University of Wisconsin-Madison
Since 1892 dailycardinal.com
Thursday, February 13, 2025
l
BE MY VALENTINE?
GO READ NERD!
The Madison Shakespeare Company highlights eight of Shakespeare’s most beloved love scenes.
Madison’s beloved Paul’s Bookstore is closing its doors after 70 years.
+ ARTS, PAGE 8
+ OPINION, PAGE 6
NIH funding cut blocked by judge, but worries remain for future of research By Gavin Escott CAMPUS NEWS EDITOR
A federal judge temporarily blocked a National Institutes of Health (NIH) decision stripping billions of dollars from universities, including $65 million from the University of Wisconsin-Madison hours after it took effect. The lawsuit, which blocks the move in the 22 states, including Wisconsin that filed, sued President Donald Trump’s administration for making an “arbitrary and capricious” change to agreed-on funding, warning the decision would devastate research and grind “cutting edge work” to a halt. At the center of the conflict are indirect costs, also known as Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs, which fund everything from shared scientific equipment to lab and facility maintenance and construction. NIH announced Friday it would cap indirect cost rates to 15% for all new and current grants — a sharp reduction from the current average rate between 27% and 28%. Many major research institutions, including UW-Madison, whose rate ranges from 26% to 55.5%, have a higher percentage, and the university said the cap would “significantly disrupt” its ongoing and future research. “[The] proposed cut in F&A costs would be disastrous for science and universities,” Wisconsin Institute for Discovery Director Jo Handelsman told The Daily Cardinal. “One thing that the people at [The Department of
Government Efficiency] who dictated this change don’t seem to understand is that F&A are REAL RESEARCH COSTS [sic].” Since re-assuming office three weeks ago, Trump has slashed budgets and laid off employees, criticizing perceived “wasteful spending.” NIH said their decision was intended to ensure “as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead,” though researchers pushed back, highlighting the necessity of these expenses to their work. “The entire scientific research enterprise is dependent on indirect costs,” Madeline Topf, a microbiology Ph.D student and co-president of the UW-Madison Teaching Assistant Association (TAA), told the Cardinal. “[It funds] the essential environment to do cutting-edge research safely — facilities with proper ventilation and autoclaves to sterilize beakers and tools, support staff salaries who make sure we properly dispose of harmful waste and fix broken equipment — [these costs] keep the lights on at UW-Madison.” In a statement Monday morning, UW-Madison leaders underlined these indirect costs are not optional but instead an “absolutely fundamental part of innovative science.” NIH funding is UW-Madison’s largest source of federal support, and a reduction in UW-Madison’s indirect cost rate would eliminate $65 million in funding for 2025,
with a comparable amount for each following year, according to the lawsuit. UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin told the Board of Regents on Friday the university spends $18.8 million in federal research expenditures weekly. UW-Madison is the United States’ sixth largest spender on research — spending $1.7 billion in 2023 — and funds a vast umbrella of projects and research, which Mnookin underlined is central to the university’s purpose of “innovating for the public good.” In the release, UW-Madison touted past innovations funded by NIH grants and pointed to current work being done, such as cell therapies to treat cancer and heart attacks and a NIH-funded project seeking to develop treatments and a cure for Alzheimers. The loss of NIH funds would “immediately impact” the university’s ability to conduct this research, UW-Madison said, adding that the NIH cap would imperil its ability to train the next generation of scientists and healthcare professionals and could delay or prevent the discovery of life saving treatments and cures. “NIH’s proposed change would pose tremendous harm to our educational institutions and, even more critically, to the public who benefit from our research” UW-Madison said, noting they provided information to the lawsuit.
NIH Funding is irreplaceable, leaders say The lawsuit notes indirect cost rates — which vary between universities — are carefully negotiated with the federal government based on each institution’s unique needs, and the NIH lacks the authority to unilaterally deviate from negotiated rates. In several appropriations bills, including one from 2024, Congress specifically prohibited NIH from changing how indirect costs are determined. Trump had previously attempted to reduce the indirect cost rate for research institutions to a categorical 10% in 2017. Handelsman said the cap is “illegal,” though she said Congress could change the rules on indirect cost rates in the next budget. Indirect costs are currently not taken out of grants, which is forbidden by federal law. These costs — building maintenance, security, and electricity — are typically paid for with the indirect cost rate, which is in addition to the grants. “Universities don’t have the resources to pay these costs, so they will have to start refusing federal funding for research if the 15% cap on F&A goes into effect,” Handelsman said. She said no other source exists to fill in the costs. UW-Madison did not respond to a request for comment on how they planned to respond if the cap is implemented.
UW-Oshkosh selling DEI building, moves to new location By Ella Gorodetzky SENIOR STAFF WRITER
The University of WisconsinOshkosh Campus Center for Equity and Diversity building is on the market to be sold as of late Jan. following budget issues at UW-Oshkosh and in the UW System, as well as Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). The Center for Student Success and Belonging staff are set to move to the Reeve Memorial Union, which is closer to central campus and would bring more students in based on location, according to UW-Oshkosh Chief of Staff Alex Hummel. Originally constructed in 1968 as the Newman Center by the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay, the UW-Oshkosh Foundation purchased the building in 2004, and the university purchased it two years later. Most recently, the building housed the Campus Center for Equity and Diversity. The move accompanies UW-Oshkosh’s recent financial restructuring. “There’s been a pretty significant budget urgency for the last few years, so we have been downsizing our footprint and trying to focus on more properties closer to the river, kind of the central area of campus,”
UW-Oshkosh public administration professor Michael Ford told The Daily Cardinal. The rebrand of the program also reflects the 2023 Wisconsin Legislature’s decision to restructure DEI in the UW System, which encouraged universities to cut back on DEI positions. However, according to Ford, the Center for Student Success and Belonging is more than just a rebranding. The UW System Board of Regents also made a deal with the Legislature in which UW-Madison agreed to restructure and freeze hiring on DEI positions in exchange for money for employee pay raises and a new engineering building in December 2023. The UW System has seen declining enrollment over the past few years, and, in combination with the undergraduate tuition freeze in effect since 2013, UW-Oshkosh has had to make strategic financial decisions. This has coincided with a rise in admissions selectivity, which can often crowd out lowincome students without access to resources that make them appealing to admissions officers. “I do think we’re just in a difficult transition period where we have a university infrastructure that’s built to serve a model that might have worked 20 or 30 years
ago but doesn’t seem to be the direction we’re going,” Ford added. The Board of Regents is focusing new efforts with the awareness that the UW System is a major proponent of Wisconsin’s economy. They created several new majors at multiple universities, including an AI major at UW-Eau Claire and a dual-university program between UW-Lacrosse and UW-Platteville which will allow students to receive degrees in physics and engineering. These decisions are in effort to respond to Wisconsin’s workforce needs and to give UW System students a competitive advantage. Several regents referenced the UW System’s “current [financial] situation” at a meeting Feb. 6 in regard to making sure the Education Committee is working to limit costs in order to preserve the “financial viability” of UW System. The university’s financial reorganization also allowed space for the Center for Student Success and Belonging to move into its new location in the Union, according to Byron Adams, executive director of the Center for Student Success and Belonging and university diversity officer. “The space inside the Student Union opened up based on some
COURTESY OF UW-OSHKOSH
reorganization that we’ve done more broadly across the university, and we saw that as an opportunity to literally and figuratively centralize these services,” Adams said. The old building, located at 717 West Irving Ave., is far from the university’s campus center. The move to the Union was designed to bring more students into the Center for Student Success and Belonging, Hummel said. “[The old location] was not a part of student traffic patterns, and just generally speaking, had a sense and feeling that it was a little bit off to the side,” Hummel said. “That made it harder for our teams and our staff to engage with the students that they were serving to ensure their success.”
As a part of the student union, Adams hopes the new location will bring more students in. “It’s really location, location, location,” Adams said. “Having space in that facility specifically allows us to just do a wide variety of activities and events and outreach efforts that we weren’t able to do prior to being in the Student Union.” The property listing states that UW-Oshkosh is focusing future investments more toward the river, at the center of campus, and the building “does not meet the needs of the university.” Continue reading at dailycardinal.com
“…the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”