University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin indicated during a Faculty Senate meeting Monday the university would walk back hiring and rethink grant-making if a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding cut is implemented.
Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin and other campus leaders are evaluating different scenarios for how federal funding cuts and policy changes could affect the University of Wisconsin-Madison financially.
College leaders are scrambling to assess the ramifications Trump’s orders would have on their institutions and come up with a long-term strategy to defend higher education, which has long been a political punching bag for Republicans. They are trying to respond in a way that appeases students and professors, who tend to be progressive, without antagonizing the conservatives now in charge of the federal government.
“The chancellor is trying to thread a very, very narrow needle,” said Michael Bernard-Donals, a UW-Madison professor of English and Jewish studies.
University of Wisconsin System President Jay Rothman and UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin emphasized the mission of the Wisconsin Idea and the value of higher education during the Wisconsin Counties Association Legislative Conference Tuesday.
An announcement from the National Institutes of Health earlier this month said the agency would slash support for indirect research costs paid to universities, medical centers and other grant recipients.
The change could leave research institutions like the University of Wisconsin-Madison scrambling for millions of dollars from other sources to support labs, students and staff.
A major cut in federal funding for medical research, announced by the Trump administration this month, would harm efforts at UW-Madison to better treat cancer, diabetes and heart disease, university officials said.
The federal education department abruptly ended a University of Wisconsin-Madison grant that pays for students to train as special education teachers in Milwaukee Public Schools classrooms.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the nation’s top research institutions, are wary of potential cuts to funding under the Trump administration that they warn could slow their work and delay new treatments for cancer and other diseases.
UW-Madison has eyed the demise of the Humanities building for the last decade, when leaders developed the current campus master plan, a wide-ranging road map for new developments and renovations, in 2015.
Evers proposed $856 million in new operational funding for the UW system, more than the $800 million he pledged to the UW Board of Regents last August. His proposed budget also includes $60 million in new state aid for Wisconsin’s technical college system, $10 million of which is meant to support the 16 two-year colleges in investing in artificial intelligence.
Devesh Ranjan will step into his new role on June 16. He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and won the Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award for outstanding achievement in Mechanical Engineering in 2023.
Josette Jaucian has been “Bucky’s mom” — or on the occasion he misbehaves, “Bucky’s unofficial parole officer” — since 2000. She took over leading the Spirit Squad in that year, which consists of not only wrangling the multiple performers who bring the Bucky costume to life, but also overseeing the university’s dance team and cheerleaders, more than 60 students total.
“We really rely on NIH funding,” Jon Audhya, a professor and associate dean at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health said. “That reduction would have a huge negative impact on the institution. The university really couldn’t fill the gap.”
On Monday, higher education groups joined an association of public universities with schools in states that supported Trump in last year’s election to file their own legal challenge that described $65 million in losses for the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a 70 percent reduction in funding for the University of Florida.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said the National Institute of Health (NIH) decision capping research funding might be a “little painful in the short term” but said it would be beneficial in the long-run.
“This executive order raises a lot of issues over who really controls public education,” said Suzanne Eckes, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor whose work focuses on K-12 legal issues and school policy. Public education has historically been a state and school board function, she said.
“Typically, the federal government isn’t saying, ‘You’re going to do this social studies curriculum, and you’re going to use this book, and everybody in the United States is going to learn about slavery or World War I or the American Revolution in this way,'” said Eckes, speaking from her perspective and not as a representative of the University of Wisconsin.
“It basically literally means we are stepping back in time decades, that we are now gonna look at data on CDs, they’re gonna be mailed out across the country instead of stored securely in an online data platform,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies college access and success. “It’s gonna be a huge waste of my time and a huge waste of the department’s time to have to process all of these new applications.”
“Cutting the rate to 15% will destroy science in the United States,” says Jo Handelsman, who runs the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “This change will break our universities, our medical centers and the entire engine for scientific discovery.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison said the decision to cut National Institutes of Health funding, or NIH, will “significantly disrupt vital research activity and delay lifesaving discoveries and cures related to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and much more.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison put out a statement arguing the new indirect cost cap will “significantly disrupt vital research activity and daily life-saving discoveries.” It added that the move will also “have an inevitable impact on student opportunities to engage in research activities.”
Dr. Robert Golden, the dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said indirect costs aren’t just administrative tasks, or “waste,” but the physical structures and equipment needed to do “top tier” research.
“I’ve been at several public institutions, including the NIH early in my career, and never saw waste to a striking degree,” he said. The NIH’s change, Golden said, “will have a profound significant impact on everything,” including utility charges, building out the laboratories where scientific experiments are done and finding cures for patients.
Afederal judge on Monday temporarily blocked a Trump Administration cap on federally funded medical research that UW-Madison said Monday could cost the the university $65 million in already-pledged funds.
In a joint statement sent to members of the UW-Madison community, Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin, Provost Charles L. Isbell, Jr., Vice Chancellor for Medical Affairs Robert N. Golden and Vice Chancellor for Research Dorota A. Grejner-Brzezinska, explained how the indirect costs are essential to the university.
The UW System is asking for roughly $855 million over two years from the state and urged support for that funding during a discussion with members of the Hoan Group, a private group of about 160 business and community members in the Milwaukee and Madison area.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the nation’s top research institutions, says National Institutes of Health funding cuts will “significantly disrupt vital research activity and delay lifesaving discoveries and cures” for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and more.
UW-Madison will experience significant disruptions to lifesaving research under the Trump administration’s new rules for federally funded medical research, officials said Saturday.
University of Wisconsin System President Jay Rothman and UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin emphasized the significant risks of President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal grants and loans at a UW Board of Regents meeting Thursday.
UW-Madison Professor of Economics Kim Ruhl was appointed as a member of President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), the White House announced Tuesday.
Curt and Sue Culver Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin Kim Ruhl has been appointed as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers by the Trump administration, according to a UW press release. Ruhl currently serves as the co-director for the Center of Research on the Wisconsin Economy and is an expert in international economics.
There’s a significant problem with the federal government’s efforts to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion in research, UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said Monday: the federal government has not defined what exactly it means.
Provost Charles Isbell, who oversees all academic operations, and Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration Rob Cramer offered guidance in a letter to UW-Madison vice chancellors and college deans.
The pause in federal funding is “significant and concerning” for UW-Madison, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin and other leaders said in a statement.
UW-Madison is encouraging most federally funded research to continue, outside of a “small number” of unspecified stop-work orders aimed at a handful of researchers, the statement said.
UW-Madison, along with hundreds of other universities, has research contracts with the federal government, especially in the areas of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense. UW-Madison health researchers get awards from its agencies, including the medical research powerhouse National Institutes of Health.
UW-Madison has demoted its director of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement after an internal review of the department’s finances, sought by Republican legislators, uncovered unspecified problems.
Work can begin on a new engineering building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after the State Building Commission reversed course Friday and approved the long-awaited project.
Plans to build UW-Madison’s new $419 million engineering building got back on track Friday after the state’s Building Commission — which initially denied UW system’s request to reallocate millions in state funds for the Madison project and others — signed off on the transfers.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, known for helping UW-Madison commercialize discoveries such as vitamin D enrichment, a blood thinning drug and stem cells, may seem like a solid presence on campus whose existence was never in doubt.
But WARF, the nation’s first university technology transfer office, had to fight for survival from its founding in 1925 until at least 1980, when the federal Bayh-Dole Act said universities could retain patent rights on federally funded research.
’I feel like I got the best of both worlds’: UW-Madison launches tuition program for Native American students.
The future of UW-Madison’s new engineering building, as well as other Universities of Wisconsin building priorities, is again in limbo after Republicans on the state’s Building Commission refused to reallocate nearly $70 million in state funds.
UW-Madison is adding a business partnership floor to its upcoming engineering building, aimed at opening a direct pipeline between students and the kinds of businesses that may one day employee them.
“Working in a restaurant is, I think, some of the best ways to learn some really cool life traits,” Jacobs said. “Whether it’s just about organization, cleanliness, empathy, or having to deal with people that sometimes you don’t want to deal with. It’s kind of a great way to learn.”
The Universities of Wisconsin are set to fare better financially than earlier projected, largely due to sizeable increases in tuition at a handful of schools and unaccounted-for donation dollars for UW-Madison, the system said Monday.
The privately funded program, known as the Wisconsin Tribal Educational Promise, covers the full cost of attendance for in-state students who are enrolled members of one of the 11 federally recognized tribes in Wisconsin.
The University of Wisconsin marching band already was in game mode despite more than 10 hours remaining before kickoff of the Badgers’ football game against No. 1 Oregon.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison rose in national rankings on federal research activity after slipping for nearly a decade.
The university announced the ranking change Monday alongside an announcement that it had spent a record-breaking $1.7 billion on research for fiscal year 2023, a 13.7% increase over the prior year. UW-Madison’s growth outpaced the national increase of 11.2% spent on university research and development, bringing the national amount spent to $108.8 billion.
After 24 hours of programming and coding — fueled by plenty of snacks and energy drinks — the organizers of an annual hackathon event at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced which of the 55 projects would move on as finalists.
The committee studying the future of the Universities of Wisconsin wants the state Legislature to explore spinning off the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The state Legislature should consider splitting UW-Madison from the rest of the Universities of Wisconsin system, according to a panel of legislators and others making a list of recommendations about the future of the UW system.
A committee studying the future of the state’s public university system recommended the Legislature explore spinning off the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the state’s public university system.
Universities of Wisconsin campuses have 1,177 more students this fall than previously projected, according to enrollment data released Tuesday.
“Top Chef: Wisconsin” finalist Dan Jacobs was chosen as the keynote speaker for UW-Madison’s Dec. 15 winter commencement.
Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, a librarian at UW-Madison’s Ebling Library for Health Services, has culled nearly 30,000 such ads from 1923 to 2007 into the digital Health Advertisements Database from Ebling Sources, or HADES. Former colleague Amanda Lambert and several students helped her compile the database, which continues to grow.
Ateam of UW-Madison current and former biomedical engineering students sliced through the competition at a national collegiate inventors competition to win first-place with their combined forceps-scalpel device.
In a survey sent out last spring, the College for Rural Wisconsin found that 82% of rural-identifying UW-Madison students felt somewhat or unprepared for college, director Jennifer Blazek said.
Soon after police officers removed protesters’ tents and withdrew from the scene on May 1, a pro-Palestinian encampment reemerged on Library Mall, forcing University of Wisconsin-Madison leaders to contemplate their next step.
There’s a lot of public discussion about how much state taxpayer money the University of Wisconsin System should receive.
There’s next to none about how that money is divvied up between the universities.
A patient should never come out of the operating room with more pain than they went in with.
That’s the thinking behind a group of UW-Madison engineers whose invention aims to make surgical incisions easier and reduce the incidence of accidental cuts from free-floating scalpels.
One of the Dairyland’s key industries has a shortage of people — and UW-Madison is stepping in to help.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison “Sustain-A-Bash” campus tour highlighted environmentally focused projects across campus.
