For the first time in more than a decade, UW–Madison is ranked in the top five in the country in research expenditures among 925 public and private universities. It’s important to note that the university’s nearly $2 billion in research investment ($1.93 billion, to be precise) reflects the fiscal year that ended in June 2024, and the figures might look different next December, given this past year’s disruptions to the research ecosystem. Still, it’s incredibly rewarding to see the results — and scale — of the extraordinary work of our faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students, who are tackling complex challenges, making new discoveries, changing lives, and strengthening communities.

A huge congratulations to our outstanding Wisconsin women’s volleyball team, which added another semifinal finish to an already storied run. With an NCAA championship in 2021 and now seven semifinal appearances, this program has made our entire Badger community incredibly proud!

To round out the year, a major milestone: we’ve taken a big step toward creating a new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence at Morgridge Hall — our first new standalone school since the School of Veterinary Medicine opened in 1983. The college will draw on the momentum in computing, data, and AI that touches nearly every profession and discipline, from health care to the humanities. Approval from the regents, which is now in hand, is the equivalent of a building permit — in the months ahead, we’ll be working across campus to further hone the vision for this exciting new school, which will likely open its doors in summer 2026.

If you’d like to see more of our past year on campus, I’d strongly encourage you to check out Still/Moving, UW–Madison’s capsule of stunning and inspiring images from 2025. I hope it makes you proud.

As we say good-bye to 2025, I want to thank you for all that you do for UW–Madison. Here’s to a wonderful 2026 — may it be full of meaningful connections and exciting moments of discovery and learning.

Happy New Year, and on, Wisconsin!

Jennifer L. Mnookin
Chancellor

* * * *

Chancellor’s Choice

What do Bucky Badger, SpaghettiOs, and the coroner of Munchkinland have in common? Their creators came from the Wisconsin School of Business, which celebrated its 125th anniversary this year! Take a look at the transformational impact WSB grads have had on the business world and beyond.

After bringing music back to Camp Randall Stadium this year with sold-out pop and country concerts, we’re ready to be “thunderstruck” when the legendary AC/DC comes to town in July. For Badgers about to rock, we salute you!

December 14, 2025

link to video

Thank you, Provost Zumbrunnen and good morning, everyone!  Will you all join me in another huge round of applause for the amazing Class of 2025?

And how about a little more love and appreciation for the people who have helped you reach this day: Proud families and friends from across the country and around the world — here in person or virtually — thank you!

And to the faculty and staff, for the years of support, dedication (and occasional, or perhaps not so occasional, constructive critique) they have given to bring these graduates to this moment — let’s give them a round of applause, too.

There is another group I especially want to thank. If you are a Wisconsin resident and taxpayer, please stand up.  We are proud to be a public university, and the taxpayers of the great state of Wisconsin have helped supported this great university for 177 years. Thank you for your investment in this state and in UW–Madison — please make some noise!

This day is also bittersweet for those of you who are missing people whose love and support helped bring you to this place — including our beloved Dean Emerit Linda Scott of the School of Nursing, who passed away just last month.

I also want to acknowledge the terrible shootings at Brown University just yesterday, and in Australia. I want us to take a moment to recognize all of those who we have lost too soon, even as we celebrate our graduates.

There are two groups of people here today for whom I’d like to ask special recognition.

If you are part of the first generation in your family to go to college or graduate school, please stand as you’re able and make some noise. Congratulations!

If you are a veteran or serving on active duty or in the Reserves — family and friends, I’m talking to you, too — please stand as you are able so that we may thank you for service.

Thank you all.

Two stories

Graduates, you are entering into a world defined by uncertainty and change. We have the disruption of AI … economic instability … political fractures and polarization … and the pace of change can be dizzying or even overwhelming.

To be able to meet disruption with confidence and curiosity, rather than fear and self-doubt, is an absolutely critical life skill.

I don’t have a plug-and-play formula to make coping with challenge and change any easier. What I do have are two stories from my own life about the things I have found essential to navigating through disruption and change. And I want to share those with you today.

The first is about a connection to ideas, and the second is about a connection to people.

A connection to ideas

One of the most compelling ideas I’ve found came from a classic book I first read as an undergraduate and re-read in graduate school called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Maybe some of you know it.

You know that “mind-blown” emoji? That’s how this book hit me.

Kuhn was writing about science, and about how our ideas about what’s true and known about the natural world can change dramatically. He rejected the idea that scientific knowledge always progresses in a linear, orderly fashion.  Instead, he thought we tended to have periods of what he called “normal science,” and then periods of uncomfortable disruption, what he called paradigm shifts, when a very different understanding could take hold. Like when the Ptolemaic idea that the earth was at the center of all things got replaced by Copernicus’s theory that the sun was at the center of our solar system. Or when Einstein’s theory of relativity came along.

But there’s a point here, I think, that goes way beyond science and scientific change. Kuhn wrote that the moment when we are forced to abandon familiar models — the moment when the unpredictable and unexpected come crashing through and change everything we thought we knew — can also be the moment when transformative change becomes possible. That’s our invitation to start seeing something in an entirely new way. As he puts it:

It is as if [you’d] been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.

Maybe you’ve had that feeling at times when things seem unsettled and even chaotic. There’s an insight here that goes way beyond the history of science, one that I remind myself of not infrequently: that in moments of disruption there can be extraordinary opportunity.

Your career plans may change. You may discover that the skills you thought would be not-super-necessary are absolutely essential … and that the ones you thought would be essential are not super necessary.

You may discover that moving away is no longer in the cards right now … or that a move is exactly what needs to happen.

So hold your assumptions lightly. Pay attention to the opportunities that the unexpected can sweep in. And keep your family and friends close.

They’re the signal through the noise.

Which brings me to my second story, about connection to people.

A connection to people

I’m here to tell you that your life probably won’t unfold in exactly the ways that you expect it to. There will be wonderful surprises along the way, joys and opportunities you can’t even quite imagine. And there will almost certainly also be disappointments and difficult moments. The relationships and friendships you have made in your time here can be a source of continued meaning in the years ahead, and a source of comfort in the face of challenge.

I graduated from college a long time ago — a very long time ago — more than 35 years ago. And candidly, I barely remember my own commencement ceremony. But some of the people I got to know then, some of my college friends, remain incredibly important in my life all these decades later. Here’s a picture of two of my very best friends and roommates in college. I met one of them, Maia, in the first week of freshman year, and the other, Judith, about a year later.

Our lives, now, have gone in very different directions. We live thousands of miles apart. And over the decades, the frequency of our contact has ebbed and flowed. There were times — years even — when our lives got so busy and disjointed that we were barely in touch with one another at all. But we all realized that our core connection to one another is both unbreakable and important to us. Now we take a trip together every year, spending a long weekend catching up on our lives, connecting with one another, having new experiences and creating new memories together. And I know that if at any moment I really needed something, they would absolutely, unquestioningly be there for me, and I for them.

Friends don’t prevent the storm from rolling in, but they anchor us through it. They comfort us … they challenge our assumptions … they offer fresh perspectives. And they listen patiently to our not-fully-baked ideas over jumbo orders of deep-fried cheese curds or on quiet walks along the Lakeshore Path at dusk, or maybe decades in the future, in places we haven’t yet been.

Our student speaker Jeeva Premkumar has a story to share along those lines in just a few minutes.

Some of you met those friends here right off the bat. And some of you will discover deeper friendships when life brings you back together with people you met here but didn’t get to know as well. So my advice to you is to hold on to these connections — and when they might ebb and flow over time and distance, remember that rekindling or deepening them as time passes will enrich your lives.

Conclusion

I hope that you have found at UW–Madison an idea or two that you’ll return to again and again, that will help you move through a world whose roads are sometimes straight and true and sometimes zig and zag.

I hope you have learned to see and embrace the new worlds of possibility that can emerge when the unexpected comes along and shuffles the deck.

And I hope you hold onto your deep connections with the people you have laughed and cried with here. The people who will be there in good times and bad, who will help remind you that when life feels like you’ve suddenly been transported to another planet where things don’t look quite like you expected them to — that’s a gift.

It’s your invitation to create something wonderfully new.

For some of you, the next step in your journey will take you away from Madison. But rest assured that no matter how far you travel, Madison will always welcome you home, and you will forever share an identity as Badgers.

Class of 2025, congratulations and on, Wisconsin!

This stretch of time between Thanksgiving and the December holidays can fly by in a rush. If you find yourself wanting to savor a bit more of fall, I recommend this stunning multimedia story about autumn on campus, a good reminder to pause and appreciate the “beauty [of] the in-between.”

Between Past and Future

For the past decade, UW–Madison has celebrated Native November — honoring the First Nations of Wisconsin and reflecting on the history beneath our feet. Our beautiful Seed by Seed banners hang on Bascom Hall, and we have speakers, meals, music, and Cultural Landscape Tours that invite us to stand between past and future.

I was honored to attend a screening premiere last week of the UW–Madison-affiliated documentary Sacred Wisdom, Sacred Earth, where I learned about the Seventh-Generation Principle that many Indigenous communities live by — a call to consider not only the next generation, but seven generations to come when making important decisions. It’s a lesson worth noting in a place dedicated to shaping lives and futures.

RISE-ing to the Moment

Our campus has been amazingly good at building a culture of collaboration, but we haven’t always been as good at building the infrastructure to make that collaboration seamless. That’s a central goal of RISE, the initiative we launched 21 months ago to hire new faculty into wildly important areas and forge new pathways for collaboration across disciplines.

I saw some fascinating early results at last week’s campuswide RISE Summit, which brought together more than 200 faculty and researchers across our three RISE focus areas, AI, EARTH, and THRIVE. Here’s a quick look at a few things happening:

Faculty leaders at our new Wisconsin Nathan Shock Center have built what they call an “eharmony for researchers,” to bring together more than 40 experts in medicine, chemistry, and computational biology to map how aging cells change over time, with the ultimate goal of preventing a host of aging-related diseases.

Our new RISE-AI Collaboration HQ, led by Kyle Cranmer MA’02, PhD’05, is picking up speed. And the Center for Humanistic Inquiry into AI and Uncertainty is gathering scholars from history, media, philosophy, English, ethics, library science, and computing to ask smart questions about how to mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence and harness its extraordinary potential.

RISE is also about creating new opportunities for our students. It’s inspiring some incredibly exciting team-taught courses that stretch across disciplines, and we recently announced an inaugural round of RISE research fellowships.

A Note to Our Badger Nursing Family

One terribly sad update: Our Badger nursing community, and so many of us across our campus and beyond, are mourning the sudden loss of Dean Emerit Linda Scott, who passed away last week after a brief illness. Dean Scott was a transformative leader who cared deeply about advancing excellence in nursing and reducing health disparities. She was a national leader in the nursing profession and an effective and passionate dean, as well as a dear friend to so many of us. I will miss her insights, passion, and wonderfully dry sense of humor. If you’d like to share a memory or contribute to the scholarship fund honoring her legacy, you can do that here.

To all of our treasured alumni: I am so grateful for all of you. I hope the week ahead offers an opportunity to pause between what is finished and what comes next, and to savor the beauty of this season.

Thank you for being part of our incredible Badger community — past, present, and future.

Happy Thanksgiving, and on, Wisconsin!

Jennifer L. Mnookin
Chancellor

* * * *

Chancellor’s Choice

If you’ve visited Madison recently, you might have encountered a wild turkey or three strutting across campus. Twenty years ago, turkeys crossing University Avenue would have been an incredibly rare sight. But today, they have dedicated social media fan pages, and their numbers and behaviors have spurred campus safety guidelines on confrontational big birds!

Some alumni might remember two Bucky Badger clocks on the bank at University and Park, keeping watch as they hurried to class. The bank is gone, but one of the clocks has recently been restored so Bucky can once again let students know how late they are.

And speaking of our iconic mascot, don’t miss the December 2 premiere of the PBS documentary Bucky! Narrated by comedian Charlie Berens ’09, the film traces Bucky’s evolution from his humble papier-mâché origins to mascot superstardom.

My father is a legal scholar and expert in negotiation and conflict resolution who spent part of his career bringing individuals, families, major companies, and even countries together over some of the hardest issues imaginable. Around our dinner table, he talked often about empathy, which he defined as working hard to understanding the other side’s issues, needs, and perspectives. Empathy, as he defined it, doesn’t mean agreeing, or even sympathizing; it does mean listening carefully and working nonjudgmentally to understand their interests and perspectives.

I learned lessons about working to understand others’ points of view, even when we don’t agree, and those lessons shape me to this day. I believe deeply that universities like ours have a special role to play in helping students learn to engage productively and with respect across their differences. (I had a chance to speak — and learn more — on this topic last month at the Reagan Institute’s education summit and this month at a national conference on building next-gen leaders in a divided world).

No Need to Agree on Everything to Work Together on Something

That’s why I’m excited to tell you that just last week, we launched the Wisconsin Exchange: Pluralism in Practice — to create additional opportunities for our campus community to pour their creativity and curiosity into building new tools to help us meet this defining moment.

The Wisconsin Exchange builds on work already underway and encourages the curiosity, humility, and collaboration that Wisconsin and our world need more than ever right now.

The project kicks off with a seed grant competition for students, faculty, and staff, and it includes a speaker series and even an AI-powered program that helps students rehearse hard conversations.

Wisconsin is a deeply purple state. Some might see that as a challenge. I see it as a gift — a chance to show that differences, in viewpoint and otherwise, don’t have to divide us, and to model what civil discourse at its best really looks like.

Cause for Celebration

The news about breakthrough discoveries keeps coming — including a new treatment for Parkinson’s disease that’s showing promise in its first clinical trial, and a new blood test that can detect Alzheimer’s disease.

With a Little Help from Our Friends

Speaking of urgent challenges: earlier this month, I hosted a lunch for about 600 members of our school and department boards of visitors. As usual, it was full of energy and Badger spirit (plus a challenging trivia quiz!). But we also talked about the challenges and risks the university faces, and the most common question I heard was: How can we help?

Here is my answer: Keep talking about the extraordinary impact of the research happening here. Talk about how two-thirds of our undergraduates now leave with zero student debt — and most in under four years. And talk about how, this fall, for the first time in more than a decade, we welcomed students from all 72 Wisconsin counties and more first-generation students than in the past two decades — real proof that access and excellence can go hand in hand.

So tell your friends and neighbors. Tell your elected officials here in Wisconsin and in Washington, DC. We have a great story, and we need your help to tell it.

And please give, as you’re able. Philanthropy is deeply important always — and that’s doubly true in this moment.

Thank you for all you do, and on, Wisconsin!

Jennifer L. Mnookin
Chancellor

* * * *

Chancellor’s Choice

Bucky turned 85 this month, with a big birthday bash befitting our favorite badger! Celebrate with some mascot history (including the Henrietta Holstein coup attempt), or revisit “Being Bucky” and “Bucky’s Game Day” for a look at life inside the suit.

UW–Madison has a Badger Cheese Club — because, of course we do! At nearly 500 members strong, it’s one of the largest student orgs, but anyone can savor the experience via their delicious Instagram account.

Ahead of Veterans Day, I’m grateful to the thousands of Badger alumni who have served proudly in the armed forces and defended the freedoms we cherish (including a few famous veterans like astronauts Jim Lovell x’50 and Laurel Clark ’83, MD’87).

October 9, 2025

Thank you, Alisa and good afternoon, everyone!  It’s wonderful to see you all here.

I want to say a special hello to a few student leaders with us today representing some of our most active campus organizations.  They’re members of Vice Chancellor Lori Reesor’s student cabinet.  Thank you for being here!

And thanks to all of you.  In a year of significant change and challenge, your leadership and trusted advice have been essential — let’s give you a round of applause — thank you!

Welcome new leaders

Following tradition, I want to introduce new campus leaders (and “old” leaders in new roles):

John Zumbrunnen is our interim provost, succeeding Charles Isbell. John has been a senior vice provost overseeing teaching and learning, and he was one central architect of the RISE program that’s expanding our faculty in some exciting new directions. We’re launching a national search for a permanent replacement in fall.

We also have two new deans: Nita Ahuja, dean of the School of Medicine & Public Health and vice chancellor for medical affairs, succeeding Bob Golden, and Devesh Ranjan, dean of the College of Engineering, succeeding Ian Robertson.

I’ll ask these new leaders and our other vice chancellors, deans and directors to please stand or give a wave so we may recognize you for your service.  Thank you!

We’ve brought in four new deans and two new vice chancellors in the past year-and-a-half. If you could see the incredible leaders and scholars who want to be here, you would be reminded — as I am — of the power of our national reputation as a place that’s making a real difference in the world.  In every one of these searches, our top candidate has joined us here.

How we continue to do that in a moment of great disruption is what I want to address today.  But let me begin with a story.

A university familiar with challenge

Two weeks ago, right here in this room, I had the privilege of hosting a conversation with Chancellor Emerita Donna Shalala, who at 84 is just as engaged and energetic as she’s been throughout her storied career.

To prepare for the conversation, I took a look through some of her papers and found a speech she gave this very same week in October, 1991.  She said:

This has been a trying year for American higher education. Issues of political correctness … indirect cost rates … and budget constraints have threatened our future [and] the very nature and certainly the respect American higher education has enjoyed since its beginnings. 

[And] recent changes in the political climate and public attitudes toward higher education bring us to a critical juncture in [the university’s] history.

Thirty-four years ago.  Typewritten on onionskin before social media, before AI, and before many of the emerging issues that eat up so much of our time today.

I share this because I sometimes hear from people who envision a past that was free from serious challenge and hardship — but the reality is, that past never fully existed.

The story of this university is, and always has been, one of overcoming immense odds.

In fact, after the lofty pronouncements at our creation 177 years ago, we went into such deep debt to build our first buildings that university leaders had to sell off chunks of the campus for pennies on the dollar — and later buy them back for a princely sum (I see our real estate folks cringing). And in a true sign of desperation, they even borrowed money from the faculty to stay afloat!

We did not collapse under the weight of that moment, and we are not going to collapse under the weight of this one.  We will meet the challenges before us with the same creativity, determination, and excellence that have allowed us to build one of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world!

Today’s challenges are on a different scale than they were 177 years ago, or even 34 years ago, but we know their general shape.

We know how to seize the opportunities that disruption can sweep onto our shores — opportunities to unlock fresh ideas and push ourselves to new levels of excellence.

While there may be bumps and bruises, we can and will manage the threats that disruption can bring.

Certainly this year we’re experiencing both the exhilarating upside of disruption, and the dispiriting downside.

Disruption’s upside

On the upside, the pace of innovation is absolutely staggering, and this university is leading the way — in artificial intelligence … quantum computing … renewable energies … and life-saving medical advances (including one I’ll tell you about in just a few minutes).  Not to mention our top-ranked programs in a vast range of disciplines — from engineering to dance, from law to printmaking to education — that are deeply engaged in exploring the many ways AI might be deployed.

AI is one of the most fundamentally disruptive changes any of us will experience in our lifetimes.  AI will have some impact on nearly everything we do — from how we treat and prevent illness to how we grow crops.

It is capable of both solving vexing problems and creating them — for example, it can spread disinformation far and wide in ways that may aggravate the divisions between us and subvert our democracy.

Here at UW–Madison, our spectacular new Morgridge Hall will be the nerve center that brings in a stunning range of specialties from all over campus — from engineers to philosophers — to work together in new ways as we ride through this ‘wild west’ moment.

If you haven’t been there, I hope you’ll go.  Our new facilities don’t have to be gobsmacking … but this one is!

It’s the largest and most sustainable building on this campus, built on time, under budget, and entirely through the generosity of alumni and friends, including many of you here today — let’s give you a round of applause!

One of the most visible impacts of AI is on the workforce. It’s potentially gobbling up some of the jobs that our graduates were landing just a few years ago — the media call it the ‘job-pocalypse.’

So we will need to be intentional and creative in thinking how best to prepare our students for the careers of the future.

Because in every challenge there is also opportunity.

Fueling entrepreneurship

One place you’ll see that is in our changing approach to entrepreneurship — we’re building a novel campuswide strategy for recruiting, developing, and launching entrepreneurs who so naturally drive, and thrive on, disruptive change (and help our society to fully integrate the benefits of that change).

Here’s just one small example of an entrepreneur harnessing AI to solve a problem many of us have experienced — long lines at coffee shops.  Adrian Deasy is one of our mechanical engineering graduates.

He created one of the first fully robotic coffee shops in the nation — right here in Wisconsin!  It’s called Octane Coffee. You order on your phone, and scan through to pay and pick up your drink.

You can visit them in Brookfield (and if we’re lucky, here in Madison one day soon).

I want to see us become a premier university for entrepreneurship — and we’re sailing in that direction with a new Entrepreneurship Hub to be led by our first-ever associate vice chancellor for entrepreneurship.  We’re conducting a national search for the right person as we speak.

This will help us row in the same direction across the university.

So we’re engaging fresh ideas for transformative teaching and research, and our faculty are finding exciting new pathways to take their work to new levels of excellence.

The amazing number of awards the faculty have won this year is one sign of that impact.

I am delighted to share with you our latest news that was announced just yesterday: Two of our brilliant faculty members have just been named MacArthur “Genius Grant” Award winners!

We are the only university in the country to have two current faculty members among the winners this year.

Over the years, UW–Madison has been exceptionally successful with this award: It is rare to have even one winner on any university campus, and this year’s winners bring us to five in just the last six years!

They are:

• Ángel Adames Corraliza in our Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. Dr. Adames Corraliza’s work to understand the dynamics of tropical weather patterns is setting the stage for vastly improved weather forecasting that can save lives and help communities better prepare for extreme weather.
• And Sébastien Philippe in our Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics. We brought Dr. Philippe to UW–Madison just this year. He’s an expert on nuclear security who works in collaboration with communities and policymakers to better understand the risks associated with building, testing, and storing launch-ready nuclear weapons.

This is an incredible testament to the excellence of our faculty — let’s have a round of applause for the winners!

Disruption’s downside

At the same time we celebrate our truly outstanding faculty and the opportunities disruption can bring us, we also are dealing with the uncertainty and instability that go along with rapid change.

In his bestselling book, A Walk in the Woods, the author Bill Bryson observes of hiking the Appalachian Trail:

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill.

In this moment, it can sometimes feel as if there is another hill beyond every horizon.

Whether we wish for it or not, we have the enormous challenge and the tremendous opportunity to help guide a reset in the compact that’s existed between higher education and the federal government for 80 years.

A compact that’s allowed this nation to become the world’s leader in innovation and discovery.

The federal cuts to research have already had a real and meaningful effect here. We’ve shuttered research projects … endured some layoffs … and imposed budget cuts to redirect money towards essential programs that are at risk.

I am happy to tell you that because of our fiscal restraint, we are in a fairly solid place financially. But there is more danger ahead with potential federal cuts that could have a devastating impact on our medical research on so many areas, from theranostics to Alzheimer’s, for example — and it could impact basic research, clinical trials, and so much more, as well as having ripple effects across our campus.

We’ve joined nearly two dozen other states to challenge these cuts in court — and for now, a permanent injunction is in place.  But there are no guarantees as these cases work their way through the appellate courts.  These are risks and I can’t minimize them.

And let me be clear: There are legitimate concerns about higher education that we ought to listen to and take seriously.

For example, I do think that we can be more transparent and accountable around:

• The return-on-investment for the degrees we confer, so that students can make informed decisions about the majors they pursue and the debt they incur. I’m proud that nearly 2/3 of our undergraduates leave us with zero student debt, but there is still more we can do to support both transparency and access at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
• And there are also, I think, legitimate potential reforms in relation to how we spend federal research dollars. We have joined with national organizations to advocate for a new approach to indirect costs (the overhead costs of conducting federal research that help us build labs and pay for the regulatory infrastructure we must operate within) that would add greater transparency and clarity.

There are also, in my view, some fair critiques about viewpoint diversity on university campuses. We all know that higher ed can be in our own bubble.  Here at UW–Madison, we know from polling (as is true at other universities) that some of our students who identify as conservative hesitate to speak in class not for fear of their professors, but for fear of what their peers might think.

If we don’t more actively demonstrate engagement with a broader set of viewpoints, I don’t think we’re doing our best for students or for our important commitment to preparing our graduates to be informed, active participants in a complex and diverse democracy where they’re going to engage with people who are different from themselves in every way.

So there are places where we can, and must, improve. But let me also be clear:

I will not hesitate to defend the precious institutional values that define this university’s excellence — including academic freedom, freedom of speech, and non-discrimination.

And let me add my strong support for our international students who have been part of this university since our very first class in 1849 (yes — in 1849 we had a student from Canada!).

Our international enrollment this semester is down by about 500 students — that’s a somewhat smaller reduction than what many universities are seeing — but we don’t want a single one of our admitted students to lose the opportunity to come here.

They enrich our campus culturally and academically and bring critically important perspectives that advance our research and enliven the exchange of ideas.

Polarization

Which brings me to our work to address polarization.

We must double down on helping our students learn to disagree productively and engage respectfully with one another across their differences.

Not because we think that engaging across their differences will help them reach some magical consensus or total agreement — we don’t want to be a monoculture — but because we want our campuses to be places where people are challenged in ways that sometimes change their minds and sometimes sharpen and clarify the views that they already had.

I recently heard a story from 1967 — another time of great disruption.  An ROTC student named John Henz showed up to class in uniform, girding himself for hostility.  And was shocked when the protestors stepped aside and said:

“You are who we are trying to save.”

He later said: “That was the great experience for me of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This ability to get clarity in your thoughts, to keep an open mind. This is what a university education is all about.”

This university in this purple state, and with a long tradition of passionate engagement with social and political issues, has an extraordinary opportunity to be a leader and a model for the nation for how to work across differences in ways that respect our shared humanity.

Here’s one program we started two years ago, and which some of you have heard me talk about.

It’s called Deliberation Dinners, and it brings together students from diverse viewpoints with trained faculty facilitators to share meals throughout the academic year and discuss deeply polarizing issues like gun rights and immigration.

The results have been remarkable. Here’s a quote from a student who participated last year:

I often view the “progressive left” as moral grandstanders not worthy of respect, but after having conversations with many of them I learned that they are people, like me, with good intentions and I hope they realize that in me, too.

We hear similar sentiments from students who come from all places on the political spectrum.

We’ve been able to triple the number of students in this program in just two years and still can’t accommodate all of the interest — and that’s one reason why I am going to announce publicly, in the next two weeks, some campuswide opportunities and new programs that will bring our work on civil dialogue to a whole new level.

I decided on the name just last week with input from a group our students — can’t say more just yet but watch for an announcement in the coming weeks!

There are those who believe that learning to engage peacefully and thoughtfully with people whose life experiences and viewpoints differ from our own is optional.

I disagree.  I say this work foundational to what we need for our students, our institutions, and our democracy, and I am excited that we’re going to do more in this space.

* * * *

Now shifting directions: For some of you, this may be the moment you were waiting for … it’s time for the quiz!

Please locate the pencils and paper on your tables.  Ready?

Quiz Answers

Here are the answers. Let’s see how you did:

Our alumni raised $26.2 billion in venture capital (raised by 943 alumni; source: Pitchbook)— making us the fifth-best public university in the nation for number of graduates founding companies backed by venture capital. We’re also the second-place all-time leader in alumni joining the Peace Corps — it’s a very “UW–Madison” thing to achieve excellence across incredibly diverse measures!

This is an online trend that’s swept campuses across the country and pokes gentle fun at men who change their hobbies or style in hopes of impressing women.  Contestants carry tote bags and lattes, play Fleetwood Mac songs on the guitar, and carry books by feminist authors.  This is the winner, freshman Posse scholar from Chicago Khabbab Gassikia.

Billy Joel has never played at Camp Randall, but he’s appeared on campus three times: at the Stock Pavilion in the late ’70s as his career was taking off, and twice sharing the Kohl Center stage with Elton John.

These animals all work for UWPD. Horses Rettke and Vetter (named after volleyball player Dana Rettke and women’s hockey player Jessie Vetter) work crowd control; Ritter and Mavi are trained in human tracking and explosive detection; and Dusty and Hoagie are therapy dogs.

Good job!  Let’s give you a round of applause!

Research breakthrough

You are clearly familiar with the amazing research happening here — but I do want to share one story about a recent major breakthrough in biomedical engineering that you likely haven’t heard about — one that shows how we can build urgently needed common ground for life-saving science.

This is a national consortium of scientists, industry leaders, ethicists, and advocates — developed and led in its inaugural years by Professor Kris Saha at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery — which set out to answer one urgent question:

Can a new, personalized drug be developed quickly enough to save a life?

Kris and his consortium knew that a new CRISPR drug could correct genetic mutations with great precision, but they were always racing against the clock. (CRISPR is a technology that makes it possible to edit DNA; the logo you see is the NIH program that’s aiming to accelerate the transfer of these technologies out of the lab and into the world.)

They were told this would be a losing battle: Getting a new drug through the FDA could take decades.

They were told no pharmaceutical company would invest in producing a CRISPR drug for exceptionally rare diseases.

But as Kris put it: We decided that was outdated thinking.

So they worked together with the FDA to prove safety, and they worked with industry partners to establish manufacturing platforms for personalized therapies.

This year, Kris’s colleagues in Philadelphia — part of the larger consortium — used the platform to manufacture a personalized drug, and you see the result.

It took not three decades or even three years, but three months. Today, we have a new blueprint for bringing custom therapies to millions of people with rare diseases.

Even our somewhat controversial secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., heralded this result, reached out to the infant’s family, and then posted a national address about the importance of investing in cutting-edge cures for disease.

The next step will be manufacturing these therapies for rare vision disorders — in Kris’s program right here in Wisconsin, changing lives and creating new jobs along the way.

I want to thank Dr. Kris Saha, who is here today, for leading the larger national consortium and the program here on campus — will you please stand?  Thank you, Kris!

Conclusion

The determination — some might call it stubbornness — to do things we’re sometimes told can’t be done has been so naturally “UW” from our earliest days. It will serve us well as we navigate the choppy waters ahead.

Which brings me back to Donna Shalala and that 34-year-old speech. An awful lot of what she said is spot-on today.  But there’s one thing she didn’t get right.

She predicted that the university would grow its excellence. And we have certainly done that.  But she also predicted we would shrink the student population, which we haven’t.

In fact, this year’s freshman class is one of the largest in our history, selected from a record 74,000 applicants — a double-digit increase over last year!  And it includes the greatest number of first-generation students in our history.

But I understand why Chancellor Shalala couldn’t envision that we’d be able to grow in size as one of the greatest universities in the nation while simultaneously serving thousands more students, with drastically fewer state dollars.

Who could imagine that we would set new records for:

• Student retention, now at 96%, 12 points above the national average?
• Six-year graduation rate, closing in on 90%, which puts us in the top 10 public universities in the country?
• And time-to-degree — now at a record low of 3.86 years?

And who would dare to hope that we would be graduating more than 2/3 of our undergraduates with no student debt?

So I am optimistic. Not recklessly so — I am well aware of the enormity of the challenges before us.

But I deeply believe that, together, we can rise to those challenges.

I believe we can preserve and protect our values while moving beyond the structures and mindsets of the last century that may not be serving us as well.

And I believe that even in moments that feel incredibly unsettled, we can build our excellence in exciting new ways to meet our proud Wisconsin Idea mission.

Because I have seen this university do extraordinary things.

We won’t meet every challenge in a day, or even a year.  And we won’t do it alone.

But with your help, we can find pathways through.

And while we do that, let’s also remember to celebrate, and to see, and to continue to be awed by the incredible things happening at this institution, and that you are all a part of.

Thank you and On, Wisconsin!

September 2, 2025

Thank you, Provost Zumbrunnen, and hello, new Badgers!  I am delighted to welcome you to one of greatest universities in the world — the University of Wisconsin–Madison!

Students, you are a very accomplished group!  Among you are:

• National Merit Scholars and high school valedictorians
• Eagle Scouts
• Debate champions
• And winners of major national research competitions.

And so much more.  You’re:

• Standout athletes
• Talented musicians
• Community volunteers

And I’m just scratching the surface. Every one of you deserves to be here and belongs here.

Over the next weeks and months, you will get to know so many new people, so here’s my advice:

Go beyond a smile, a nod, or a “hey.”  Ask questions.  See if you can find the classmate who started a successful business in high school … or the classmate who organizes registration drives for organ donors … or the classmate who rehabilitates injured animals … or classmates who serve in the U.S. military.

All are here with you today.  So dig a little bit beneath the surface and find out something that matters.

New students by the numbers

Let me tell you a little more about yourselves:

• There are nearly 10,000 of you joining our university this year — and 1,200 transfer students (let’s hear from you!). We also have about 8,500 freshmen (freshmen, make some noise!).
• We selected each of you from a record 74,000 applicants. You can be really proud that you were admitted in one the most competitive years in our history.
• We’re still finalizing numbers, but it looks like this year’s freshman class (for the first time since I became chancellor) represents all 50 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.!
• I want to hear from you if you’re from one of the biggest states outside of Wisconsin represented in this class:
  • #5 and #4 go together — the tri-state area — New Jersey & New York (and let’s not leave out Connecticut), where are you?
  • #3 — Minnesota — let’s hear it!
  • #2 — California — make some noise!
  • #1 — you know who you are — Illinois, where are you? Congrats!
• We also have international students from around 50 different nations all around the globe — students, let’s hear it for our international Badgers!
• OK, Wisconsin — are you ready? If you’re from the great state of Wisconsin, make some noise!
• Welcome, all!
• And here’s something I’m really proud of: This freshman class includes more students who are in the first generation in their family to go to college than we’ve ever seen.  If you are a member of the first generation of your family to attend college, please rise as you’re able — let’s hear it for them!

Pin & Selfie

Do you all have a pin that says “Badger 2025”?  This is a brand-new tradition, and it’s special for Convocation — being right here, right now, is the only way you can get one, so I’d like to ask you to take a moment to put it on and then I want a selfie with all of you.  Ready?  (takes selfie with students)

Your first official UW portrait!  I’ll post it on Instagram if you want to follow me there @UWChancellor.

Value and values

Tomorrow you will begin your first classes.  As you do that, I want you to keep one important thing in mind:

Your education is in your hands.

For most of you, graduation day is about four years away.  That’s 1,461 days.  That’s quite a few days, but it will also go by in a flash.  And what you do with those days will help chart a course for your life.

We’ll be here to help and support you, but it’s up to you to decide what you’ll do with this amazing opportunity.  The ways you choose get involved.  The deep friendships that you’ll make.  The academic risks you take, the challenges you rise to, and the acts of kindness that you choose.

The math is pretty simple: The more you invest in your learning, and in your overall experience here at UW–Madison, the more value your education will have.

Pluralism

We want you to ask bold questions. We want you think deeply about ideas. And we want you to feel empowered to both agree and disagree with one another, and with your professors and with me.

And when you have strong views, we want you to disagree with respect for our common humanity.  I would ask you to start out with curiosity and generosity rather than condemnation and judgment.

That’s true for the small stuff — like when you’re debating the relative importance of the engagement news about your favorite English teacher and your favorite gym teacher.

But it’s equally true for the bigger, harder conversations. There will likely even be days when the discussions you’ll have won’t feel super comfortable.  But by engaging with a great diversity of ideas, you will learn something about yourself, and you’ll emerge with a stronger, deeper sense of what drives you, and what you believe and why.

This is part of the process you heard the provost call “sifting and winnowing” — it’s how new insights and discoveries come to life.

One essential ingredient in this process is pluralism — that’s a word you’ll probably hear a lot this year.  It means we bring together people with many different backgrounds and points of view and identities (in other words, all of you) to discuss and debate ideas. You will learn from each other, from those similar to you and equally, you will learn from your differences.

Learning from one another will enrich you, and it will also connect you — to one another, and to the broader world.  It will ground you in our community, and it will also let you soar. When you step into the unknown, when you take a chance on a hard conversation with empathy and civility, when you open yourself up to others, and when you embrace the unexpected, you just might find that you discover a new intellectual passion or make a lifelong friend.

Outstanding faculty

And, in your time here, you will have an opportunity to work with some of the top scholars in the world.

Slide:  Prof. Oyola-Merced with students

People like Professor Mayra Oyola-Merced, who came to us from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and who is a much-beloved mentor to our undergraduates.  She’s working on ways to improve how we predict severe weather — building on our long tradition of excellence as the birthplace of weather satellite technology.

Slide: Prof. Chevrette with headphones

People like Professor Marc Chevrette, who started here just this month with all of you.  The undergraduates in his lab listen in on the chemical conversations between bacteria to help search for new antibiotics in some really unlikely places like the microbiomes (i.e., guts) of frogs, snakes, insects, and even freshwater sponges.

Slide:  Bad Bunny & Prof. Melendez-Badillo

Or if you’re interested in history, you could take a class with Professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a Latin American and Caribbean history scholar who collaborated with Bad Bunny on his latest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” [translation: I should have taken more photos] to create a narrative to accompany songs that celebrate Puerto Rican history and culture.

These are just three of the more than 2,000 renowned scholars on our faculty.  All of them are eager to welcome you here!

Go Big Read

I got to talk to a few of your parents last week at move-in and several of them who were, themselves, students here back in … the late 1900s … said this place feels even bigger than it did then, and they’re right: We’ve grown!

You’ve heard about the ways we make the campus feel smaller and help you find your place here — but there’s one campuswide event that we make as big as possible. It’s a university-wide book club called Go Big Read.

This year it’ll bring all of us together to read and talk about an incredible new book called James: A Novel by Percival Everett that reimagines Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, who was the enslaved man who escaped and accompanied Huck down the Mississippi River on a raft.

It’s a bestseller and winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it invites us to think about how the assumptions people make about us (and our assumptions about others) affect our lives. And how there are many ways of seeing, and being in, the world. You’ll receive a free copy on your way out today.

Many of our professors will incorporate the book into their classes, and the author will come and visit us and spend a day on campus engaging in conversations and giving a talk.  I hope you’ll join us for that.

Conclusion

You are joining a university that produces Nobel laureates and Pulitzer prizewinners. Best-selling authors, star athletes, leaders of non-profits, and people who create meaningful and beautiful works of art, and so much more.

And this is also a place that’s pretty proud of its inspired goofiness.  We plant pink flamingoes all over Bascom Hill and Jump Around and put a giant Statue of Liberty head on ice-covered Lake Mendota in the middle of winter.

You, today, are joining this wonderful community, and we are all stronger for your presence here.

From this moment on, you share a common identity as Badgers that I hope you’ll proudly claim for the rest of your lives.

And so a very, very warm welcome to every one of you!  We are so happy that you are here.

Babcock & Bucky

To conclude our time together, we’re going to celebrate with one time-honored Badger tradition, and then invite you to join us for a second.  The first is (of course) singing Varsity together and the second is (of course) Babcock ice cream.

We can’t do both at once, it doesn’t work so well, so we’ll sing here and then eat ice cream — courtesy of the Wisconsin Alumni Association — right next to Memorial Union at Alumni Park.

So thank you all for being here. Now please join me in welcoming one very special Badger … and On, Wisconsin!

(Bucky enters)

I still remember my first day at college — the hush after my parents departed, getting to know my roommates, and that doubt that could sometimes creep in: Do I really belong here?

I’m riding around this week in one of those boxy white trucks we affectionately call “toaster cars,” popping into different residence halls to meet parents and families, helping haul an impressive amount of stuff upstairs (with great assistance from our upperclassmen), and assuring the new students who have come to UW–Madison from around the state, the nation, and the world that they absolutely do belong here.

I’m talking with new students from places near (all over Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois) and not-so-near (California and New York) and quite far (one of our freshmen from Dubai was seeing our state for the very first time; we talked about how to survive and thrive through a long Wisconsin winter).

I see proud parents and families (some already in “Wisconsin Dad” and “Wisconsin Mom” T-shirts) smoothing fresh sheets onto beds, assembling furniture, and rushing out on last-minute errands that take on special meaning as they delay that inevitable (and oh-so-hard!) last good-bye.

I vividly remember the day I moved my daughter into her freshman dorm. We’d forgotten a few things, so I ran over to CVS to pick them up for her. It was a simple errand, mundane, but also freighted, as I marked the moment because who knew when I might have another chance to do this for her?

To get to watch our students learn about each other and our traditions and this beautiful campus, and to see them grow into thoughtful and accomplished leaders and scholars, is truly one of the great privileges of being chancellor.

Game Changer

As we gear up for fall, college athletics is facing a seismic shift that could transform scholarships, team structures, and department and university strategy.

We remain committed to supporting all 23 Badger sport programs. That means making some thoughtful changes — like expanding sponsorships (look for the Culver’s logo on center court at the Kohl Center) and bringing concerts back to Camp Randall Stadium — to help meet the financial realities ahead and ensure our Badger athletes continue to thrive, whether in competition or the classroom.

On, Wisconsin!

Jennifer L. Mnookin
Chancellor

* * * *

Chancellor’s Choice

Feeling nostalgic after reading about move-in? You’re in luck! The UW Archives has digitized every issue of the Badger yearbook back to 1884. It’s a rich, quirky chronicle of campus life through 2014 — the year publication of Badger yearbooks ceased. (Why? Read more here).

If you’re a foodie like me, you might enjoy Lab Culture Recipes — an online cookbook cocreated by UW genetics professor Ahna Skop PhD’00 pairing scientists’ favorite recipes with personal stories. It’s a delicious way to explore the diverse backgrounds that fuel scientific discovery.

And if you’re in search of a great fall read, pick up James by Percival Everett — a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It’s this year’s Go Big Read book, and I’m so excited that we’ll welcome the author to campus this fall.

The capitol-to-campus view wasn’t an accident. Wisconsin’s first governor, Nelson Dewey, and the state’s early leaders wanted a clear and close connection, and the first regents called UW–Madison “a blessing and an ornament to the state” — big words for a campus that at the time had more horses than students and one lonely building sitting atop a grand hill.

From the start, this university has been a partnership with the state, created to solve problems in ways that can fundamentally change lives. (More on that below!) But over the years, as many of you may be aware, funding for public universities in Wisconsin slipped to 44th in the nation.

A public university by — and for — Wisconsin

Thanks in meaningful part to so many of you who have made your voices heard, that’s starting to change. There are several things to cheer about in the state’s new budget, such as the legislature’s investment in renovating our historic Science Hall, but there are also concerning new requirements around faculty teaching loads that will weaken our ability to compete for top talent. I’ll be working with the regents and legislature to find a path forward that recognizes the vital contributions of our faculty and instructional staff in education, research, and outreach, and the critical importance of being able to hire and retain the very strongest and most talented scholars and teachers.

Regardless of state or federal pressures, our aims remain the same. We are still driving research, preparing educators, launching start-ups, and expanding opportunity because we believe deeply in our founding mission and the good this university does for the people of Wisconsin — and beyond.

Public science, personal impact

To share just one example: you might know that the UW Health Transplant Center is one of the premier centers of its kind in the world — but I’m guessing you might not have heard about the center’s most recent extraordinary innovation (now in clinical trials), which may allow some kidney transplant recipients to live without antirejection medications.

At the same time, the UW is doing fascinating work on xenotransplantation — genetically engineering pigs for organ donation (with three clinical trials now in development), helping to bring new hope to patients urgently awaiting life-saving transplants.

These discoveries matter deeply to me — both professionally and personally. In the depths of the pandemic, I donated a kidney to my father. Since I couldn’t be there in person, the UW Solution preserved it safely on a red-eye from LA to Boston.

We’re celebrating this lifesaving work in organ transplantation with a special project this month — I hope you’ll take a peek.

A final bit of good news

UW–Madison was just named a Princeton Review Best Value College for 2025, a Money magazine Best College, and number 14 in the country for Best Alumni Network — not to mention number 30 out of more than 21,000 universities in the latest world rankings, confirming what we’ve long known: we’re delivering an outstanding, life-changing, and affordable education. (Two-thirds of UW–Madison undergrads now graduate with no student loan debt.) We couldn’t do it without each of you!

On, Wisconsin!

Jennifer L. Mnookin
Chancellor

* * * *

Chancellor’s Choice

I often highlight successes, but Sean Jacobsohn ’94’s online Failure Museum — a collection of things that didn’t go as planned — offers valuable lessons in resilience, risk, and innovation.

Taylan Stulting PhDx’26 and two teammates rowed 2,800 grueling miles from California to Hawaii, setting a new world record in the World’s Toughest Row.

The Wisconsin Idea just went intergalactic! UW–Madison physicists helped bring a new observatory in Chile to life, and that observatory has the world’s largest digital camera. Travel to places several thousand light years away from Earth on a Skyviewer tour or browse the stars on your own.