University of Wisconsin System President Jay Rothman continued to push for an increase in state funding, defending the system’s 2025-27 biennial budget request at a committee hearing Thursday while impending federal funding cuts cast a long shadow over higher education in Wisconsin.
In a column published in the Wisconsin State Journal, Mnookin addressed the recent visa terminations of UW-Madison students and alumni. As of Tuesday, the university is aware of the termination of 27 total records, which includes 15 current students and 12 alumni.
UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin discussed the many issues facing the university, including concerns over federal investigations, funding cuts, and international student visa revocations, as well as the 2025 state budget cycle.
UW-Madison officials’ sense of relief Thursday was almost palpable at the official groundbreaking for the new engineering building.
More than 250 people gathered on campus to rally against the Trump administration and demand action from UW-Madison higher-ups. The local unions representing university faculty, academic staff, and graduate students organized the demonstration, joining countless others today across the country as part of the National Day of Action for Higher Ed.
Federal funding cuts and national culture war politics cast a long shadow over a state legislative committee hearing Thursday as Wisconsin’s higher education leaders asked lawmakers for additional investments in the next state budget — warning that disinvestment by the state could damage public universities’, private nonprofit schools’ and technical colleges’ ability to serve students and the state.
Campus leaders and Gov. Tony Evers broke ground Thursday on a new engineering building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after long delays and a protracted political funding battle.
The report cards, compiled by Manuel Teodoro, a professor at UW-Madison’s La Follete School of Public Affairs, evaluated 572 water utilities using data from 2022 and 2023 provided by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and Teodoro’s research team.
When former University of Wisconsin-Madison director of tribal relations Aaron Bird Bear was hired in 2003, he was shocked at the lack of representation and resources for Native American students. He saw Native American students’ need for support.
The Universities of Wisconsin is set to pay a consulting firm $395,000 after a diversity leader at the system’s flagship campus was demoted over financial concerns.
“January and February were just a disaster,” Ron Kean, a poultry specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension, said in an interview last month. “We’ve been pretty fortunate here in Wisconsin, knock on wood.”
This is less privacy than the legal system typically affords young people, confirmed Cary Bloodworth, who directs a family law clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Bloodworth said both child welfare and juvenile courts tend to keep records confidential for a number of reasons, including that what happens in a person’s youth will follow them for a lifetime.
“I certainly think having a higher level of privacy for kids is a good thing,” Bloodworth said, adding that she thinks the publication requirement is unnecessary for people of any age.
At Wisconsin Sea Grant, the program’s director Christy Remucal said NOAA funding is the largest source of revenue for the program that’s operated for 57 years on state and federal support. Federal funding makes up 32 percent of the program’s funding, or $2.4 million. Wisconsin Sea Grant and its 30 staff support conservation of Great Lakes resources and communities through research, education and outreach.
“We have staff that are working directly with communities and really making a difference on so many different things whether it’s flooding or clean marinas or invasive species,” Remucal said.
A group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Realta Fusion, a Madison-based nuclear startup, have developed a fusion device in Stoughton that creates the same kind of reaction that fuels the sun and stars. The process is much different than fission, the nuclear reaction that powers current nuclear reactors and the atomic bomb.
Volker Radeloff, a forest and wildlife ecology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the interface of wild land and urban areas accounts for roughly 10 percent of the state that’s potentially at risk of wildfires.
At an April 1 hearing, in a sign of what the most contentious issues will be in this year’s state budget, the Republican-controlled budget committee only heard from two state agencies: Corrections and the Universities of Wisconsin system.
The University of Wisconsin will implement fiscal controls for the remainder of the 2025 fiscal year including hiring reviews, reductions in non-essential spending and the development of 5% and 10% budget reduction scenarios for fund 101 — a fund dedicated to state tax, federal indirect cost and tuition allocation.
Republican-ordered audits released Friday found that Wisconsin state agencies and the University of Wisconsin system have failed to track the millions of dollars they spent on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, making it difficult to fully assess the initiatives.
A highly anticipated state audit found University of Wisconsin System campuses do not track how much they spend on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, or whether the millions spent on these initiatives pay off.
State agencies and the University of Wisconsin System failed to adequately track millions of dollars spent on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, according to audits released Friday, fueling ongoing Republican efforts to dismantle such programs.
The University of Wisconsin system and several state agencies failed to specifically track spending on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Wisconsin’s Legislative Audit Bureau (WLAB) recently revealed.
Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former board member for the ICF, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that counting cranes might seem like a simple task, but it’s the only way to get a snapshot of the population around the state.
“Conservation is really based on pretty small numbers of beings in the world, so you actually have to find them and see them,” he said. “And that really requires people to be on the ground.”
The report was commissioned by the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) and produced by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
University of Wisconsin-Madison students contributed to a record-high turnout for uncontested local candidates in the spring 2025 elections, boosted by the marquee state Supreme Court race.
Co-authored by Kateri Klingele Pinell is a clinical mental health professional and co-founder of the Wisconsin Student Parents Organization at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Among wards containing University of Wisconsin-Madison residence halls, Crawford received roughly 92.3% of the vote, outperforming Harris in wards containing university residence halls by nearly 15 percentage points, according to an independent analysis from The Daily Cardinal.
Overall, it may look like Schimel and his conservative allies aired more crime-related TV ads than did Crawford, said University of Wisconsin political science professor Barry Burden. But Burden noted that most of the spending on the left went through Crawford’s campaign. On the right, many conservative groups spent their own cash instead of funneling it through the state Republican Party to Schimel.
“Campaigns who spend directly are guaranteed by law to get lower ad rates, so even equal spending by the two sides means that Schimel was able to purchase less because more of his support came from outside groups,” Burden said.
Wisconsin author Dean Robbins’ new book “Wisconsin Idols: 100 Heroes Who Changed the State, the World, and Me” is a collection of essays about notable people who have a connection to Wisconsin, either because they lived in Wisconsin or had a significant experience while passing through.
The way these protests affected and defined Madison proves yet again that the University of Wisconsin–Madison is the most important thing about the city. Of the demonstrations listed in this article, only two — against Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 assault on public employees in 2011 and for Black lives in 2020 — weren’t driven by UW–Madison students.
Somewhere on UW-Madison’s cramped campus, university leaders hope to find space for a residence hall with up to 2,000 new beds, the first new dorm in more than a decade.
UW-Madison may seek a tuition increase if the state Legislature does not fully fund its 2025-2027 budget request, a university finance official said at an April 3 university budget committee meeting.
Protesters marched from the Capitol to Bascom Hill on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, filling State Street joining the two landmarks.
Co-authored by J. Michael Collins, a professor in the School of Human Ecology and the La Follette School of Public Affairs, and Tyler Q. Welch is a PhD candidate in the Wisconsin School of Business’ Risk and Insurance department, both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Democrats are now a party of higher income and more educated voters, rather than lower income and less educated voters, and that makes them more reliable voters,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center.
A dangerous bird flu, in other words, was suddenly circulating in mammals — mammals with which people have ongoing, extensive contact. “Holy cow,” says Thomas Friedrich, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “This is how pandemics start.”
An agreement approved by the Joint Committee on Employment Relations, the Wisconsin State Legislature and Gov. Tony Evers increases the University of Wisconsin Building Trades employee wages, according to a press release from UW.
Martin Ventura, the Urban Agriculture and Community Gardens Specialist at UW-Madison Extension, manages and maintains farms in the Milwaukee area, some of which are farmed by immigrants, particularly in the Hmong community. UW-Extension, Ventura said, had a former partnership with the Hmong American Friendship Association to establish a Hmong heritage garden plot, allowing local communities to farm.
A Middleton native, Karofsky has a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and master’s and law degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1992, she started as a Dane County assistant district attorney and was later promoted to deputy district attorney. She also has worked as director of human resources and general counsel for the National Conference of Bar Examiners and as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The heads of the Universities of Wisconsin system and the state Department of Corrections faced critical questions from Republican state lawmakers Tuesday over requests for new state funding.
“Although Green Bay being a city, you know, of course has a substantial number of Democratic leaning votes as well,”said Howard Schweber, a professor emeritus of political science and affiliate faculty member at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “Counties like Brown County and other northern counties, which are traditionally conservative strongholds in Wisconsin depend heavily on manufacturing and agriculture, and those are areas that are being slammed by the tariffs.”
UW-Madison administrators have long wanted to tear down the Humanities Building for a host of reasons. The facility has faced problems since before it opened in the late 1960s, including costly construction, design cuts and poor acoustics.
The role of Musk — who is overseeing a controversial cost-cutting operation for Trump — made the race in part a referendum on him, said Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center.
“He is such an unusual person and he has this outsize influence in what is going on,” Burden said of Musk, who is listed by Forbes as the world’s richest person. “So that concern fit the narrative of what he was doing in the Wisconsin race, throwing his weight around and using his wealth. It was just a step too far for a lot of voters.”
Judge Crawford lives in Madison, the state’s capital. She is married to Shawn Peters, an academic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and they have two children.
Learn to appreciate insects, with guidance from local artist Jennifer Angus, entomologist P.J. Liesch, bumblebee expert Judy Cardin and more.
Leaders of the Universities of Wisconsin and the state Department of Corrections (DOC) defended Gov. Tony Evers’ budget requests to lawmakers on the Joint Finance Committee during a meeting Tuesday.
In 2023’s state Supreme Court election, Wisconsin’s young voters voted at a higher rate than ever recorded, Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the Washington Examiner.
“I’m not shocked that we might see that record broken again,” he added. “It’s a reflection of a lot of things – the nationalization of the election, the enormous flow of money, the enormous number of ads, the genuine stakes. I do like to think that there is also something about the Wisconsin culture of civic engagement and getting out there and having your voice heard.”
“The (Republican) Party is behaving as if it has a mandate for really dramatic action,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center.
“A loss by conservatives in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race would be a big symbolic setback,” he continued. “It would suggest the public is tired of that and wants the administration to stop and go in a different direction.”
“It looks like Elon Musk’s intervention probably backfired,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center. “It really provided fuel for Crawford’s campaign and a kind of focal point for people who were upset by what’s happening in Washington.”
“We could see this kind of back-and-forth at fairly short terms — a year, two years, three years in between them — in a way that deprives the court of one of the key things that is supposed to separate law from politics, which is stability,” said Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The court’s upcoming decisions on abortion, union rights and election laws have helped make this a blockbuster election,” says Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin political scientist. Another matter at stake could be the shape of the state’s congressional delegation, which is currently filled by six Republicans and two Democrats. If Crawford wins, a round of redistricting for the congressional map could follow the one already implemented for state legislative seats.
The level of intensity in the state feels about like a presidential election, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s now become kind of a national referendum, or at least a way to measure the temperature of the electorate a couple of months into the Trump administration. The fact that the court is up for grabs ideologically and is weighing in on these important issues and money is so easily spread into these campaigns has really been the kind of magic stew that has put these elections on the map for everyone.”
Allison Prasch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specialises in US political rhetoric, said this race was a strategy test for both sides.
“We know that Wisconsin, up to the very end of the presidential cycle, was very close,” she said, noting that some cities such as Milwaukee and Madison unexpectedly swung towards Trump and helped deliver him the state’s electoral college votes. “What happens in Wisconsin [now] is going to tell us a lot about what’s going to happen, not just in 2026 but in 2028.”
Manny Teodoro, a professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the project’s founder and lead researcher. He told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that this kind of comprehensive report is only possible in Wisconsin because of the “depth and quality of data we have on water system performance.”
“You could not do this in any other state,” he said.
Emeritus Professor of Public Affairs and Applied Economics at University of Wisconsin Madison, Andrew Reschovsky, said low income students, students with disabilities and rural school districts can impact how much each student costs, when calculating state aid allocated per pupil. He added that the formula used to determine state aid amounts in Wisconsin does not take these factors into account.
“Those sort of factors are not part of our what are called general aid formula in Wisconsin. In most other states, they are integral to the main funding formula,” said Reschovsky.
You should ideally grow a variety of nectar-producing flowers, with feeders to supplement when blooms are in short supply, according to the UW-Madison Department of Horticulture.
At University of Wisconsin-Madison, radiology and biomedical engineering professor Pallavi Tiwari is leading a team of researchers to make cancer diagnoses more comprehensive with the help of AI. Tiwari is also one of the leaders for the school’s RISE-AI and RISE-THRIVE initiatives focused on AI in advancing health outcomes.
“It’s really the first major election since Trump and Republicans took office in January,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center.
“It’s become kind of a referendum on the Trump administration, and what Elon Musk is doing as part of that, and Musk has amplified that by getting involved in Wisconsin,” explained Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If there was any doubt about whether this election had a connection to national politics, Trump and Musk have made that connection for voters.”
However, the same court declined a request to redraw boundaries for the Wisconsin congressional map. Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he believes the issue is being “overblown” in this year’s race.
“I think it’s possible, but I wouldn’t say that it’s likely,” Burden said of congressional redistricting. “And it’s not the most important thing determining what happens in those midterm elections.”
In a social media post Friday morning, Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Musk appears to be crossing a line.
“Earlier payments were for registering, but this is for voting,” Burden said. “A clear violation of the state’s election bribery law.”
