S tate budget crunches and political turmoil have set off rumblings about a mass faculty exodus from public colleges in some states. High-profile defections stoke the rumors. But have professors really fled in droves?
It appears they haven’t. But the threat of departures has led to plenty of maneuvering behind the scenes, and to other consequences as well.
Many public colleges in Wisconsin, where legislators stripped tenure protection and $250 million in support, and in Illinois, where a state-budget impasse has left campuses in the lurch, didn’t lose substantially more faculty members to other institutions than in previous years.
But even if most professors are staying put, many have considered leaving. Some have quietly entered the job market, and others may soon follow. Meanwhile, universities elsewhere have escalated efforts to lure top scholars away from besieged competitors.
Faculty turnover is a fact of academic life, but the forces squeezing public colleges in several states make the jockeying for jobs a little more charged this time. Departures have further dimmed already low morale, even at prestigious flagships. And with budgets trimmed to the quick, especially at regional universities, the loss of professors who may not be replaced is felt deeply.
Many colleges haven’t yet resolved all of their negotiations this academic year, but they’ve been counting up the losses. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had lost 22 out of about 1,900 tenured or tenure-track professors as of January, compared with only about a dozen in each of the previous two academic years to that point. The university did not respond to requests for more-recent data.
At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, out of about 2,250 tenured or tenure-track faculty members, about 23 have left so far this academic year, a number comparable to those of past years, says Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, the provost.
The number of departures disguises a frenzy of recruiting and negotiating. Twenty-one professors at Urbana-Champaign have asked for counteroffers from the university through January of this academic year, compared with just 11 in the same span last year. At Madison, requests for counteroffers nearly tripled, from 37 during the 2014-15 academic year to 94 in 2015-16 to date.
That comes with costs. With several cases still pending, the Madison flagship has managed so far to retain 76 of 88 professors who asked for counteroffers. That’s a retention rate of 86 percent, which nearly matches last year’s.
The university, aware that other institutions would entice its professors, budgeted funds to beat back the competition. Madison, even as it economized elsewhere, spent nearly $16 million this academic year on salary increases and additional research support to help keep faculty members who had offers in hand, Ms. Mangelsdorf says.
The prospect of departures also has less-tangible costs. In addition to the challenges of weakened tenure, eroded shared governance, and budget cuts at Madison, all the discussion about who’s staying. who’s leaving, and why has led to “an incredible amount of noise,” says Nan Enstad, a professor of history. “It’s been a demoralizing year.”
‘Quit Lit’
Most departing faculty members leave quietly, but some make their dissatisfaction public. Caroline Levine, who is stepping down as chair of the English department and leaving Madison, wrote an op-ed essay about her decision, taking the state government to task. Political rhetoric in Wisconsin often depicts professors as pampered fat cats who suck up tax dollars and offer little value. Ms. Levine had had enough. “We were told that we were wasting the public’s money while we’re working like crazy to do our jobs as well as we can,” she says. “That’s the part that made it easy to go.”
Sara Goldrick-Rab, who was a professor of education-policy studies and sociology at Madison, announced last summer that, because of weakened tenure protection, she would be looking for a new job. In March she declared in a blog post that she was leaving Wisconsin. She described how the state’s new “fake tenure” policies had led to her departure.
“I needed to lay it out there, for the people who aren’t my friends, who don’t already know,” says Ms. Goldrick-Rab. “I had to say what had to be said.” As she sees it, the University of Wisconsin at Madison “only learns when you call it out.”
“Quit lit” is nothing new in higher education, says Nicholas C. Burbules, a professor of education policy, organization, and leadership at Urbana-Champaign. But typically it’s about leaving academe itself, not a particular university. The decision to depart one college for another is often shaped not only by a professor’s attitude toward the institution, but also by pay, benefits, opportunities for career advancement, and the effect on family life.
Statements like Ms. Levine’s and Ms. Goldrick-Rab’s make a move an apparent act of social and political protest, and not just that “the grass is greener somewhere else,” says Mr. Burbules. Both Ms. Levine and Ms. Goldrick-Rab say their decisions were not based on money. But each is making significantly more at Cornell University and Temple University, respectively.
In some cases, political turmoil or fiscal instability may be only a final push out the door. Arthur Kramer, director of Urbana-Champaign’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, is leaving his alma mater after more than 30 years to take a position at Northeastern University. So is his wife, Laurie F. Kramer, an associate dean for academic programs in the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences.
The move offers a great professional opportunity, Mr. Kramer says, and a chance for the couple to be near their daughter, in Boston. While the budget impasse in Illinois didn’t drive their decision to leave, he explains, “I can’t say that it wasn’t a factor.”
Universities are always working, subtly and less so, to lure academic stars away from one another, but the climates in Wisconsin and Illinois rang the dinner bell for other institutions. Ms. Mangelsdorf, the Madison provost, says she heard as much from colleagues elsewhere. “They would jokingly tell me, ‘We’ve been given the green light to go after faculty from Wisconsin.’ " But they weren’t kidding.
More than just poaching individual scholars, some colleges planned ambitious raids. A fellow Big 10 university tried to hire three of the 30 faculty members in the department of education policy, organization, and leadership at Urbana-Champaign, says Mr. Burbules. So far none of them has resigned.
Looming Threat
Faculty members at Madison have debated staying and fighting rather than leaving, says Ms. Enstad, the history professor. The overwhelming majority has stayed put for now. “One percent is not exactly an exodus,” says David T. Canon, a professor of political science.
But departures may continue in the year to come. Wisconsin’s Board of Regents didn’t approve the controversial new tenure policy until March, which left some despairing faculty members little time to enter the 2015-16 academic job market. “The retention issue, in terms of outside offers, is going to be much bigger next year than it is this year,” says Ms. Goldrick-Rab. “It’s giving people more time to get their ducks in a row.”
The university will continue to retain faculty members as aggressively as it can, says Ms. Mangelsdorf, but that doesn’t mean everyone. “You will never have a 100-percent retention record,” she says, “nor would you want one.” The loss of faculty members sometimes offers opportunities to hire new stars. Madison recently announced that it had hired Phillip A. Newmark, a developmental biologist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, away from Urbana-Champaign.
But after years of diminishing state support — or, in the case of Illinois, none for most of the past year — many tenure-track professors who leave aren’t replaced. The issue is especially acute beyond the public flagships, which typically have more-robust fund-raising and research budgets.
“It’s just disastrous at this point,” says Andrea Imre, an electronic-resources librarian and a recent president of the Faculty Senate at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. The university has not seen a spike in departures this year, according to a spokeswoman. When professors do leave, their positions are sometimes filled by contingent faculty members, Ms. Imre says, but frequently are not filled at all.
The slow bleeding of the tenured faculty has been going on for years now, says Rachel I. Buff, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. In her 12 years there, the number of full-timers in her department has dwindled from 35 to about 29, she says, a “skeleton crew” that has trouble covering certain geographical and chronological gaps in the curriculum.
Ms. Buff knows of about 10 professors leaving Milwaukee. They’re not “players,” looking to clamber up the career ladder, she says. “These are people who built lives and really invested.” When they leave, they take with them not only their scholarship but also years of institutional memory and the ability to get things done at the university.
Few of her colleagues who left were eager to do so, Ms. Buff says, and neither is she. Her husband teaches at the university. Her daughter goes to a local school. “I can’t build a life like this again,” she says. “I’m going down with the ship.”
Correction (6/21/2016, 5 p.m.): This article originally reported that the department of education policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has 42 faculty members. In fact, it has 30. The article has been updated accordingly.
Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.
