The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation added its voice Tuesday to those opposing legislation that would criminalize the use of fetal tissue in biomedical research.
The top Republican in the state Assembly says a controversial proposal that would ban researchers from using most tissue from aborted fetuses likely does not have the votes needed to pass out of his chamber right now.
As students return to campuses across the state, the impact of the GOP-led $250 million two-year budget cut to the University of Wisconsin System — combined with the extension of a tuition freeze — is drawing new attention.
No charges were filed against Jim Villa, the UW System’s vice president of university relations. But sworn statements released this week show investigators sought a search warrant for Villa’s home and office. At the time, he was president of the Commercial Association of Realtors Wisconsin, and he was previously Walker’s chief of staff.
Tenure is a touchy subject right now within the University of Wisconsin System, given the new limitations placed on the concept this summer by the state’s conservative-dominated Legislature. So a survey that arrived in faculty members’ inboxes earlier this week, asking for their opinions on tenure, drew immediate interest and participation. Sure, the survey asked some provocative questions, such as how much of a pay raise faculty members would need to give up tenure in exchange for multiyear contracts. But the survey had the imprimatur of a prestigious research institution, the University of Chicago, and a well-known political scientist was running the project. Plus, some faculty members welcomed the opportunity to vent about the ongoing challenges to tenure.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday that despite that opposition, his goal remains to pass a fetal tissue ban bill this year. “I don’t know what form it will take,” Fitzgerald said. “The tricky thing is probably the research piece.”
University of Wisconsin System leaders are continuing to travel throughout Wisconsin to build stronger connections between businesses, citizens and higher education.
The Republican leader of the Wisconsin Senate said Tuesday that he wants to pass a bill banning the sale of tissue obtained from aborted fetuses, but he doesn’t know yet how it would apply to research.
The Republican leader of the Wisconsin Senate said Tuesday that he wants to pass a bill banning the sale of tissue obtained from aborted fetuses, but he doesn’t know yet how it would apply to research.
Nearly 700 people enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Extension’s flex option program in the past year.
Campuses across the University of Wisconsin System are slashing hundreds of jobs as they cope with a $250 million state budget cut, according to an organization that studies higher education. The Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education is tracking how the UW System’s colleges and universities have cut costs in response to the reduction in state funding.
A UW-Madison faculty committee on Monday unanimously approved new standards for laying off tenured professors, a few months after legislators drew national attention by weakening them in the state budget.
University of Wisconsin’s School of Education is stepping in to reverse ballooning student-teacher ratio and a steep decline of educators in the state.
According to a Wisconsin Budget Project report, nearly 3,000 public school teachers left their jobs within the past nine years in the state. Meanwhile, student recruitment continues to rise, resulting in a student-to-teacher ratio that is growing faster than the national average, said Tamarine Cornelius, an analyst at the Wisconsin Budget Project.
Two top leaders within the University of Wisconsin System are hitting the road this fall to make new connections and strengthen existing relationships between Wisconsin businesses, residents and the public higher education system.
The UW Board of Regents will not yet make a formal statement about a fetal tissue research ban circulating in the Legislature. Members of the board said Friday that they do have concerns about the measure that would make it a felony to do research on fetal tissue derived after January 1, 2015.
Noted: Unlike many states that are angling to be bioscience centers, Wisconsin has a good foundation. Between the University of Wisconsin-Madison — the state’s life sciences research juggernaut — and a consortium of schools in the Milwaukee area, universities here generate a strong talent pool and attract nearly $1 billion of research funding, Ernst & Young’s report says.
Noted: Reilly attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned a degree in political science with a certificate in environmental studies. He was interested in energy policy analysis. But this was in the early 1980s and there were few jobs in the field since the country was in a steep recession.
Noted: [Alex] Hummel says reductions were the result of changes that had been underway before lawmakers cut $250 million from the UW System in the new state budget. But he says eliminating the positions will help the system cope as it absorbs the budget cuts.
Business-focused Q&A with the chancellor of UW Colleges and UW-Extension.
A Wisconsin state Assembly committee has passed a Republican-backed bill opposed by the University of Wisconsin that would prohibit research using tissue obtained from aborted fetuses.
Wednesday’s vote makes the bill available for a vote by the full Assembly as soon as later this month. It’s unclear whether the measure has enough support to pass the Senate, where Republican Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald has not commented on its chances.
Scientists are still trying to figure out how a changing climate affects walleye and other species of fish. Most don’t expect the walleye to be a winner. As global climate change continues delivering warmer temperatures and heavier rains to Minnesota, lakes and their inhabitants will feel it. “One of the places you expect climate change to make a big difference is in changing the mix of species that do best in a lake,” said John Magnuson, director emeritus of the Center for Limnology — the study of inland waters — at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A Wisconsin bill that would limit the research use of fetal tissue from abortions is gaining momentum, over the protest of scientists who say the measure would stifle progress in disease research. The bill, approved today by a committee in the state assembly and expected to win the support of the full assembly this fall, is the first in what many predict will be a series of battles waged at the state level against the distribution and use of fetal tissue.
A Wisconsin bill that would limit the research use of fetal tissue from abortions is gaining momentum, over the protest of scientists who say the measure would stifle progress in disease research. The bill, approved today by a committee in the state assembly and expected to win the support of the full assembly this fall, is the first in what many predict will be a series of battles waged at the state level against the distribution and use of fetal tissue.
Noted: More than 700 University of Wisconsin professors have signed a letter against the legislation, offering up their own ethical argument.
“The bill will do nothing to reduce the number of abortions going on,” said UW Biochemistry Professor Michael Sussman, one of the co-authors of the letter. “The bill, though, will make it illegal for anyone in Wisconsin to utilize the tissue that is available.”
According to the COWS report, “The State of Working Wisconsin 2015,” Wisconsin has the highest unemployment rate for African-Americans in the U.S., at 19.9 percent. That’s 4.6 times as high as the state’s white workers, who have a 4.3 percent unemployment rate, COWS said.
Maintenance will face the chopping block before academics as University of Wisconsin administrators work to make up for a $300 million slash in state funding over the next two years.
Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., visited his alma mater Monday to help a family move into Sellery Hall and reminisce about his days as a Badger.
As a freshman at UW-Madison 44 years ago, Feingold left his room at Sellery Hall to make way for a friend of his roommate. Instead of making the 40-mile trek back to his home of Janesville for the weekend, he and a friend decided to stay in the lounge area, with mixed results.
University of Wisconsin System leaders are set to begin a series of listening sessions around the state.
After a summer of turmoil over budget cuts and tenure protections, chancellors in the University of Wisconsin System now must convince faculty and staff that all is not doom and gloom as a new academic year begins this week.
A defiant UW-Madison Chancellor Becky Blank, who won’t address her faculty in person until Oct. 5, has vowed to do everything possible to fend off competitors who attempt to lure away her best and brightest researchers. Wisconsin’s higher education woes were widely broadcast to a national audience as Gov. Scott Walker launched his presidential bid while he and state lawmakers were cutting education spending.
MADISON — A working group of Republican lawmakers in the Assembly is examining whether the state’s technical college system should be merged with the University of Wisconsin’s two-year campus network, mainly as a way to save money.
Members of a state Senate committee are calling for details to be released about a possible plan to merge the two-year University of Wisconsin campuses and Technical College system.
Expert Mark Stephenson, UW-Madison Director of Dairy Policy Analysis, comments
If you’re from Wisconsin, the Friday night fish fry is a big deal, and the fish you want on your plate is a yellow perch you caught yourself. But for years, the population of yellow perch has been in serious decline. Now on the verge of collapse, the future of this iconic fish is looking grim. Kind of like what is happening right now with the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, under siege from a legislative agenda that has been steadily decimating its numbers while pretending that the loss doesn’t matter and hey, maybe it’s even a good thing! Why do you care, anyways? It’s just stupid fish. There are always more of them.
Editor’s Note: The following is a letter that’s accompanied with the names of 700 University of Wisconsin faculty members who oppose a bill banning the use of fetal tissue and cells.
I’ve been to many places in Wisconsin in my two years as chancellor, but always with a singular purpose: to meet someone, to speak to a group, to visit a company. Vacation is a time for travel with less of a purpose.
Letter co-signed by 678 UW faculty members
MADISON – One of the central issues in an ongoing heated legislative debate is whether modern medical research has moved beyond the need for using tissue from new abortions.
MADISON, Wis. — On the pristinely manicured grounds of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a guiding principle has informed the instruction of hundreds of thousands of students for over a century.
The political reflex to the creepy possibility that people are illegally selling organs and tissue from aborted fetuses is understandable. The rush to pass overly broad legislation that would outlaw and even criminalize legitimate, longstanding medical research is not.
Noted: To close a shortfall in the current budget, Walker and GOP lawmakers cut aid to the University of Wisconsin-System by $250 million in the current two-year budget, a decrease that followed a $300 million cut in the 2011-13 budget.
A proposed merger of Wisconsin’s two-year and technical college systems will be a disaster if state officials don’t carefully study if and how to do it, argues UW-Madison professor Michael Apple. “That is what has happened elsewhere,” Apple, a professor of curriculum, instruction and educational policy, told Joy Cardin on Wisconsin Public Radio Thursday. “There are many hidden effects that appear only in the long term.”
In the last week, a state legislator in Wisconsin suggested that professors defending the use of fetal tissue in research should think about the work of the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Also in the last week, Ben Carson, formerly a professor at Johns Hopkins University known for his path-breaking research and now an anti-abortion candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, found himself questioned on his use of fetal tissue for research in 1992.
The bill, spearheaded by Reps. André Jacque, R-De Pere, and Joel Kleefisch, R-Oconomowoc, and Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, would ban selling, donating and experimenting with fetal body parts resulting from abortions in Wisconsin.
A public fund at UW School of Medicine and Public Health is worth $47 million less than a similar fund at Medical College of Wisconsin, largely because UW Foundation has taken some $40 million out of the fund in extra management fees, critics say.
Noted: For example, at a legislative hearing on banning the practice in Wisconsin, Dr. Robert Golden, dean of the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and the university’s vice chancellor of medical affairs, explained that “There is incredibly important, potentially lifesaving research that goes on in Wisconsin that relies on fetal material received from federally regulated tissue banks.” Banning use of it, he added, “would have a substantial negative impact on our capacity to do the lifesaving research we are doing.”
A key Senate Republican told 27 News Wednesday that she cannot support the current version of an Assembly bill designed to ban the sale and use of aborted fetal tissue, because it would stop major medical research being conducted at UW-Madison.
Sen. Alberta Darling (R-RIver Hills) made those comments just one day after the Assembly Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety held a public hearing on the bill.
Some state lawmakers are reviving an idea to merge the University of Wisconsin System’s 13 two-year colleges with the state’s 16 technical college districts. On Wednesday, a handful of Assembly Republicans will begin considering the proposal to reshape public higher education in Wisconsin. Its goal would be to cut duplication and save tax money.
Gov. Scott Walker isn’t saying whether he supports the current version of a bill in the Legislature that would ban research involving aborted fetal body parts. Walker was asked Wednesday about the measure, which drew opposition from University of Wisconsin and private researchers at a public hearing Tuesday.
Campuses across the University of Wisconsin system are grappling with budget shortfalls after the state’s legislature approved $125 million in cuts to system’s budget earlier this year.
Governor Scott Walker is not offering much support for a bill that would restrict research in the state that uses tissue from aborted fetuses.
MADISON — Republican lawmakers sponsoring a bill to ban research on aborted fetal tissue in Wisconsin — a proposal medical groups oppose — said Tuesday they were working on changes to protect work at the University of Wisconsin that uses existing cell lines.
…Efficient administration of public education in this state that protects or enhances quality, is worth pursuing if it makes sense. So we’re up for a look at what a closer relationship between the Wisconsin Technical College System and UW Colleges and Extension might mean. Already the word merger has been attached to the talks, but there may well be other options.
The ink is barely dry on a new state budget that aims to make the University of Wisconsin System more nimble and efficient, and already another idea to reshape public higher education in Wisconsin is under review by Assembly Republicans.
Wisconsin doesn’t have a single, unified community college system — and many of the educators at the state’s two-year institutions say that’s a good thing. But as a legislative committee considers possibly merging the state’s two separate two-year systems, some politicians are questioning whether a more traditional community college model would work better for the state.
Republicans in the state legislature want to ban research in Wisconsin, using tissue from aborted fetuses, legislation which opponents fear could damage the biomedical industry in the state.
Abortion opponents and medical researchers packed a public hearing Tuesday to testify on a bill banning the sale and use of aborted fetal tissue.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said a bill banning the use of fetal tissue would bring a halt to medical research on campus. The dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, the Wisconsin Medical Society, the Medical College of Wisconsin and a trade association representing biotech companies are all lobbying against the measure.
Wisconsin legislators have begun quietly and unofficially discussing how the state’s 42 public universities and colleges—the 26 UW System campuses and the 16 technical colleges—might be realigned to deal with dwindling state aid. If approved, any shift would be the biggest realignment of higher education since the UW System was stitched together in 1971 by merging state colleges, the Madison and Milwaukee campuses, and two-year centers.
A group of Republican legislators will meet this week to discuss the possibility of merging the Wisconsin Technical College System and the University of Wisconsin Colleges and Extension, lawmakers said Monday.
All transfers of fetal tissue in Wisconsin could be banned, under a bill coming before lawmakers Tuesday that could affect medical research in the state.
