[16] As of March 2023[update], 20 Nobel laureates, 41 Pulitzer Prize winners, 2 Fields medalists, and 1 Turing Award recipient have been affiliated with UW–Madison as alumni, faculty, or researchers.

The regents' building plans called for a "main edifice fronting towards the Capitol, three stories high, surmounted by an observatory for astronomical observations.

This effort failed, with the Wisconsin state Board of Regents issuing a ringing proclamation in favor of academic freedom, acknowledging the necessity for freely "sifting and winnowing" among competing claims of truth.

UW–Madison's Howard Temin, a virologist, co-discovered the enzyme reverse transcriptase in 1969,[40] and The Badger Herald was founded as a conservative student paper the same year.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, UW–Madison was shaken by a series of student protests, and by the use of force by authorities in response, comprehensively documented in the film The War at Home.

The student newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, published a series of investigative articles stating that AMRC was pursuing research directly pursuant to US Department of Defense requests, and supportive of military operations in Vietnam.

The Carillon Tower, erected in 1936, was designed by Warren Powers Laird and Paul Philippe Cret so that the balustrade echoes that on Bascom Hall.

East of the tower lies a monument to the Sauk leader Black Hawk, whose flight through the Madison area represented the last armed conflict between the United States Army and native peoples in southern Wisconsin.

Following the 1884 fire that destroyed the original, Milwaukee architect Henry C. Koch designed the new Science Hall (built in 1888) in a Romanesque Revival style.

Although debunked, the campus myth is that the building (with its poor ventilation, narrow windows, inclined base, and cantilevered upper floors) was designed to be "riot-proof".

[69] The building contains several dining options, an art gallery, a movie theater, a climbing wall, a bowling alley, event spaces, and a hotel.

[73] Laird and Cret were hired to draw up a master plan for future construction at the campus, with the idea of creating a more unified and aesthetically pleasing area.

These sites, reflecting thousands of years of human habitation in the area, have survived to a greater or lesser degree on campus, depending on location and past building activities.

The four year, full-time undergraduate instructional program is classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as "arts and science plus professions" with a high graduate coexistence.

[112] Poets&Quants ranked the Wisconsin School of Business undergraduate program 22nd in the nation, up 10 positions from 2022, and top 10 among public universities.

[118] The 2024 Times Higher Education World University Rankings placed UW–Madison 63rd worldwide, based primarily on surveys administered to students, faculty, and recruiters.

[135] College Library houses a media center with over 200 computer workstations, DV editing stations, scanners, poster printing, and equipment checkout (including laptops, digital cameras, projectors, and more).

[136] The LGBT Student Center, located in the Red Gym, functions as a library for queer-themed fiction and non-fiction and provides training and resources for the entire campus.

Additionally, it offers the Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship to a second-year candidate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison's MFA program in creative writing, in order to fund a third year of study.

These colleges are involved in scientific research, education, training, and extension projects geared toward the conservation and practical use of U.S. coasts, the Great Lakes and other marine areas.

Their research includes non-inductive startup techniques, investigation of ion gyro-scale turbulent instabilities and dynamics, understanding core-edge coupling, and development of diagnostic systems.

The building features an Italian Renaissance Revival style and owes its namesake to former chancellor Henry Barnard, who, ironically, opposed student housing on campus believing it to be a drain on the institution's income.

[182] Historically, UW–Madison has been home to a collection of student run radio stations, a number of which stopped broadcasting after run-ins with the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

WSUM remains entirely free format, which means that the on-air personnel can showcase a large variety of music and talk programming at their discretion with few limitations.

The groups are the MadHatters, Redefined A Cappella, Fundamentally Sound, Pitches and Notes, Tangled up in Blue, Under A-Rest, Jewop, and Wisconsin Waale.

Other rivals include the Denver Pioneers, Colorado College Tigers, Michigan Tech Huskies, Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs, and St.

[208][209][210] The school mascot is an anthropomorphized badger named Bucky who dons a sweater affixed with the UW–Madison athletic logo (currently the red "Motion W").

), David J. Lesar (Halliburton), Kelly Kahl (CBS Entertainment), Keith Nosbusch (Rockwell Automation), Lee Raymond (Exxon Mobil), Tom Kingsbury (Burlington Stores), and Judith Faulkner (Epic Systems).

UW–Madison alumni have made significant contributions to the field of computer science, including Edison Medal recipient Howard H. Aiken, who envisioned the conceptual design behind IBM's Harvard Mark I,[225] and Turing Award Laureate Pat Hanrahan (BS, PhD).

[230] Faculty members have been responsible for numerous scientific advances at UW–Madison, including the single-grain experiment by Stephen Babcock,[231] the discovery of vitamins A and B by Elmer McCollum and Marguerite Davis,[232] the development of the anticoagulant medication warfarin by Karl Paul Link,[233] the first chemical synthesis of a gene by Har Gobind Khorana,[234] the discovery of the retroviral enzyme reverse transcriptase by Howard Temin,[40] and the first synthesis of human embryonic stem cells by James Thomson.