Quoted: Christelle Guédot is an associate professor of entomology at UW-Madison. She says establishing more habitat for pollinators could help them out.
“So having more habitats for them, and more connectivity between those habitats, and not have, like, islands of habitat for pollinators, would really help in bringing those populations – not necessarily back to where they were, but improving in their abundance and diversity,” says Guédot.
Quoted: “The FCC target for these is 25mpbs, which is sufficient for most applications. However, we are far from that in most places,” UW-Madison computer science professor Paul Barford says. “And, it’s not just about up/down speeds, it’s also about where there is still zero connectivity and about the reliability of connectivity in deployed areas. Many things must be considered.”
The state Legislature next week will vote on the $87.5 billion GOP-authored biennial budget, which falls almost $3.7 billion short of Gov. Tony Evers’ original proposal.
Noted: Hynek is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Quoted: The state’s field crops are in fairly good condition, but are behind schedule considering the early planting accomplished by farmers this spring, said Shawn Conley, a soybean and small grains specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension.
“In southern Wisconsin and even northern Wisconsin, it was a record planting time frame this spring,” Conley said. “I had a lot of farmers in southern Wisconsin have all of their crops in by May 1. I talked to a farmer of 40 years and that’s never happened.”
Quoted: One interpretation of that data, said economist Noah Williams of the conservative Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is that “fraud detection basically dropped to near zero” in 2020.
“We had a huge explosion in claims in 2020, but the actual cases in the state that were referred for fraud fell,” Williams said. “We don’t know how big the problem is, but … I wouldn’t have expected the absolute number of cases to fall.”
Quoted: Doug McLeod, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said conflict can indeed be threatening, especially to smaller cities, and that the national attention that Wausau is receiving would “disappear into everything else” in a city like New York or Chicago.
“(Conflicts) can be more divisive, they can raise tensions in smaller communities,” said McLeod, who studies social conflicts and the mass media. “Those communities might look for scapegoats to place blame, (and) it’s often the person coming in from outside — like a journalist from New York.”
The debate over how Wisconsin’s colleges should deal with declining birth rates has come roaring to the fore this state budget cycle, as legislators, college administrators and academics grapple with major questions of how, if at all, higher education should adapt for an uncertain future.
Quoted: “Mind you, it’s a difficult thing to do, and to do well,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at UW-Madison.
Stephenson said farmers often make about $20 per hundredweight (cwt) for milk. By selling the cheese instead of the milk, they can get somewhere closer to $100 cwt for their milk.
“Sure, there are additional costs along the way, but potentially the income stream is bigger,” Stephenson said. “But there are a lot of ways it can go wrong.”
Gloria Ladson-Billings, a UW-Madison education professor emeritus and one of the first scholars to introduce the idea in the 1990s, said Republican rhetoric purposely twists the intent of critical race theory, which does not argue that one race is superior to another but that white privilege perpetuates inequities. “This particular movement at the legislative level is a red herring, a way to gin up fear,” Ladson-Billings told the State Journal in an interview. “It’s a political move, a way to rally the troops.”
The Wisconsin Idea, a fundamental philosophical pillar of the University of Wisconsin, charges the system with serving all parts of the state.
But the system has fallen short in its most populous region — Milwaukee.
Noted: Whether the measures can win the support of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers remains unclear. Evers has said lawmakers need to do more for schools and the University of Wisconsin System before cutting taxes.
Noted: Milwaukee’s new traffic unit is using DOT data to focus its enforcement efforts on intersections and stretches of road identified as particularly dangerous. The DOT partners with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory to collect collision report data that flows in from law enforcement agencies across the state every day and organize it into an interactive statewide map of crashes.
Assembly Republicans approved bills Wednesday that would ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s athletics — proposals that have pushed Wisconsin into a national firestorm.
Noted: A second bill would require the same policies at University of Wisconsin System schools and state technical colleges for women’s teams.
Quoted: Amaya Atucha is a fruit crop specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. She said the hot and dry conditions over the last few weeks have put stress on everything from strawberry plants to apple orchards.
“Plants in general use water mostly to be able to control temperature. So the warmer it gets, the more water they need to be able to cool down,” Atucha explained.
Cole Lubinski manages the UW-Extension’s Langlade Research Station, which supports the state’s potato industry. He said his area has gotten enough moisture so far this year, but farms in the Central Sands have had irrigation systems running around the clock.
“Vegetable crops, they’re considered a high-moisture crop, so it’s very crucial to keep proper soil moisture levels,” Lubinski said. “When you have weeks like last week where there was a lot of heat and you get put on electrical (peak) control, where you can’t run your system if it’s run by electric, then you’re going hours without water for your crop.”
Quoted: Simone Schweber, Goodman professor of Education and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said such comparisons are not rare — likely because there are few events that trigger such universal agreement.
“The Holocaust is still, and deservedly so, a very powerful moral paradigm, and it may be one of the few large-scale events that we all agree, on the political spectrum, that it’s awful,” Schweber said.
UW-Madison agronomy and environmental studies professor Chris Kucharik details how limited rain and hot weather are contributing to drought conditions across southern Wisconsin.
Quoted: Richard Avramenko, a UW-Madison political scientist and director for the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy, said Johnson would have been more accurate to describe Biden as a “left liberal.”
“Liberals, socialists and Marxists are, by definition, progressives,” Avramenko said in an email. “But Biden is not a ‘classical liberal’ (i.e., libertarian) — he’s a ‘left liberal.’ “
Avramenko added, “If he said, ‘Don’t ask me to get inside the mind of a liberal, progressive, socialist, Marxist — whatever you want to label him — like President Biden’ it would have been less questionable.”
Quoted: Kurt Paulsen, a University of Wisconsin-Madison expert on housing affordability, said little headway has been made in increasing Black homeownership, which stands at 44 percent nationally compared to 74 percent for whites.
“Nationwide, the Black homeownership rate is still not where it needs to be, and in some ways, has not significantly improved since the 1968 Fair Housing Act,” Paulsen said.
Kacie Lucchini Butcher is a public history project director at UW-Madison who researches housing inequity. Butcher emphasized the alarming implications of low Black homeownership rates, including the ability of such families to build intergenerational wealth.
“If homeownership continues in the way that it does, and if access to housing continues in the way it does, we are just going to see a continued exacerbation of wealth inequality and of poverty. One of the best ways to fix this is to get everybody housing.”
UW-Madison professor Kris Olds, an expert on urban planning and gentrification, said housing affordability remains a huge problem across Wisconsin, especially in Madison.
“One of the problems in Madison is so much of it (housing) is allocated to single family zoning districts, and it’s quite expensive to access that,” he said.
Paige Glotzer, assistant professor of history at UW-Madison and author of a book on the history of housing discrimination, said bias still permeates the housing market in sometimes inconspicuous ways.
When Dr. Laura McDowell finishes her obstetrics and gynecology training at UW Health this month, she will be the first person in the country to complete such a residency program focused on caring for women in rural areas.
A third former governor, current interim University of Wisconsin System President Tommy Thompson, wielded a sledgehammer in a series of videos last year urging people to “smash COVID.”
Southern Wisconsin is pushing through an unseasonably dry summer. While the arid, hot days may be uncomfortable for those of us in Madison, it could spell financial trouble for the region’s farmers.
For more, our producer Jonah Chester spoke with Christopher Kucharick, professor of Agronomy at UW-Madison.
Quoted: That the decision to get a COVID-19 vaccine often includes a political dimension is a predictable result of the policy response to the pandemic as it unfolded over an exceptionally tumultuous period in American politics, according to Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s not surprising that people’s attitudes toward vaccination can line sometimes with political beliefs because the disease has been discussed in those arenas,” Sethi said.
National polling conducted over spring 2021 has shown eagerness for the vaccines among Democratic voters, while Republican voters have indicated tepid enthusiasm, with a distinct difference between men and women. But simple partisanship doesn’t tell a complete story about who is open to getting vaccinated.
“It’s even more pointedly about the Biden-Trump difference,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at UW-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center.
Burden noted that voters’ preference in the 2020 presidential election “is far more predictive [of their vaccination views] than a person’s race, or age, or income, or just about any other thing that might be asked in a survey.”
UW Health, an academic medical system that is affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, which is behind the public service announcement, moved to cut the ad as the state attempts to address a sharp disparity in vaccination rates in different counties. In Wisconsin, some counties are seeing less than 30 percent vaccination rates while others are nearing 70 percent.
In light of the new projections, Evers also announced that an estimated $300 million in cost savings across 18 state agencies — which the governor called for during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — would be returned to those departments. That includes more than $45 million to the University of Wisconsin System, $5 million to the Wisconsin Technical College System and nearly $25 million to the Department of Children and Families.
A little less than half of the GOP proposal, or nearly $629 million, is earmarked for the University of Wisconsin System. Evers had asked for about $1 billion for UW campuses. Humanities is on track to be demolished by 2030 because the committee approved $88 million for a new academic building that will move many academic departments housed in Humanities to the new facility. A quarter of the cost will be covered through fundraising with the rest supported through state borrowing.
Quoted: “These jobs aren’t the same jobs they were a year ago, and our lives aren’t the same lives that they were a year ago,” says Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The research and policy center examines economic issues as they affect workers and employment.
Workers in the hospitality industry, already at the lower end of the wage scale, were especially hard hit.
“Those jobs make for very hard lives,” Dresser says. As the coronavirus spread, “either your venue shuts down and your work goes away, or if your work doesn’t go away, you’re exposed through your work.”
Republican lawmakers on the state Legislature’s budget committee voted Tuesday evening to approve $1.5 billion of Gov. Tony Evers’ $2.4 billion plan for state construction projects, including roughly $629 million of the governor’s $1 billion plan for the University of Wisconsin System.
Republicans on the Legislature’s budget committee agreed Tuesday to spend $1.5 billion over two years for University of Wisconsin buildings and other public facilities.
The building projects Evers wants funded are spread out over 31 counties and include $1 billion for the University of Wisconsin System.
Marquette University’s announcement Monday makes it the third private institution in the state to impose a vaccine mandate as the University of Wisconsin System continues its stance of encouraging but not requiring vaccination.
Quoted: Dry conditions have been holding pretty steady for the past month or so, said Christopher Kucharik, a climate researcher and professor of agronomy and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The longer they continue, though, the more intense drought becomes, with southeast Wisconsin moving from a moderate to severe level as June started and hot weather descended.
Noted: The report attributes the decline at least partially to the COVID-19 pandemic. Madison schools, for example, lost some students whose parents are international students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and went home.
Republicans who control the Legislature want to ban requiring COVID-19 vaccines on University of Wisconsin campuses, but UW System President Tommy Thompson says that won’t be happening anyway.
For hundreds of years, Wisconsin’s indigenous languages faced suppression and extermination. Concerted efforts to wipe out native tongues played out in a variety of arenas — from schools to government policies.
Enwejig hopes to address some of those past injustices. The group, which formed last year on the UW-Madison campus, works to bring visibility and recognition to Wisconsin’s native languages.
For more on the group’s mission, our producer Jonah Chester spoke with Brian McInnes, an associate professor of civil society and community studies/American Indian studies at UW-Madison.
Another bill sponsored by Jacque and Rep. Rick Gundrum would establish the same ban on the teaching of the same concepts within the state’s University of Wisconsin System and the Technical College System with similar provisions for the withholding of noncompliant institutions.
A group of Wisconsin lawmakers is joining a national campaign of Republicans pushing back against a decades-old theory that examines how slavery affected the way societal institutions treat Black people more than a century later.
A group of Wisconsin Republicans is joining the nationwide conservative push against teaching about aspects of race and gender in classrooms.
The draft bills introduced Thursday would prevent University of Wisconsin System campuses, state technical colleges, public K-12 schools and independent charter schools from teaching “critical race theory,” which argues that racism is baked into social structures and policies.
Quoted: In a 2014 Wisconsin State Journal story seeking to define Up North, Eric Raimy, a UW-Madison professor who has studied the quirks and forms of the English language in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest, said it’s not clear when the term was first used, but it has grown to become exceptionally well understood today. “North itself is a geographical term,” Raimy told the State Journal. “But the fact that the term is Up North, that changes it from a purely geographical term to more of a social-cultural term. It can bond us.”
A proposal by state Sen. Roger Roth, R-Appleton, would restructure the UW System into four regions plus UW-Madison. We discuss the vision and what challenges it seeks to address.
Republicans in the state legislature have approved education funding that’s more than a billion dollars short of what Gov. Evers proposed. We get the latest. Then, we talk about how a lifeguard shortage is affecting the state’s pools. And, we talk about an effort by UW-Madison to research health disparities.
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.
