A life of service in Milwaukee

I'm JR Radcliffe and this is the Daily Briefing newsletter by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Sign up here to get it sent to your inbox each morning .

We're back in the 80s starting today, with a high near 82 and sunny skies. It's a high near 84 tomorrow and 86 on Sunday, with sunny skies throughout.

A life of service in Milwaukee

The Rev. Carmen Porco came to Milwaukee in 1965 as an intern to work at the Milwaukee Christian Center and soon found himself in the midst of the city's open housing marches, led by Father James Groppi, whose mission of seeking fairness and equality in housing influenced how Porco approached his role in developing and leading Housing Ministries of Wisconsin.

As CEO, he was responsible for running six low-income housing complexes in Madison and Milwaukee, including Greentree Apartments on the city's northwest side. For 50 years, Porco led by the mantra: “Serving others, to serve themselves.”

Angela Peterson has an interview with Porco , who passed the torch in January to his longtime assistant, part of her project on the Greentree-Teutonia Apartments public housing complex on Milwaukee’s north side.

UW-Milwaukee will lay off 32 tenured professors

The board overseeing Wisconsin public universities voted to lay off 32 tenured University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors , marking the first large-scale application of a Republican policy put in place nearly a decade ago.

UW-Milwaukee closed its Washington County campus at the end of the 2023-24 school year , and its Waukesha campus will shutter after the spring 2025 semester. Faculty at the two campuses worked in an academic unit called the College of General Studies. The UW Board of Regents on Thursday eliminated the college, and with it, the professors' jobs.

Board members were apologetic about what they called an "unfortunate situation." They blamed poor planning and a lack of oversight on the 2018 restructuring project, which placed the branch campuses collectively known as UW Colleges under four-year universities. Enrollment had been declining even before the merger but has accelerated since then.

"It's always the people who make the least who get cut first, right?" asked Tait Szabo, an associate professor of philosophy for the branch campuses, at a rally held before the vote. Kelly Meyerhofer has the full story.

Don't miss these

• The conventions are over! Here's a look back at the USA Today coverage from Day 4 of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. What did you think of Kamala Harris' speech? Check out Mike De Sisti's time-lapse video of the United Center filling up and emptying during Wednesday night.
• Here's a bit more about Gus Walz, the son of vice president candidate Tim Walz, and non-verbal learning disorder, written by mental health reporter Natalie Eilbert.
• Remembering Jeanette Mitchell, who founded the African American Leadership Alliance of Milwaukee.
• This was in yesterday's Daily Briefing, but there's still time to give it a shot. Could you pass the test to become a U.S. citizen? Give it a try! I got 5 out of 10 … not great, though I mistyped on one of them, I guess?
• A downtown Milwaukee dog park is breaking ground early in September and could be open by year's end.
• An all-vegan festival in Wisconsin featuring more than 50 vendors from the state?
• A well-known comic strip creator made a stop at Lambeau Field.
• A former U.S. Representative from Wisconsin, Mike Gallagher, has a new high-profile gig.

JR Radcliffe can be reached at (262) 361-9141 or jradcliffe@gannett.com . Follow him on Twitter at @JRRadcliffe .

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: A life of service in Milwaukee