Wisconsin Campus Closure Approved; Philosophers & Others To Lose Jobs
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents voted last week to approve the closure of the Waukesha campus of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Thirty-two professors will be laid off, including three tenured philosophers.
They are Timothy Dunn, Dean Kowalski, and Tait Szabo.
See this earlier post for background.
An article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:
UW-Milwaukee closed its Washington County campus at the end of the 2023-24 school year, and its Waukesha campus will shutter after the spring 2025 semester. Faculty at the two campuses worked in an academic unit called the College of General Studies. The UW Board of Regents on Thursday eliminated the college, and with it, the professors’ jobs… Board members were apologetic about what they called an “unfortunate situation.” They blamed poor planning and a lack of oversight on the 2018 restructuring project, which placed the branch campuses collectively known as UW Colleges under four-year universities. Enrollment had been declining even before the merger but has accelerated since then.
Only one member of the 18-member board voted against the layoffs.
The article notes that the layoffs are the result of weakening of tenure protections:
Before 2016, if a program was discontinued, faculty with tenure protections had to be placed in a different position if they did not leave on their own accord. Tenured faculty could be laid off only in a campuswide financial emergency or be terminated for just cause. For decades, Wisconsin had some of the strongest tenure protections in the country because they were written into state law. Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2015 stripped those protections from state law. They added language into the law giving chancellors clear authority over program decisions, and allowed for tenured faculty to be laid off if an academic program is discontinued. The regents, the majority of whom were Walker appointees, approved the new tenure policy in 2016 despite intense faculty objections. Since then, the board has applied the layoff policy just once, for a single UW-Platteville professor in 2021.
The Journal Sentinel article, paywalled, is here.
(via Alan White)
more writing on the wall, under the current state gov austerity regime here in Iowa schools @ UofI are being told to develop alternative business/funding plans, likely our professional schools (and hard science programs) will do what they can to be more like the Ag school @ Iowa State having sold themselves to Big Ag interests but not sure what the other disciplines can do but make more cuts…
Sad to read this. And this is on top of the other small/satellite closures this past year. “UW-Milwaukee at Washington County and UW-Oshkosh Fond du Lac campus will no longer have in-person instruction as of June 2024.
UW-Platteville Richland, which had previously announced suspension of in-person instruction, will be fully closed.”
You can see the decline in all these UW System branch campuses enrollments since the 2018 restructuring/merger here, although it’s probably a post-hoc argument on the part of Board of Regents to say it’s *because* of the restructuring.
UW cuts in-person learning at Washington and Fond duc Lac campuses (jsonline.com)
The restructuring itself was a situation largely created by chronic under/non-funding since the early 2000s. The Republicans especially became aggressive on this in about 2013 when they made a huge political deal about “unspent reserves”. When an institution cannot expend a lot of funds on recruitment–as what happened at the branch campuses–then enrollment falls. And–the legislature gave the tech schools equivalent transferability of credits to the four-years, further weakening the role of the branch campuses. It must be strongly emphasized that a lot of this is the result of persistent political machinations. My own campus (I’m emeritus)–now UW–Green Bay, Manitowoc–is attached to a four-year that has supported us so far–but the future looks pretty bleak.
“starve the beast” then shutter due to forced insolvency. the same strategy is being used for public primary and secondary education in red states.
Would you like a deeper understanding of the structural reasons why such calamities are permitted to happen and why they will continue happening if we don’t rethink the structure of the university? And are you interested in thinking through a cogent and workable vision of how the university should be structured?
Read Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn’s The Autocratic Academy: Re-envisioning Rule Within America’s Universities (Duke University Press, 2023).
A choice, synoptic passage:
Of course there were intense faculty objections. To say, though, that it was “despite” those faculty objections that the regents approved new tenure policies suggests, mistakenly, that faculty even had a structurally recognized, legitimate basis for complaint.
I was an invited direct participant in the 2015 Tenure Task Farce (sic). I can tell you first hand that everything that finally resulted from the committee was completely top-down from a stacked voting deck, and obviously politically motivated from the belief that the university represented “liberal” values and should be geographically shrunk as much as possible–which has occurred. Considerations of the protection of tenure based on matters of academic freedom (e.g.) were not even in real question in all of this. To ignore all that is to wear blinders about how conservative mistrust about universities has worked–as it obviously has in my beloved state and shrinking university system.
Yikes. I’m sad to hear how accurate Kaufman-Osborn’s account is.
(That is, Kaufman-Osborn’s account details precisely what makes the top-down pressure you describe possible, and outlines a vision of the university as less an autocratic corporation and more a small-r republican one, in which faculty are constitutionally guaranteed a say in how the university is governed.)
Alan
I worked at a state university, in a different state (a “progressive” one) for a number of years. Any committee formed to address an “important” issue was carefully constructed to produce a document that reinforced a decision that was already made by the senior administration. And there was an endless supply of willing participants among the faculty, people who had no real research career, but enjoyed “interacting” with the senior administrators. It was quite distressing. These people had endless energy for having meetings … endless