This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/uw-tenure-hysteria-was-unwarranted/

A look at what has happened in UW System since 2015

The number of tenured faculty in the University of Wisconsin System has fallen roughly in line with the decrease in student enrollment since 2015 — the year a legislative decision to take tenure guarantees out of state statute unleashed a torrent of blowback from professors who called the move by Republican legislators “destructive” and “remarkably chilling” and like “a death in the family.”

A look back at what has happened to tenured faculty since then uncovered no deaths.

Or even much use of the replacement policy that was passed by the Board of Regents.

The numbers of tenured professors in the System decreased approximately 8% — from 4,561 to 4,209, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau — between the 2016-17 school year and 2021-22. Student enrollment was down 9% over the same time period.

Evidence in retrospect shows that the much-derided change in tenure protection — which took place in stages, first in the Legislature and then at the Board of Regents, in 2015 and 2016 — has had very little impact at all in the eight or nine years since then.

The changes were relatively simple.

Beginning in the 1970s and up until July of 2015, tenured faculty were protected by state law and the Wisconsin Administrative Code. Tenured faculty could basically only be laid off in cases of a campus-wide financial emergency.

In 2016, the Board of Regents enacted a new policy that allows layoffs when programs are cut and gives chancellors more latitude to act without as much faculty involvement.

The new policy has been used only once since 2016, according to media reports, and the single professor affected reportedly declined an offer to start another program.

UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone has reportedly recently cited the 2016 changes — which allowed layoffs when programs are cut — in explaining his decision to close two branch campuses and lay off at least some tenured faculty.

But it appears he could probably have done the same thing prior to 2015 — just not as easily.

Mone has cited enrollment declines and reduced tuition revenues and the fact the status quo is “no longer sustainable” — definitions, it would seem, of a campus-wide financial emergency. Hard to imagine almost anyone outside of academia arguing Mone should not have the ability to address that.

UW-M officials did not respond to questions by our deadline.

Even if not much used, the changes adopted by the Board of Regents in 2016 were a good thing. They gave chancellors greater ability to manage enrollment decreases and financial challenges and cut tenured staff when programs need to be cut.

And programs, actually, are cut pretty frequently.

A Badger Institute paper in 2016, The Trouble With Tenure, pointed out that UW System campuses eliminate, suspend and add programs nearly every year. Tenured professors can now, at least theoretically, be eliminated when programs are no longer necessary — exactly the way jobs are eliminated every day in the private sector when the market changes or demand dries up.

The reality is that never happens. But it should.

We recommended eight years ago that the Board of Regents go further. They had the ability to allow layoffs of tenured faculty for reasons that included significant program reduction or modification, not simply program discontinuance, but declined.

We still believe that giving chancellors that sort of latitude would be more than appropriate.

Numbers of tenured faculty are decreasing. The only question now is whether the ones left in our universities are always the ones the students truly need.

Mike Nichols is the President of the Badger Institute, Mark Lisheron its Managing Editor. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the authors and Badger Institute are properly cited.

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