcement on an updated mask policy is expected next week, university spokesperson John Lucas said.
Nurses and Democratic lawmakers are advocating for employees at UW hospitals and clinics to have a union voice.
State Senator Melissa Agard (D-Madison) and Representative Lisa Subeck (D-Madison) announced legislation Thursday that would give employees of the UW Hospitals and Clinics the authority to have a union voice.
Noted: In her complaint, Tina Virgil — head of the Division of Law Enforcement Services — disclosed that Kaul brought in an outside agency last year to look into working conditions at the Department of Justice after staffers raised concerns about possible harassment. The outside agency was the University of Wisconsin System.
Noted: At University of Wisconsin campuses, interim President Tommy Thompson has said that vaccination against COVID-19 won’t be required, especially not while the medicines are under emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study shows a strain of coronavirus that spurred fast moving outbreaks at two University of Wisconsin-Madison dormitories in the fall didn’t spill over to the greater Madison community.
Officials in the University of Wisconsin athletic department were beaming Thursday.
Why?
The Milwaukee Brewers had just announced they would end all restrictions on the number of fans allowed inside American Family Field, beginning June 25.
That announcement came just two days after the team said it would increase maximum attendance to 50% from 25%.
“(Thursday) was a big day, man,” UW deputy athletic director Chris McIntosh said. “Between the Brewers news and the CDC. That was huge.
Wisconsin reached its pandemic tipping point on Nov. 18.
That was the day the state recorded its highest number of confirmed new COVID-19 cases — 7,989 — and the virus began to flip from exponential growth to its opposite, exponential decay, according to Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
After a year fraught with unemployment payment delays, high rates of unemployment denials, call center headaches and other issues, a new University of Wisconsin report suggests the state should outsource at least a portion of its unemployment system.
The report by conservative UW economics professor Noah Williams detailed areas the state lagged behind most other states as the wave of unemployment claims swamped the state’s Department of Workforce Development last year.
A pair of bills being advanced by Wisconsin Republicans that bar transgender athletes from participating in school sports for girls and women would directly affect very few — if any — athletes, according to high school and collegiate sports officials.
Quoted: “I think it actually is the day we have been waiting for, the day we feel good and safe gathering indoors,” said Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the CDC.
“The pendulum has really swung back,” added Remington, who directs the preventive medicine residency program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Now the benefits of gathering in person for fully vaccinated people clearly outweigh the risks.”
“I don’t expect you, if you have a scrimmage, to play it before for a scrimmage,” he said. “But I do expect you play it for a [University of Wisconsin-Madison] Badgers game.”
The leader of the state Senate’s higher education committee is recommending sweeping changes to the University of Wisconsin System, including grouping campuses into four regions and eliminating a longstanding tuition freeze.
Noted: The two-year state budget plan also won’t allow the University of Wisconsin System to borrow for operational expenses, restore collective bargaining for public employees, make Juneteenth a state holiday, create a so-called red flag law for gun owners or adopt maps from the governor’s redistricting commission, among other proposals.
While the northern half has seen a smaller increase, Dane County has seen a 20% increase and Milwaukee County has seen a 15% increase, according to data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Scientists started keeping records of precipitation levels in the 1890s, said Steve Vavrus, a climate professor at UW, and since then, all records for the state have been broken.
Climate change explains the rising amount of rain falling from the sky, Vavrus said. As temperatures rise, warmer air can hold more droplets of water.
“More moisture can be wrung out of the air than 100 years ago or so,” he said. “And climate models have been projecting that for a long time that as the climate warms, we’ll get more heavy rains.”
Written by Tim Smeeding, the Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the La Follette School of Public Affairs and former director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In March, The Washington Post reported that University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank sought to move a conversation around the COVID-19 pandemic and students returning to campus in the fall to a private portal used by presidents and chancellors of the 14 Big Ten universities.
Quoted: The new maps are supposed to be in place for the 2022 elections. But the delays could be so severe that Wisconsin’s existing, Republican-friendly maps will have to be used for those elections, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It seems unlikely I think that the litigation would be resolved in time for elections to happen in new districts in 2022,” he said.
Keeping the old maps for another cycle “doesn’t feel right,” he said. “But I think courts often view it as the least bad option, as opposed to forcing candidates to make very quick decisions or changing the dates of primaries or something else.”
Noted: The two-year state budget plan also won’t allow the University of Wisconsin System to borrow for operational expenses, restore collective bargaining for public employees, make Juneteenth a state holiday, create a so-called red flag law for gun owners or adopt maps from the governor’s redistricting commission.
Gov. Tony Evers on Friday appointed a medical group CEO to the UW Board of Regents, tipping the political balance of a board long led by Republican appointees who passed policies for University of Wisconsin System campuses opposed by many faculty and staff.
Republicans are also stripping the budget of proposals to allow the University of Wisconsin System to borrow money for operational expenses. They also stripped a provision that would have expanded a tuition promise program to all of the state’s universities and their branch campuses, building off a UW-Madison tuition promise, which provides free tuition to students from families making up to $60,000.
Humanities is the second building this month where UW-Madison officials asked employees working there to leave and then ordered repairs to because of safety concerns.
Column by Thompson, president of the University of Wisconsin System.
Quoted: Republicans in Wisconsin first took their stance when Scott Walker was governor, contending that the federal government eventually could stop paying as much as promised for the expansion.
“There might be a little bit of Scott Walker legacy in all of this,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “People who wear masks in close settings have a lower risk of being infected than people who don’t,” said Patrick Remington, former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program.
Noted: Clinical trials included the same number of participants as are required for any vaccine trial, said Dr. James Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute.
Noted: Foxconn has worked to try to create goodwill with other parts of the state by signing agreements with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and local governments in Racine, Eau Claire and Green Bay to establish “innovation centers.”
The company has signed a $100 million agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create Foxconn Institute for Research in Science and Technology within the College of Engineering.
UW-Madison Director of News and Media Relations Meredith McGlone told NBC15 the university had weighed a variety of scenarios for students and families to come together for a graduation ceremony but could not do so for safety and logistical reasons, specifically noting the number of people who are still not vaccinated and the presence of highly contagious coronavirus variants.
A political science professor is seeking to challenge Attorney General Josh Kaul in the 2022 election to be Wisconsin’s top attorney.
Ryan Owens, 44, who has taught law and political science courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the last 10 years, is the second Republican to announce a run against the Democratic incumbent.
Owens serves as an affiliate faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s law school and La Follette School of Public Affairs. He’s also the director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership, which brings conservative speakers to campus.
Wisconsin technical colleges could more easily establish general education degree programs under a Republican bill that the University of Wisconsin System says would threaten the existence of some of its smallest campuses.
’Alumni and supporters of UW-Madison who reach out to their state elected officials are the most convincing advocates for the university,’ UW spokesperson says.
Video tour of Humanities.
Crumbling concrete, rusted rebar and falling facades were among the selling points on a campus tour Monday designed to shore up support for the University of Wisconsin System’s more than $1 billion request to repair or replace aging facilities.
Gov. Tony Evers authorized emergency work on the 19-floor Madison building that houses the University of Wisconsin System’s headquarters Thursday after two precast concrete railing slabs fell from the third floor.
The 10-by-6 foot slabs fell from Van Hise Hall on UW-Madison’s campus Sunday, landing directly in front of the building’s entrance. No one was injured.
Gov. Tony Evers took the unusual step Friday of ordering workers to remove all concrete slabs hanging over the entrances and exists of the University of Wisconsin System headquarters building, days after two slabs fell off the facade and crashed to the sidewalk outside the building’s main doors.
