U. of Wisconsin Faculty Members Fear Gutting of Tenure

Mike De Sisti, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Faculty leaders in the University of Wisconsin system are sounding alarms that its governing board appears poised to leave unrepaired much of the damage that state lawmakers did last year to professors’ job security and shared-governance powers.

The Wisconsin Legislature stripped faculty powers and tenure protections from state law as part of an overhaul signed by Gov. Scott Walker, prompting the university system to move to adopt such policies on its own. Faculty members warn, however, that the policies being considered by the Board of Regents on Friday are weak replacements for what lawmakers removed, and would leave professors vulnerable to arbitrary dismissal.

The strongest faculty objections to the proposed policies focus on their provisions dealing with posttenure review and with faculty layoffs in the event of program cuts.

Faculty leaders have criticized the posttenure-review policy as unnecessary, too focused on possible negative outcomes, and not offering professors enough assurance that their tenure would remain intact.

The proposed policies on program cuts have come under fire for letting such decisions be based on financial considerations rather than educational ones. They’ve also been accused of making it too easy for the system to shed tenured faculty members by starving academic programs seen as not meeting the state’s job needs.

“This represents a new vision of what a public university should be. It is not a vision that I and my colleagues share,” said David J. Vanness, president of the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

But Regina M. Millner, the board’s president, on Wednesday dismissed many of the criticisms of the proposed policies as unfounded, saying that they mirror the policies in place at public universities in other states and that some faculty leaders would have complained about them “no matter what we wrote.”

The board’s education committee plans to discuss the proposed policies on Friday, to fine-tune them before an expected board vote on them in March. Given tensions between the system’s faculty leaders and the board, which consists primarily of gubernatorial appointees, it remains unclear whether the policies will be tweaked enough to overcome faculty objections.

Overcoming Uncertainty

The proposed policies’ potential threats to job security are just the latest source of stress for the University of Wisconsin system’s instructors, who have endured decades of meager salary growth and were stripped of their collective-bargaining rights under legislation pushed through by Governor Walker, a Republican, in 2011.

“I wish UW faculty had something to smile about,” said Ken Menningen, a professor of physics at the system’s Stevens Point campus who served on the panel of faculty members and administrators that drafted the policies. “We’ve had a string of multiple decades with budget cut after budget cut, and we’ve been paid below-average salaries for as long as I can remember, and now it’s easier to get laid off?”

Many faculty leaders say the system’s campuses are already losing their ability to recruit and retain faculty members. Nicholas Sloboda, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Superior and the chairman of a systemwide panel of faculty representatives, said every campus of the system had seen faculty members leave in response to tenure uncertainty and relatively poor compensation. Many job searches underway at system campuses have seen their finalists withdraw in response to similar considerations, he added.

“A good number of faculty are hoping that this is resolved, so that the message can be sent out that there is tenure in the state of Wisconsin,” Mr. Sloboda said. Rather than prolonging the debate over the proposed policies, he said, “I think we have to face reality and deal with the cards that we have been given.”

Not Dead Yet

Other faculty leaders, however, argue that the policies need to be drastically revised or else they will only worsen the working conditions of the system’s professors.

Among the policies’ critics, Mr. Vanness, an associate professor of population health sciences on the Madison campus, said they “use a veneer of legitimacy to hide several deep flaws, leaving UW system faculty in as great a state of uncertainty as ever.”

The Faculty Senate at the system’s Whitewater campus has issued a statement arguing that the policies “violate the standards of American higher education” and will lead to “an erosion in the quality of our university, as many faculty whose life circumstances make it possible to leave may do so.”

The American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers’ Wisconsin affiliate on Wednesday issued a statement raising the possibility that the AAUP would censure the system for any failure to abide by the association’s principles.

On the other side of the debate, Ms. Millner said the task force of administrators and faculty members that devised the new policies “took this work very, very seriously.” She added, “Clearly, tenure is not dead, nor ever has been dead, in Wisconsin.”

The Faculty Senate at Whitewater has urged the board to postpone a vote on new policies until December, to allow time for input from faculty-governance bodies that, it argues, have been given far too little opportunity so far to weigh in. Until such a December vote, it said, the regents can keep in place the stopgap measure the board adopted in response to last year’s legislation, a policy that replicates the tenure protections that had been enshrined in state law.

Ms. Millner said the Board of Regents had already made an exceptional effort to account for faculty concerns, going so far as to alter the agenda for this week’s meeting so its education committee could hold a special session to make additional policy revisions. She said she did not want to postpone a vote on the policies past next month’s meeting because the system will be entering the time of year when it seeks to recruit new faculty members, and “we want to make sure people understand that we have a tenure policy that is in alignment with our peer institutions’.”

Costs and Benefits

The University of Wisconsin system had stood apart in terms of how much its shared governance and faculty job protections were spelled out under state law. The Republican lawmakers who had advocated the repeal of such legislation argued that it got in the way of quick, top-down decision making, hindering the system’s efforts to remain competitive.

Ms. Millner and Raymond W. Cross, the university system’s president, established the task force that came up with the new policies last March, after it became clear that the legislature was going to divest to the system the task of setting the terms of its faculty members’ employment. The 19-member panel included system officials, campus administrators, and tenured professors.

The system’s AAUP chapters last weighed in on the task force’s policy proposals in December. Even faculty leaders critical of the task force’s work give it credit for heeding faculty members’ concerns in several areas and, for example, incorporating into its policy proposals stronger protections of academic freedom than it originally devised.

An online forum established by the regents to allow professors to anonymously comment on the policies makes clear that faculty leaders are not alone in their concerns. Among the objections raised there, several faculty members have protested that the proposed policies give faculty members little incentive to perform well, and do not provide those who receive poor performance reviews adequate time for remediation. Others characterize the proposed policies as penny-wise and pound-foolish, in that the system will need to substantially increase faculty salaries if it cannot offer faculty members better tenure protections.

“I am so saddened by these policies,” wrote one commenter who self-identified as a relatively new professor on the system’s La Crosse campus and said, “These policies have made me start looking elsewhere for a new position.”

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.