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.”
When it comes to voting in Wisconsin, the rules for college students can be a bit complicated.
For one thing, voters in Wisconsin are required to provide an acceptable form of photo identification, and that could include a student ID. But not every student ID is allowed.
Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center, said he believes Schimel has made Trump the centerpiece of his campaign because Republicans have fared poorly in Wisconsin when Trump is not on the ballot.
“Schimel hitching himself to the Trump train looks like the tactic they believe is necessary to reel in less attentive voters who take note of Trump, even if it comes with the risk of blowback,” Burden said.
Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, credited the state Democratic Party for the large number of out-of-state residents donating to Crawford.
“The Democratic Party of Wisconsin established a national profile over the past five years and has attracted contributions from a network of progressive donors all over the country,” Burden said. “Touting Crawford’s campaign has definitely brought contributions her way.”
Another good resource for gardeners is the University of Wisconsin Extension. The scientists and specialists experience the same gardening challenges when it comes to weather conditions and pest management and can provide geographically specific advice to plant what food crops.
“Earlier payments were for registering but this is for voting. A clear violation of the state’s election bribery law,” Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin Madison, wrote in a post on X.
Bryna Godar, staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said Musk changing the terms of his offer “puts the payments and attendance at the rally back into a gray area under Wisconsin law.”
“The question is whether the offers are ‘in order to induce’ people to vote or go to the polls, and there can be arguments made on either side of that question,” she said in an email.
Robert Yablon, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that the huge spending in the race was only possible because of the state’s loose campaign finance laws. People in Wisconsin can donate unlimited amounts to state parties, which can pass that money on to candidates. There are also very weak anti-coordination laws between independent expenditure groups and campaigns.
“You would hope that in a judicial race, you might have different candidates – maybe they have different ideologies or philosophies, different ways that they talk about the law, but it’s shared ground that they believe that the judiciary ought to operate independently from other branches, ought to check those branches,” he said.
“That ought to energize Democrats that there’s still some life left in the party, despite them being kind of at sea in Washington,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Chuck Nicholson, an associate professor of animal and dairy sciences and agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shared insights on the potential ramifications.
His research, recently featured in Time magazine, highlights the challenges posed by the back-and-forth nature of tariffs on the economy.
Steven Deller, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called Canada’s billboard campaign “pretty unusual.”
“I can’t think of a single time that another government has taken a very proactive kind of marketing campaign like this,” Deller said.
“I think it’s extreme nervousness about how these tariffs will disrupt trade,” he added.
Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, credited the state Democratic Party for the large number of out-of-state residents donating to Crawford.
“The Democratic Party of Wisconsin established a national profile over the past five years and has attracted contributions from a network of progressive donors all over the country,” Burden said. “Touting Crawford’s campaign has definitely brought contributions her way.”
The State Building Commission has deadlocked on recommendations for new capital spending in the upcoming budget Tuesday, ceding its authority once again to the Legislature’s Republican-controlled budget committee.
“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.
“I like to always say that we know less than what we don’t know,” said Gavin Dehnert from Wisconsin Sea Grant and University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That’s partially due to the fact that the PFAS have really hit the scientific radar in the last seven [or so] years.”
In the only social science work on the issue in Wisconsin, a 2023 study by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center found 47.6% of its panel of state residents opposed crane hunting while 35% were neutral and 17.6% supported it.
“We thought this was a one-off: one bird to one cow, and we wouldn’t see that again,” says Peter Halfmann, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Influenza Research Institute.
Yet the more severe human cases are concurrent with the spread of a recently mutated, potentially more dangerous version of the virus called the D1.1 genotype. D1.1. is now circulating among wild birds and poultry, and it has spilled over into dairy cows at least twice in 2025, according milk testing data from the Agriculture Department. With D1.1, Halfmann explains that the threshold for cross-species transfer is “much lower than we previously thought.”
The vast majority of raw milk cheese should be safe after the 60-day aging window, according to Keith Poulsen, DVM, PhD, a clinical associate professor of medical sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.
“We have a lot of history and data to back that up,” Poulsen told Verywell in an email. “Unfortunately, the data from Cornell suggests that if raw milk cheeses were made on an affected farm, they would not be recommended for consumption.”
Match Day — the long-awaited moment when medical students nationwide learn where they’ll begin their residencies — arrived Friday at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
For Samantha Bush, it wasn’t just about where she’d spend the next few years of her training, it was about continuing a mission she started years ago.
While the dollar figures have become eye-popping, electing one judge to a 10-year term on a seven-member court can have a greater influence on a range of policy issues than electing a single lawmaker to a larger legislative body for a shorter term, said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“So maybe it’s surprising it took this long for the money and the parties and the ideological groups to find these races, but now it seems impossible to unwind,” Burden said.
Public and private K-12 schools would have to organize all athletic teams, including in club sports such as kickball, by male or female sexes and prohibit transgender girls from participating in female sports, under one of the bills, Assembly Bill 100. Another, AB102, would make the same requirements of public university and technical college sports and athletic teams.
The Universities of Wisconsin System requested a variety of projects when the State Building Commission was considering allocation of its funds, according to the official State Building Commission’s agenda and requests statement. These included new electrical systems, demolition and replacement of old or outdated buildings along with fixing and adding parking lots around campus, according to the agenda and requests statement.
St. Norbert College is the latest Wisconsin campus to face financial challenges in the wake of declining enrollments.
Gov. Tony Evers visited the University of Wisconsin-Madison Thursday, touring Chadbourne Residence Hall and the Mosse Humanities Building to hear student concerns about the building and to highlight his 2025-27 Executive and Capital Budget investments.
UW-Madison School of Education professor Suzanne Eckes discusses the Trump administration reducing U.S. Department of Education staffing by nearly half and a multi-state lawsuit filed in response.
Wisconsin farmer Andy Diercks sits on a red Memorial Union Terrace chair in the middle of a farm field, holding a potato in his left hand. “It’s amazing all the work that goes into growing this little guy,” he says to Amanda Gevens, UW-Madison chair of plant pathology, who sits across from him. “The research you’ve done over the past decades is critical to grow a good quality crop.”
Closures are common after mergers, and a particularly sticky problem in more rural communities, which have fewer people and thus make less financial sense for profit-driven organizations, said Peter Carstensen, a professor emeritus in the UW-Madison Law School who focuses on competition policy. When competitors merge, they look for areas to reduce cost.
“It almost always means eliminating some overlapping activities,” he said.
Committee members quizzed the leaders of several state agencies — including the Department of Public Instruction, the Department of Administration and the Department of Health Services — as well as the University of Wisconsin and several private companies.
With a video camera and a $3,000 budget crowdsourced on Kickstarter, he visited two campuses that were in the process of shutting down last summer: UW-Milwaukee at Washington County, which was holding its final classes, and UW-Platteville Richland, where UW was vacating the campus after local officials spent a year fighting to keep it open.
The cicadas will likely be most active in areas ranging from southern Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and parts of western North Carolina, according to P.J. Liesch, director of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab. However, people can expect to spot them as far east as Boston and as far west as southern Indiana, Liesch said.
“Based on historical records, we know there’s going to be a little bit of activity in a few counties in Indiana,” he added. “Those would be about the closest to us up in Wisconsin.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison mass communications professor Michael Wagner said the state’s rule about justices making their own decisions about when to recuse themselves from cases makes the election outcome that much more consequential.
“It’s in a presidential swing state, it’s on a swing court,” said Wagner, “and the cases that are going to come before the court are going to be cases where the donors in the election, most notably Elon Musk, have a clear interest and a clear path they want the winning judge to take.”
The State Democracy Research Initiative and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Election Research Center hosted an expert panel on Friday to explore funding, impact and the legal context of the upcoming Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
The committee heard testimony from agencies with employees who telework, including the Department of Public Instruction and the Department of Safety and Professional Services, in addition to the University of Wisconsin System and private-sector companies.
“There’s still a little uncertainty about that, and so to be voting on it (in April) could be additionally confusing to voters,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said.
Evers has broken records for vetoing Republican-sponsored bills, making it highly unlikely he would go along with anything significant the GOAT committee may recommend.
Still, as a committee of the Legislature, it was able to solicit testimony Tuesday from numerous agency heads in Evers’ administration at its first meeting Tuesday. University of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman and Bob Atwell, the founder of Nicolet National Bank, also testified.
Gov. Tony Evers announced the 2025-27 Capital Budget, proposing investments of $4.1 billion directed towards renovating aging infrastructure within the University of Wisconsin System.
Gov. Tony Evers is recommending the state take a wrecking ball to numerous aging state facilities, including the Green Bay Correctional Institution and UW-Madison’s Mosse Humanities building, as part of his $4.1 billion capital spending plan.
University of Wisconsin Law School professor Zoe Engberg explains why campaigns for state Supreme Court release attack ads that focus primarily on crime and sentencing decisions of their opponents.
Donna Friedsam is a researcher emerita who has been studying health care policy and reform for decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Friedsam told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that changes at the federal level could have significant ripple effects at home.
“Many people who are on Medicare, who are low-income, also duly rely on Medicaid to cover things that Medicare does not cover,” Friedsam said. “So, Medicaid is actually quite a wide-ranging program and reaches over a million Wisconsin residents who rely on it.”
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers wants to spend about $4 billion on state building upgrades across Wisconsin under a plan released Monday.
If approved, about $1.6 billion would go to the University of Wisconsin System for brick-and-mortar building projects. Other big-ticket items include $634 million for the Department of Corrections, $137 million for upgrades to veteran homes and $40 million to restore the state Capitol building.
Gov. Tony Evers unveiled a capital budget Monday that calls for $4.1 billion in new building projects around the state, with the largest chunk going toward Universities of Wisconsin campuses.
