Each November and December, two swan species pass through Madison during their fall migration from the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic to Chesapeake Bay and the mid-Atlantic Coast. The length of their stay on Lake Mendota and Lake Monona depends on weather conditions and can range from days to weeks, according to Stanley Temple, the Beers-Bascom Professor Emeritus in Conservation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Starting next fall, full-time faculty and instructional academic staff at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee will need to teach at least one course per semester and a minimum of 12 credit hours each school year. Employees at the other 11 state universities face higher requirements.
All credits for general education courses must also be transferable and satisfy general education requirements across the universities by September.
“Yes, it’s the first time a three-judge panel for a redistricting action has happened in Wisconsin state court. But a three-judge panel for redistricting challenges or Voting Rights Act challenges are what happens in federal court,” said Bree Grossi Wilde, the executive director of the nonpartisan State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “This is how redistricting battles played out in federal court.”
Born in 1947 on a dairy farm in New Holstein, Meyer’s asthma kept him from following the family path into farming. He earned a degree in economics at St. Norbert College in De Pere and a law degree in 1972 from UW-Madison.
UW-Madison political science professor and Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden considers implications of multiple states seeking to redraw congressional district maps by the 2026 election.
Rudolph Johnson, a toxicologist with experience working for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, started in the top role at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene in November, the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health announced Monday.
Supporters of isocycloseram said it could help with a pest that’s long shown resistance to insecticides. Russ Groves, an entomology professor and Extension specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the insecticide has been evaluated in Wisconsin to gauge its effectiveness at controlling the Colorado potato beetle. The pest eats the leaves off potato plants, resulting in serious yield losses.
“We’ve evaluated this tool alongside others, and we see that it’s a very good fit,” Groves said. “It performs well in controlling the insect.”
Several attempts to reestablish a population of turkeys in the wild in Wisconsin failed. All attempted to use game farm or other captive-reared birds.
But a 1976 change in strategy and source birds proved dramatically different. That project, a partnership between the DNR and Missouri Department of Conservation with assistance from the National Wild Turkey Federation and University of Wisconsin-Madison, transferred wild turkeys from Missouri to southwestern Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene announced its new director, Rudolph Johnson, who brings national leadership experience to the role.
The laboratory, established in 1903, serves as Wisconsin’s public laboratory focused on clinical, environmental, and occupational health, as well as genetic testing, forensic toxicology, cytology, outbreaks, emergency preparedness, and epidemics. It is a key partner of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and reports to the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
UW-Madison political science professor Howard Schweber breaks down cases looking to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional maps.
Leonard Polzin, dairy markets and policy outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said whole milk has benefited from the diet craze around protein, driven in large part by health and fitness influencers online.
“The more protein, the better. Consumers are all about that,” he said. “The other portion is kind of a shift towards healthy fats too. So for example, cottage cheese is having a real moment right now.”
Dr. Jonathan Temte, associate dean of public health and community engagement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said Friday’s vote was not based on new scientific evidence. And he believes it will have consequences for people’s health care.
“This creates a great deal of confusion for parents, for clinicians, for public health providers, for vaccine managers,” Temte said. “I believe there have been purposeful approaches to create as much havoc and a great deal of parental concern over safety when none of this is necessary.”
“If we want land to be available to new or beginning farmers, figuring out ways that the land can be affordable for them and still provide the income that the owner generation needs is key,” said Joy Kirkpatrick, a farm succession outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension.
Surrounded by tools and wires in his lab at UW-Madison, Luis Izet Escaño holds up a tiny object, 3D-printed with metal powder in a device he created. It’s a little product that could lead to something much bigger, and he’s crafted it through his startup company.
That effort is getting some help from a new program at UW-Madison, through which he gets some seed money from the university and one year of training, with the help of campus experts, to get his company out of the door and pitch it to real-world investors.
Dominique Brossard, a professor of life science communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and principal investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research, says it’s likely the people who get the flu vaccine every year likely did so again this year but the public confusion might have dissuaded those who were undecided.
“People that are hesitant might actually become reluctant,” she said.
More academic programs at Wisconsin’s public universities could be on the chopping block under a new metric campuses must use to monitor enrollment trends.
The Universities of Wisconsin, also known as the UW system, formed a taskforce last year to explore program cuts in response to declining enrollment and persistent financial pressures.
UW-Madison has the go-ahead to start a new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence.
The UW Board of Regents on Thursday gave UW-Madison permission to move the School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences (CDIS) out of the College of Letters and Science and transform it into the new college.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents approved the reorganization of the School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences to create a new, standalone College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence during its December meeting on Thursday.
UW Board of Regents approved UW-Madison’s proposal to create a College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (CAI), school officials announced on Thursday
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS) will be reorganized into the College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence under a proposal approved by the UW Board of Regents Thursday.
Some say they fear being scapegoated for the actions of one man — an Afghan national who has been charged in the ambush-style shooting of two National Guard members last week.
“No community is responsible for an individual’s act,” said Najib Azad, a lawyer and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was resettled along with his wife and children in Stevens Point almost four years ago.
Politicians’ support for switching to partisan judicial elections seems to depend on whether they think it will help their own side. Ohio Republicans figured they would benefit from fully partisan high court elections, and they have won every race since the 2022 change, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Similarly, Louisiana Republicans are changing Supreme Court justice nominations to regular partisan primaries, starting in 2026, instead of the state’s unique all-party primaries.
A series of federal and campus funding cuts have plunged the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s foreign language programs into financial uncertainty.
Last spring, UW-Madison regularly offered 31 different foreign languages through the fourth semester level, but now, the future of many lesser-taught languages are in limbo after the Trump administration withheld federal funding and university-ordered campus-wide budget cuts.
For the first time in 42 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison will launch a new college.
In 1983, the college opened the School of Veterinary Medicine so students could learn how animals and humans relate.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is set to create a new college for the first time in more than 40 years.
The Board of Regents — which oversees UW-Madison and Wisconsin’s 12 other public universities — approved a proposal Thursday to establish the College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence.
John Miller, who previously served on the UW Board of Regents and several national boards and commissions, has been appointed secretary and CEO of the state’s top economic development agency, Gov. Tony Evers announced Wednesday.
Following the Trump Administration’s crackdown on higher education, University of Wisconsin-Madison administrators, student and faculty groups alike have stepped up lobbying efforts.
Lobbying reports from OpenSecrets show UW-Madison has spent $831,000 on lobbying since the beginning of the year, but information from the last quarter of the year has not been reported yet. During all of 2024, UW-Madison spent $807,000.
A series of federal and campus funding cuts have plunged the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s foreign language programs into financial uncertainty.
Last spring, UW-Madison regularly offered 31 different foreign languages through the fourth semester level, but now, the future of many lesser-taught languages are in limbo after the Trump administration withheld federal funding and university-ordered campus-wide budget cuts.
That kind of “strident, negative television advertising” characterized Wisconsin’s first million-dollar contest in 1999, then-Rep. Mary Hubler, D-Rice Lake, complained at the time. Liberal Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson won reelection against conservative challenger Sharren Rose in a race that cost $1.4 million.
Before then, high court candidates in the 1990s typically spent around $250,000 each, which “looks like a pittance” now, former Justice Janine Geske said in an interview. Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called those earlier races “gentlemanly” and “low-key affairs.”
Early results of a new study show landfill runoff contained the highest levels of PFAS among liquid wastes sampled statewide in Wisconsin.
Since 2023, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been collecting and analyzing samples from four waste materials that could be potential sources of PFAS in groundwater, which provides drinking water to two-thirds of state residents. It’s also a source of drinking water for around 800,000 private wells.
For the past few years, Thomsen has been collaborating with the preservation officers with the Ho-Chunk Nation and the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, as well as Sissel Schroeder, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Products Laboratory. Together, they’re unraveling the mysteries of the Indigenous canoes, which are some of the oldest surviving specimens of their kind in eastern North America.
UW-Madison is revamping its Law School public defender training program after dismissing the program’s director as part of budget cuts.
Students have circulated a petition condemning the decision to lay off the director and have called on the university to halt the changes, but to no avail.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents Nov. 19 approved two policy documents established in the 2025 Wisconsin Act 15, regarding general education requirements and teacher workloads, according to an update from UW News.
The proposed policy document regarding UW general education requirements aims to define the Core General Education Requirements for Universities of Wisconsin and the way they transfer between the different universities, according to the Board of Regents meeting notes.
The good news amid the rancor is that people are not only studying why we’re so polarized, but they are also working on ways to fix it. I learned that fact during my recent interview with Susan Yackee, director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW–Madison.
The school is launching a new undergraduate public policy program in the fall of 2026, including a required course titled Advancing Public Policy in a Divided America.
In it, students literally practice talking across ideological divides. “If I don’t work out my bicep, it’s just not gonna get strong, right? It’s the same thing with our students and their skills in talking across differences,” Yackee told me. “[It’s] super easy for them to be siloed in their own little social media environments and not hear or have to interact with people that think differently than them. So we’re gonna force that in the class.”
Though the regular full-time student does not meet the requirements for SNAP, there are special opportunities for students with different circumstances, like students in a work study program or who have a child caretaking role.
“There are certain exemptions that make students able to access SNAP … working in a work study job, if you have a caretaking role or if you have a certain kind of disabilities,” said University of Wisconsin assistant director for student engagement Kasie Strahl. “Finally, if you work more than an average of 80 hours a month, you qualify.”
Dr. Jim Conway, medical director of UW Health’s immunization program, said he thinks health care providers and public health officials have done a good job communicating the risks of flu and other respiratory illnesses for seniors.
“But it is a little bit troubling that they do seem to be, even for that group, a little bit behind,” he said.
Extending enhanced tax credits for Affordable Care Act Health Insurance Marketplace plans was what Democrats were holding out for in the government shutdown that ended on Nov. 12. The continuing resolution put forth by Republican lawmakers ended up passing without that extension, and ACA policyholders are girding for premium hikes that could more than double.
“There’s really no uncertainty about that — it’s basically pretty straightforward, simple math,” said Justin Sydnor, a professor of risk and insurance at the Wisconsin School of Business. “The way the tax credits work is that they’re tied to a share of the percent of your income, and the enhanced tax credits increased or decreased the share you would have to pay, and increase the income range for people who are eligible. So they’ll definitely go up. The share that you’re responsible for paying goes up if those subsidies expire — how much depends a lot on your income level.
The competition has grown so much, in fact, that it’s too big for the five staff members of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association to handle. They’re now handing the reins to the Universities of Wisconsin, which has sponsored the event since its inception.
The games will be overseen by the university system’s Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue, which will soon become the Office of Civic Engagement, said Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman. Separately, that office will host civic education workshops for teachers across the state over the next three years, funded by a $1.1 million grant through the U.S. Department of Education’s American History & Civics Seminars program.
The insects have killed millions of trees in the eastern U.S. and threaten 80 million eastern hemlock trees in Wisconsin. A single egg sac may contain as many as 300 eggs. Hundreds of thousands of the insects can feed on the trees with their needle-like mouth parts, said PJ Liesch, an entomologist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension.
“It’s a whole bunch of them ganging up on the trees,” Liesch said. “Together, that combined feeding damage over time causes those hemlock trees to decline and ultimately die.”
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center and political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said political messaging votes can have impacts on elections, especially in what will be some of the close Senate races in 2026.
“It’s kind of a messaging opportunity, not really a policymaking opportunity. It’s also maybe a way for Republicans to let off some steam,” Burden said.
“It’s another sign Democrats have the edge in general going into 2026,” Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the university’s Elections Research Center, said about the election outcomes.
The state budget passed this summer increased the UW system’s budget by $256 million but came with strings, including requiring all core general education courses be transferable between UW campuses and satisfy general education requirements at the receiving institution by fall 2026.
Universities of Wisconsin students will have an easier time transferring general education credits from one campus to another after the Board of Regents approved a new core general education policy this week.
UW-Madison researchers at a new federally funded center on campus will examine how aging influences diseases, such as cancer and neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s.
The Wisconsin Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging will fund new research that examines how metabolic changes associated with aging are linked to disease. The center’s researchers aim to develop improved treatments or methodologies that physicians can use to better address their patients’ conditions.
A new collaboration between UW-Madison, Microsoft, and TitletownTech is set to boost scientific research in Wisconsin. The partnership will leverage advanced AI tools to help researchers tackle major challenges more efficiently.
The UW Board of Regents on Nov. 19 approved controversial changes to a teaching workload policy despite some criticism and concern from faculty.
Under the proposal, full-time instructors would be required to teach at least 24 credits every school year, or four three-credit classes each semester. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, where professors are expected to produce more research, the minimum load is 12 credits per year, or two classes per semester.
The UW Board of Regents on Wednesday approved minimum teaching requirements for Universities of Wisconsin professors and a redesign of general education courses to make them easier to transfer between schools.
Lawmakers also took up a measure to penalize the UW system and the state technical college system if they’re found to have violated the free speech rights of their students and staff. Another bill would require the UW system to drop any fees it levies for online-only classes. Both passed largely along party lines.
In the Republican race for governor, Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann has some big ideas for the state’s public universities.
He said he is open to eliminating tenure protections for professors, would consider closing a four-year public university and sees merit in spinning off the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the Universities of Wisconsin, also known as the UW system.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez discussed her support for increased funding for the University of Wisconsin System, saying tuition hikes are a “burden” for families in an interview with The Daily Cardinal Monday.
When lawmakers passed a new state budget this year, they approved a roughly $256 million increase in funding for Wisconsin’s 13 public universities. But that money came with strings attached, including new requirements for how much faculty need to teach.
QTS, the company planning to build a data center in the DeForest area, on Friday announced a $1.5 million partnership with UW-Madison.
The money will go towards a new research initiative focused on data center sustainability.
QTS Data Centers is partnering with the University of Wisconsin–Madison to advance sustainable digital infrastructure.
The initiative, Advancing Data Center Sustainability, involves a $1.5 million investment from QTS, aimed at driving innovation in responsible data center development.
QTS Data Centers is partnering with University of Wisconsin-Madison to invest $1.5 million in a new research initiative.
The new initiative, Advancing Data Center Sustainability, will help the university advance sustainable digital infrastructure though research and innovation.
A conservative nonprofit on Wednesday filed a complaint against UW-Madisonover a university policy intended to allow those on campus, such as transgender and gender-nonconforming students or visitors, to use the restroom of their choice.
Three companies behind planned and ongoing data center developments on Thursday separately announced efforts aimed at supporting Wisconsin researchers and communities.
The announcements come as new polling shows most Wisconsin voters believe the costs associated with data center projects outweigh the benefits of those developments.
Republican lawmakers have introduced a package of bills aimed at preventing foreign adversaries from causing harm in Wisconsin, including new regulations for the University of Wisconsin, medical research and telecommunications technology.
Local pharmacies across the state are playing a bigger role in preventing people from dying from opioid overdoses, largely because of the work of a Madison-based program that started one year ago. The Wisconsin Opioid Overdose Response Center estimates it has brought more than 185,000 residents into contact with a variety of expanded services since launching last year.
UW-Madison has shuttered the equity and well-being department in its human resources office, which worked to retain LGBTQ+ and employees of color.
The university established the Office of Equity, Inclusion and Employee Well-Being in spring 2021 to offer consultation and promote inclusive policies and environments, with a focus on support for traditionally marginalized communities.
It’s 7:30 a.m. on a Thursday, and class for the Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums program at UW-Madison is just getting started.
Program director Cassy Leeport, a descendant of the Grand Portage Band of Ojibwe, pulls up to a university parking lot and greets her student Cheyenne Woerman as she hops into the UW-Madison-issued minivan scented with cut sweetgrass ready for braiding.
