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Tenure still sort of exists in Wisconsin, but is now officially a much weaker protection than before

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 10–MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

The Regents are set to approve what one correspondent aptly called "tenure lite," and faculty involved in the process are, correctly, not happy.  The big issue is not post-tenure review, which many states have adopted, so far without egregious miscarriages, but rather this:

Under the final plan, tenured faculty can still be laid off and programs downsized in financial emergencies….They also could lose their jobs if their programs are discontinued for "educational considerations," which include long-term student and market demand as well as "societal needs." Each system campus will be free to develop its own policies under the plan….

Now Wisconsin chancellors can cut programs that aren't generating revenue regardless of the courses' educational value and can fire professors who teach concepts such as climate change that aren't popular with conservative legislators who hold the system's purse-strings, [critics] contend.

"If professors are put at risk for telling the truth, for seeking out the truth, for teaching the truth, and losing control of what they teach, we have lost something very essential in public higher education," said Barmak Nassirian, director of federal policy for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

Opponents also warned that quality instructors will flee to schools with stronger tenure protections.

I do think this is a disastrous revision of the tenure rules, that will invite political meddling and mischief.  It will also put Philosophy Departments at risk, if not at Madison, certainly in other parts of the UW System.  I am not aware of any other state authorizing programs and tenured faculty to be terminated under the vague and much lower standard of "educational considerations."  (Am I wrong?  Please correct me in the comments, with links please.)  And to think that this catastrophe happened in a state that used to be at the progressive vanguard!

Thoughts from readers, whether in Wisconsin or elsewhere?

UPDATE:  IHE clarifies the issue about the role of "educational considerations," noting that the AAUP "also allows for faculty layoffs for educational reasons determined by faculty members" (emphasis added).

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11 responses to “Tenure still sort of exists in Wisconsin, but is now officially a much weaker protection than before”

  1. V. Alan White

    Full disclosure: I was a member of the Tenure Task Force (TTF).

    The final result is not at all what faculty representatives of the TTF wished it to be, even though we could not restore tenure to its previously strong status anyway, due to the state legislature's actions. These were: deleting tenure (36.13), modifying conditions of firing tenured faculty from cause and financial exigency to cause and program changes (36.21), and adding new law (36.22) that specifies procedures for the latter. All draft language was handed to the TTF as authored by Regents and UW legal and staff. There was no vote allowed on versions–all TTF commentary was advisory only.

    Statutory procedures for program change include modification and reduction, and thankfully–if one can be thankful here–the Regents finally only included procedures for termination of tenured faculty for program closure. However, given that the legislature holds the purse-strings here, that's cold comfort, and especially if you are a more peripheral UW institution trying to survive very repeated life-threatening cuts. I've had some conversations to the effect that it seems Madison faculty are largely nonplussed by all this–they feel they have the reputation and cash to have something more like full-fledged tenure protections. Well, if so good for them as they enjoy a new form of de facto tenure protection. For now.

    We have had UW System-imposed post-tenure review since 1992. The new policy makes it more rigorous and uniform across the System, but provides insufficient shared-governance protections for negative reviews.

    Every campus in UW has this statement on a plaque from the Regents, 1894:

    "Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."

    I wonder if faculty might, in protest, place on every campus a small placard-revision of "ful" over the "less" modifying the important base adjectival term "fear".

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  2. David Sullivan

    BL writes: "I am not aware of any other state authorizing programs and tenured faculty to be terminated under the vague and much lower standard of 'educational considerations'."

    It is pretty much everywhere (now), meaning program elimination based upon "long-range judgments that the educational mission of the institution as a whole will be enhanced by discontinuance." Whatever that means (and to whom).

    Search 'layoff "educational considerations" site:.edu' in Google.

    BL COMMENT: I'm asking for evidence that other state university systems have adopted the rule that tenured faculty can be fired because their program is eliminated not for financial exigency but because of "educational considerations." If such rules have been adopted, it's been done rather below the radar. The proposed search turns up on its first page lots of University of Wisconsin campus pages!

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  3. David Sullivan

    The curious phrase "based essentially upon educational considerations" derives, I believe, from the AAUP "Red Book" and is found in numerous state university handbooks and the like.

    https://books.google.com/books?id=HM7xBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&dq=%22based+essentially+upon+educational+considerations%22#v=onepage&q=%22based%20essentially%20upon%20educational%20considerations%22&f=false

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  4. Owen Schaefer

    Looking at further Google results from David Sullivan's suggestion, there are indeed a number of non-UW university policies on firing tenured faculty (via eliminating a department/center) due to educational considerations.

    Moreover, the AAUP itself allows for 'educational considerations' in its recommendations for tenure regulations: http://www.aaup.org/report/recommended-institutional-regulations-academic-freedom-and-tenure , at 4(d)(1). To be sure, that AAUP language seems stronger than the UW rules (or other instantiations), insofar as the under AAUP's suggested regs, the faculty themselves determine whether the educational considerations are met. But the language itself, at least, is endorsed, so it should not be a great surprise for it to appear in various university rules and regulations.

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  5. Gregory C. Mayer

    I'm a professor at one of the "peripheral institutions". The effect of "tenure lite" or "fake tenure" (as it's variously known) will be to further fuel a trend of faculty departures that has been noticeable each year since 2011. Of the faculty at my campus in 2010, 36% left in 2011 through 2015. For the sciences, for which I have more long term data, fully 50% of the faculty left during this same period, and this represents a highly statistically significant 2-3 fold increase in the rate of departure (measured by either percentage or absolute number) over the previous 19 years. I presented these numbers at a recent meeting with three members of the Board of Regents, and one of them perceptively noted that it was thus Act 10, not the recent threat to tenure, that had precipitated the departures. The new tenure measures will thus deepen the problem, but they have not created it. Remember, these are departures from a branch campus, not from Madison, where many faculty have stellar academic credentials that can lead to newsworthy departures (such as Sara Goldrick-Rab). There will, however, be an inevitable plateauing of the departures, as the old and young, who both have easier pathways to departure (retirement or starting over elsewhere, respectively) leave, so that only those who have a more difficult path out are left.

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  6. Anonymous Coward

    "The proposed search turns up on its first page lots of University of Wisconsin campus pages!"

    Protip: 'layoff "educational considerations" site:.edu -Wisconsin'

    Reply
  7. Marie Monaco

    At the root of the tenure crisis is the erosion of shared governance. The faculty have become increasingly marginalized and are no longer able to effect outcomes. University boards and administrations feel free to ignore faculty recommendations and are increasingly bypassing faculty governance altogether, whether the issue is tenure or curriculum or finances. Here at NYU in 2013 faculty organized and expressed their displeasure with the administration via votes of no confidence. The result: a lot of talk about "listening to faculty" while behind the scenes the administration was busy further dismantling faculty governance. I doubt the weakening of tenure rights can be reversed, so where do we go from here?

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  8. V. Alan White

    Very interesting that today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel relegated the tenure story to page three! But then again, the MJS was just purchased by Gannett, which now owns something of a monopoly on Wisconsin print media. It was displaced by such urgent front-page stuff as "Kohl's Refreshes Its Sonoma Brand: Billion-dollar flagship line gets a makeover". Seems like some flagships are more important than others. Well, back to my garbage scow.

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  9. Sean McAleer

    If there were a legitimate problem this was designed to solve, it'd still be pretty disheartening, but it might be a bit easier to take. But the truth seems to be that this is just another attempt to consolidate political power, much like the gerrymandering that results in legislative majorities that don’t accurately reflect voting patterns (e.g., http://wisconsinwatch.org/2012/12/data-votes-vs-seats-in-the-2012-elections/).

    More specifically, it’s the second prong of an attack on perceived liberal power bases in Wisconsin.

    The first prong was the attack on unions (itself a two-pronger): Act 10 hobbled public unions in Wisconsin (though not, if memory serves, the unions that endorsed Governor Walker's election bid), and the "Right to Work" legislation passed last year tries to do the same to private-sector unions. (An aside: Governor Walker earned a "full flop" from Politifact on this (http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2015/feb/23/scott-walker/supporting-2015-right-work-legislation-scott-walke/. Whereas most politicians end up not delivering on what they campaign on, Governor Walker has mastered the art of delivering what he did not campaign on.)

    Senate president Scott Fitzgerald proclaimed back in 2011 that "If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin." (http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/09/149655/scott-fitzgerald-obama/) I'm not sure if I should be refreshed by Fitzgerald's honesty or distressed by the fact that someone so politically artless can rise to such a position of power — but that's life in Wisconsin these days.

    Now we have second prong: ending shared governance and significantly weakening the strongest tenure protections in the country. It’s hard not to see this as anything but an attempt to go after another perceived liberal power base. Maybe Regent President Millner really believes that scaling back tenure protections is a financial issue, that it's all about providing campus chancellors with "flexibility." But if chancellors require greater flexibility, it's to deal with the crisis created by the huge budget cut pushed through by Governor Walker, House Speaker Vos, et al. It seems either clueless or disingenuous to put this in terms of managerial flexibility.

    In some ways, the loss of shared governance is worse than the weakening of tenure. Faculty have gone from having "responsibility for the immediate governance of the institution … and as such had the primary responsibility for academic and educational activities and faculty personnel matters" to having responsibility for "advising the chancellor regarding academic and educational activities and faculty personnel matters." There seem to be no formal or institutional constraints to prevent mischief the sort of recently witnessed at Mt. Saint Mary's. So long as a campus chancellor has the backing of the regents (political appointees who for the most part have no experience in higher education other than having been students), the sky's the limit – especially when most of them have been appointed by someone who wants to ditch “the search for truth” as the core of the UW system’s mission in favor of “meet[ing] the state’s workforce needs.” Relying on a sort of chancorial noblesse oblige seems like a terrible idea (even when one's chancellor is one of good ones, as is the case at UWEC).

    So, tenure is radically scaled back, shared governance is gone, faculty pay more toward retirement and health insurance (back in the day, the generous benefits were supposed to compensate for the comparatively low pay in the UW), there hasn’t been a cost-of-living raise in I can’t remember when – but at least on 3/14 there is pie in the break room.

    Reply
  10. Daniel Kaufman

    Brian: At our university, programs/departments can be eliminated for being "low completers," which means, failing to graduate more than X number of people per year. What happens to the faculty in those programs is anyone's guess, but there isn't really anything you could do with them, so I am assuming they would be laid off.

    Reply
  11. V. Alan White

    Sean (if I may) is exactly right. Off-term elections in 2010 and 2014 installed and maintained a right-wing majority in Wisconsin (and reinforced through gerrymandered redistricting as well) and the agenda has marched accordingly to form. After a quarter-billion dollar cut to UW for the present biennium the legislature is signalling that projected tax revenues will not support increases–we may well be cut again. And the tactics of the politics of resentment will be used again, and in a double sense. The legislature will once again see UW "cash reserves"–highly concentrated in Madison–as sufficient reason to refuse to increase funding for the System and maybe even decrease it further. Which of course–the intention is clear–will jeopardize many other non-Madison branches of UW. My two-year UW institution is already cut into the bone, and offices on my campus are literally dark from elimination of staff. Still, I would not envy the position of colleagues at at least four 4-year campuses either–this bit of info from the mouth of a former System finance director. And so the second sense of resentment kicks in–pitting segments of UW against one another. The Chancellor of UW-Milwaukee recently said that the survival of his campus as a newly elevated R1 might require that other UW campuses suffer. So the large-scale strategy is clear: destroy the university from the outside in, leaving the revenue-producing engine of Madison largely intact. At least the liberal-leaning university will be on a short leash.

    Now they have the means to make the short-leash economics effective: programs can be closed–especially humanities perceived as under-performing–and tenured people fired. From this–to vouchers, voter-ID, non-disclosure of political funding–the right-wing has a long-term agenda. It is the future of maintaining power–the power of money and privilege.

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