One day after the University of Wisconsin-Madison said COVID-19 spread was on the verge of jeopardizing plans for in-person instruction, the state’s top Republicans sent a letter to Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren asking that he reconsider the cancellation of the fall 2020 college football season.
Noted: Birx was in Madison to talk to Wisconsin officials and health care representatives about COVID-19 as part of a tour of states. Among those she met with was Tommy Thompson, the University of Wisconsin System president whom she knows from his time as health and human services secretary under President George W. Bush.
“I think he has taken a very serious and public-health approach to this,” Birx said. “He has a plan for surveillance testing, he has a plan for surge testing … and I think equally importantly, he has a plan for caring for students who become positive.”
She suggested that could help UW avoid the problems of colleges that have seen clusters of cases once students arrived on campus.
The Legislative Fiscal Bureau on Monday reported state tax collections totaled more than $17.5 billion in the 2019-20 fiscal year, a 1.1% increase from the previous year. That’s about $112.6 million, or only 0.6%, less than projected in January, according to the state Department of Revenue.
Column from interim System President Tommy Thompson: If our great state is going to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic poised for growth, we will need to renew the Wisconsin Idea for the 21st century with a real investment in the University of Wisconsin System.
The heads of the University of Wisconsin System, the Tavern League of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Restaurant Association sent an open letter to restaurant and bar owners Monday asking they take precautions to prevent COVID-19 spread as students start to return to campuses across the state.
UW System Interim President Tommy Thompson asked businesses to “help to encourage responsible behavior of our students,” alongside on-campus efforts to bring back a portion of some 170,000 students across 13 UW campuses.
Wisconsin doesn’t have the capacity to process the number of coronavirus tests health officials ideally want available when schools and college campuses reopen, Health Services Secretary Andrea Palm said Friday.
Quoted: “Face to face campaigning is a known positive … the positive on the Republican side is they know this can work. One of the negatives is that we don’t know that it works in a pandemic,” said Michael Wagner, a journalism professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in political communication and behavior.
Calling the process of building the 2021-23 biennial budget “one of the most significant actions” in the University of Wisconsin System’s history, interim President Tommy Thompson delivered a State of the University address Thursday that urged support for higher education and a reconsideration of System priorities.
The head of the University of Wisconsin System will propose its Board of Regents support a 3.5% increase to its 2021-23 state budget in the hope of funding several new initiatives, including a statewide free tuition scholarship program for some Wisconsin students.
Interim University of Wisconsin System President Tommy Thompson will request a 3.5% operating budget increase for the 2021-23 biennium, alongside ten key initiatives to be presented to Gov. Tony Evers Thursday.
The University of Wisconsin System wants nearly $100 million more in the next state budget to cushion COVID-19’s financial blow to campuses and cover tuition for Wisconsin students whose families earn less than $60,000 a year.
The fastest-growing part of the state is also its most reliably liberal, with a genuinely left-wing political culture growing up around the state capital and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. When Scott Walker referred to D.C. as “68 square miles surrounded by reality,” he was taking a phrase he’d applied to Madison and updating the area size.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has received less than 1% of the money that Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group pledged to it two years ago amid the electronics giant’s expansion plans in Wisconsin.
Noted: Vel Phillips was a civil rights activist who smashed racial and gender barriers as the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin law school, the first woman to be elected to Milwaukee Common Council, the first appointed female judge in Milwaukee County and the first Black person ever elected to statewide office in Wisconsin.
Born in Keshena, Wisconsin, in 1935, Ada Deer grew up in a log cabin on a Menominee Indian Reservation. She was the first Menominee to earn an undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin and the first Native American to receive a master’s in social work from Columbia University. Deer also was the first woman to chair the Menominee Tribe in Wisconsin.
Noted: University of Wisconsin System: $32 million. Evers recently allocated these funds for additional testing and protective equipment so UW campuses can conduct some classes in person.
A CBS News and YouGov poll released Sunday morning found Biden leading Trump 48% to 42% among likely voters, and the Election Research Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looking at registered voters, found Biden ahead with 49% to Trump’s 43%. The Marquette University Law School Poll, released on Tuesday, finds Biden at 50%, in a close race with Trump at 46% among likely voters.
Quoted: “It’s definitely a trial run for November in terms of recruiting poll workers, finding new locations, and distributing personal protective equipment,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden, who directs the Elections Research Center. “August is really good practice for that.”
Quoted: There are risks for both sides if one party embraces mail voting and the other doesn’t, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. If there is a surge of coronavirus cases near the election, those who had planned to vote in person may find it difficult to cast a ballot — and may not have enough time to request a ballot by mail, he said. Clerks short of poll workers might have to close polling locations, meaning some voters would have to go to new precincts and wait in longer lines.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank delivered a sobering message Wednesday about the state’s flagship campus as the fall semester looms, saying “we’re in a real financial crisis” due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Quoted: Miriam Seifter, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in an email that “the opinion seems to have had a chilling effect on further attempts at executive emergency response, with both the governor and the state (Department of Health Services) hesitating on or delaying actions not covered by the ruling out of fear they will lose in court again.”
“The result has been a governing gap in Wisconsin, with local governments left to try to address statewide problems,” said Seifter, who co-wrote an amicus brief in the case “on behalf of 17 legal scholars” that criticized the GOP controlled legislature’s challenge.
Quoted: Despite avoiding the worst-case scenarios predicted when the pandemic first hit, the number of deaths is still troubling, said University of Wisconsin-Madison epidemiologist Patrick Remington.
“It’s been hard to get the general public and even some policymakers to realize how serious a disease this is,” Remington said. “These are absolutely preventable deaths.”
Bracing for more financial losses associated with COVID-19, the University of Wisconsin System announced on Tuesday a series of additional cost-cutting measures for its roughly 600 administrative employees, including some layoffs.
Noted: In Wisconsin, widely seen as a key 2020 battleground, a new poll coordinated by the UW-Madison Elections Research Center in collaboration with the Wisconsin State Journal, found Biden leading Donald Trump in the state, 49% to 43%. Among those who say they’re “certain” to vote, Biden’s lead grows to 52% to 44%.
A new poll shows voters in Wisconsin favor Joe Biden over President Trump. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center poll finds Biden leads Trump by six points. According to the poll, Biden’s drawing support from Democrats who went for other candidates than Hillary Clinton in 2016, or didn’t vote at all.
Noted: As a result, Kind has drawn challengers from both the left and right. In the Democratic primary, he’s facing Mark Neumann, a former missionary and pediatrician. Neumann has criticized Kind’s lack of support for Medicare-for-All, but his primary challenge hasn’t drawn much national attention. Kind is the clear favorite, according to Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “Historically speaking, the back and forth of recent years is kind of unprecedented,” said Booth Fowler, a retired political scientist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Wisconsin Votes: An Electoral History.”
“Most of the time it has been a one-party state,” said Fowler, referring to the dominance of the GOP during the state’s first hundred years.
Democrat Joe Biden led GOP President Donald Trump in Wisconsin and two other battleground states in a poll released Monday by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Johanna Hussain, a UW-Madison junior, says she’s excited to vote in her first presidential race. “I kind of got interested in politics during the 2016 election and I was 16 at the time,” Hussain said. “I’ve been waiting the last four years for this.”
Gov. Tony Evers has allocated about $32 million to University of Wisconsin System schools for COVID-19 testing and protection — a significant savings from the original request — based on the availability of a rapid, less costly test.
Agriculture workers are up to eight times more likely to die on the job than workers in other industries, according to the National Farm Medicine Center in Marshfield. The center, along with the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute, the UW-Madison Division of Extension and UW’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, restarted the annual reports to bring attention to farm fatalities and ways to prevent them.
Research on the effectiveness of wearing face masks is limited, but the idea is that wearing a mask helps reduce the transmission of the virus from the wearer to people in proximity through talking, coughing or sneezing. Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said cloth masks can achieve that quite well.
Quoted: “We know that voter registration numbers have been lower this spring and summer than they would normally be in a presidential election year,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.
The University of Wisconsin System received a $2 million anonymous donation to improve online education as campuses try to make classes more engaging than was offered in the spring.
Quoted: “We don’t want Wisconsin to become a poster child of how not to do an election,” said David Canon, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “It takes a brave actor to stand up and run against the boss,” Lanny Glinberg, director of the University of Wisconsin Prosecution Project, says.
Glinberg also points to the decline of local news as an impediment to contested races. If the community isn’t aware of the daily goings on in the courthouse, how will they know if there have been any problems?
“Another factor — how well informed is the public of the role of district attorney?” he says. “The most powerful actor in the criminal justice system in terms of discretion. The public needs quality investigative journalism to know that. That’s in shorter and shorter supply.”
Quoted: Tessa Conroy, an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Agricultural and Applied Economics Department who specializes in regional economic development, said it’s encouraging to see unemployment improving across the state. However, she said the numbers show that the economy has not gotten back to normal for a lot of people in Wisconsin.
“Even though things are better, we’re still quite a ways from where we were before the pandemic hit,” Conroy said. “So if we were to compare to say a year ago, we have a ways to go in terms of improving things again.”
Noted: Minutes after Evers announced the plan, University of Wisconsin interim president and former Gov. Tommy Thompson pointed out that the system’s campuses had already absorbed more than half of the first round of cutting and signaled the system would have trouble with further reductions.
“Our universities are doing everything we can to provide in-person classes safely this fall and reductions in state support for the UW System are an obstacle to that work,” Thompson said in a statement.
UW System President Tommy Thompson said the budget reductions are an obstacle to providing in-person classes safely this fall. “The UW System has already borne a disproportionate share of state cuts to date,” Thompson said. “I am working with the Governor’s office to manage these further cuts, as well as to secure the resources we need to ensure our classrooms and university communities are safe this fall. We have a compelling case, and I believe the Governor will be helpful.”
Within minutes of Evers’ announcing the new cuts, the University of Wisconsin System Interim President Tommy Thompson, a former governor, released a statement saying the UW is working with the governor’s office to manage the impact its schools.
UW-Madison economist Noah Williams said it would be inaccurate to blame government regulation for the economic slowdown that’s accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Economic activity started falling early in March, before there were any restrictions in place,” Williams said. “What the lockdowns essentially did was keep that activity at a very low level. Things deteriorated much more quickly than people expected.”
The COVID-19 pandemic imposed significant new hardships on American workers — and it’s exposed just how much hardship many of them have been enduring for years.
That’s a central conclusion of a report published today, the 2020 edition of the State of Working Wisconsin. The report is published by COWS — formerly the Center on Wisconsin Strategy — a policy research and analysis organization at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Belzer lived in La Crosse until attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to the governor’s office. He worked as Evers’ personal assistant since February of 2019.
The University of Wisconsin supports a multi-state lawsuit filed Monday challenging the Trump administration’s new restrictions on international students, interim system president Tommy Thompson said.
The rule threatens to upend the legal status of thousands of international students in Wisconsin, including roughly 5,800 on the UW-Madison campus.
The University of Wisconsin System has asked the governor for $110 million to fund COVID-19 testing and personal protective equipment, as campuses look to open this fall and the number of coronavirus cases in Wisconsin continues to rise.
Noted: The surge in cases in the county has put in jeopardy the ability of the state’s flagship university to hold in-person classes this fall, the University of Wisconsin Health chief quality and safety officer told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week.
DOA spokeswoman Molly Vidal said the Evers order applies to roughly 35,000 executive branch employees throughout the state but not to those in the Legislature, the court system or the University of Wisconsin System … A similar mask rule was already in place on the UW-Madison campus, where employees are required to wear masks inside all campus buildings unless they are alone in a lab or office.
Gov. Tony Evers has given the University of Wisconsin System the go-ahead to begin complying with new federal rules that bolster the rights of sexual misconduct defendants and narrow the range of sexual misconduct that colleges must investigate.
While many people are scrambling to combat flooding and damage to infrastructure, climate scientists are working to find out what has been causing the latest rise in lake levels. According to Jack Williams, a UW-Madison geography professor and climate-change expert, it’s the billion-dollar question.“We can’t yet definitively say,” Williams said. “What we know is that we are seeing increasing temperatures and variability of rainfall, which are both known to be caused by climate change.”
Widespread criticism has rained down on those who led a night of destructive protestsin Madison on Tuesday night after the arrest of a Black protester.
Many on the left and right were left baffled and upset that rioters toppled two iconic Capitol statues — one of an abolitionist who died during the Civil War and the other a female figure representing the state motto “Forward.”
But one state Senate candidate, Nada Elmikashfi, defended the destruction in no uncertain terms.
Finally, Elmikashfi, a 24-year-old recent University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate and a Muslim immigrant from Sudan, said, “I’m glad my future colleagues in the legislature are getting a good introduction of how nice I’ll be in the Capitol when it comes to their anti-blackness.”
Large majorities of Wisconsinites support the protests against racial injustice and police brutality that have swept across the state in the last month, a new poll from the Marquette University Law School found.
Madison has a long history of protests and clashes with police, dating to student-led demonstrations on the University of Wisconsin campus in the 1960s. About 100,000 people protested in 2011 over anger related to anti-union proposals from then-Gov. Scott Walker. Smaller protests are almost a weekly, and sometimes daily, fixture at the Capitol on a host of issues.
In between strained breaths, German — a freshman from West Bend attending UW-Madison — said he had been running from building to building in an attempt to cast his ballot. “I haven’t missed an election yet,” he said.
Quoted: Robert Yablon, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in election law, called the case “a true outlier.”
“Seventh Circuit cases rarely sit for even one year after oral argument, much less three,” he said by email.
“The judges’ internal deliberations are confidential, so it’s impossible to know for sure what’s happening behind the scenes. The judges may have disagreements that they’re truly struggling to resolve. It’s also conceivable that they’re waiting to see if Wisconsin law changes in ways that moot the appeal or hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court eventually decides another voting-related case that offers further guidance on the relevant legal standards.”
Quoted: “Wisconsin has the most roundabouts of any state on its state highway system,” said Andrea Bill, a traffic safety engineer and researcher at the University of Wisconsin’s Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory.
Noted: According to data presented to the Board of Regents at the beginning of the month, the system anticipates a total loss of more than $100 million through the end of the summer, even taking into account the emergency federal funding they’ve received.
The UW System will receive $20 million of the funding, coming just as UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee announced their plans to reopen for the fall Wednesday.
The money will help offset the cost of technology infrastructure, personal protective equipment and other expenses, UW System President Ray Cross said, but said more help will be needed.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on Monday rejected a scope statement from the University of Wisconsin System for Title IX changes that follow new rules from President Donald Trump’s administration, saying the changes could weaken protections against sexual harassment.
Early Saturday morning, several hundred health care providers and advocates rallied at the state Capitol in Madison. The Student National Medical Association chapter at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health organized the event, called “White Coats 4 Black Lives.”
Quoted: “We found substantial variation across communities in the proportion of people who had these risk factors for severe complications,” said Maureen Smith, a physician and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “That finding suggests that matching community with the right resources needs to take into account that communities are different.”
The information compiled by UW researchers can help identify potential hot spots, said Jessica Bonham-Werling, director of the Neighborhood Health Partnership Program, which prepared the reports, at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. That in turn can help public health and other officials make decisions on where to allocate resources, from testing and contact tracing to community services, such as delivering groceries.
Wisconsin has joined more than a dozen other states seeking to block new federal restrictions over how schools handle sexual assault and harassment allegations, even as University of Wisconsin System officials work to get the ball rolling on implementing the changes.
