More tenured faculty get the axe in Wisconsin, thanks to the awful former Governor Scott Walker

This time it's faculty at two branch campuses of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee:

The board overseeing Wisconsin public universities voted to lay off 32 tenured University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors, marking the first large-scale application of a Republican policy put in place nearly a decade ago.

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.

"It's always the people who make the least who get cut first, right?" asked Tait Szabo, an associate professor of philosophy for the branch campuses, at a rally held before the vote. He said he had given 17 years to the UW System and ended his academic career earning about $56,000. Milwaukee isn't brimming with other philosophy faculty jobs for him to apply for, but his family has established roots in the area, leaving Szabo in limbo.

"That's just my story," he said. "Now multiply it by about 30, plus all the staff ... already laid off"....

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.

(Thanks to Alan White for the pointer.)