UW-Milwaukee tests decade-old tenure law with layoffs plan

Nearly a decade ago, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Republican legislators alarmed faculty members across the country when they removed tenure protections from state law. But since then – despite the Universities of Wisconsin System suffering significant enrolment declines and closing entire campuses – UW institutional leaders haven’t fully utilised the freedom Mr Walker and his allies gave them to oust tenured professors.

In 2021, the Wisconsin State Journal reported what it said was the first instance of the system’s board of regents laying off a tenured professor because their academic programme was discontinued – a justification that the Republicans’ Act 55 in 2015 allowed for. One person, Wonim Son, was laid off from UW Platteville.

Now, UW-Milwaukee has proposed something much bigger. The university has advanced plans to end its entire College of General Studies, which includes what used to be two separate, two-year college campuses that the state merged with UW-Milwaukee. All told, 35 tenured faculty members will lose their jobs if the board of regents approves UW-Milwaukee’s plan.

“UWM is sort of making us a test case of this policy from 2015 that hasn’t really been used yet,” Tait Szabo, a tenured associate philosophy professor in the College of General Studies, told Inside Higher Ed. “They can keep our programming after laying us off, keep our courses and hire untenured instructors to teach them and, according to their interpretations, this would not violate state law,” Dr Szabo said.

The UW-Milwaukee Faculty Senate decided in April that it would vote on whether to agree with the administration’s recommended layoffs in cases of programme discontinuations. The issue came before the senators on 7 August.

“Act 55 was a watershed in the history of tenure and faculty governance in Wisconsin, and not a positive one. I think we mostly agree on that,” Rachel Buff, a UW-Milwaukee history professor, said at the meeting. Professor Buff said she wondered “how comfortable we feel…with being pioneers in mass firings”, adding that “what they can do to one person, they can do to anyone”.

Ellyn Lem, a professor of English and gender studies in the College of General Studies who originally worked for UW Waukesha before it was absorbed, gave a speech that elicited applause. “None of us asked to be part of UW-Milwaukee, but when we were told this was our fate we committed ourselves to being worthy colleagues,” Professor Lem said. “If our jobs are going to be taken from us, who is going to protect yours?”

The Senate ended up rejecting the proposal – but its vote was only advisory, and the final decision lies with the board. It’s unclear when it will vote on the issue.

Nick Fleisher, president of the Wisconsin Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), said that, from the AAUP’s perspective, “the concern is that this sets a major precedent…we’re talking about a mass layoff of tenured faculty”.

But Kathleen Dolan, the elected chair of the Faculty Senate, agreed with UW-Milwaukee chancellor Mark Mone’s proposal to lay off these faculty members. So, Professor Dolan said, did all six of the other members of the Faculty Senate’s executive committee, which is dubbed the University Committee.

“This is an extraordinarily difficult position. It is something that nobody wants,” Professor Dolan said. “But when you look at the realities of the budget in the UW System campuses, we are not the first to have significant financial challenges. And we are faced with a situation where we have a unit that has experienced [a] 65 per cent decline in its enrolment.” Now, when it comes to employees, Professor Dolan said, “we have simply too many people”.

The university’s written proposal for the layoffs mentions that 65 per cent decline. The College of General Studies was born from UW-Milwaukee assimilating what used to be the UW System’s separate Waukesha and Washington County campuses. Those campuses’ enrolments, according to UW-Milwaukee, “have dropped catastrophically since 2013, with losses of 65.3 per cent (1,571 to 545) in Waukesha and 72 per cent (from 766 to 215) in Washington County”. The university system has now ordered both of the physical campuses that made up the College of General Studies to close.

Professor Dolan said 60 non-tenured College of General Studies employees had already received layoff notices. She acknowledged that tenure was important to protect professors’ right to teach, research and speak about controversial ideas, but said that “at some level, tenure is not a guarantee of lifetime employment”.

The Faculty Senate rejected their chancellor’s proposal for the layoffs 11 to 24, with one abstention, despite the University Committee’s approval. It was an example of the larger campus sticking up for the faculty members who joined it in the merger.

That merger made those faculty members part of this larger, R-1, “very high research activity” Carnegie classified institution – if only until the system board fires them. Professor Dolan and Dr Fleisher said the way they were brought on in the first place played into what was happening now.

‘Walled’ off

In 2018, the UW system mandated that the Waukesha and Washington County campuses merge with UW-Milwaukee as part of a larger merger of two-year campuses with four-year institutions across the state.

Other UW universities welcomed the two-year faculty members into their main campus departments, Dr Fleisher and Professor Dolan both said. UW-Milwaukee, on the other hand, created a whole new unit with its own departments – the College of General Studies – to house them.

Professor Dolan said this distinction mattered. The board of regents policy, passed in the wake of the 2015 law change, broadly lays out two paths to get rid of tenured faculty members: a whole university can declare financial exigency (a declaration likely to scare potential students away), or it can discontinue a programme.

A university that welcomed the formerly two-year faculty members into, for example, its main English programme might be loath to discontinue its whole English programme just to lay off those newer faculty members. But UW-Milwaukee created an entirely separate college with its own programmes, which it’s now discontinuing.

In its proposal for the layoffs, UW-Milwaukee wrote that it created the College of General Studies “to provide an organisational structure for the two-year campuses at Waukesha and Washington County”. University spokespeople didn’t respond to some of Inside Higher Ed’s questions, including whether this set-up was specifically created to enable layoffs of the former two-year college faculty members in the future.

“That administrative structure is what has enabled this proposal now,” Dr Fleisher said, because the College of General Studies faculty members were “walled” off from the rest of the university

Dr Szabo, one of those faculty members whose job will be gone if the board cuts it, said there’s a “divide-and-conquer mindset” that hearkens back to the Walker administration, in that faculty members on the main campus are being told to fear cuts by their own Faculty Senate leaders if UW-Milwaukee tries to keep him and the others employed. And Dr Szabo still blames the legislature to this day. “The source of all this pain is coming from the state legislature’s refusal to adequately fund the university,” he said.

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared on Inside Higher Ed.