Badger Institute has argued for more leeway to lay off professors
Republican candidates for governor are joining politicians across the country who are increasingly skeptical of tenure guarantees for professors.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who was part of a state Senate majority that helped put across the last major tenure reform in Wisconsin in 2015, told the Badger Institute this week that tenure would be a big part of a review of UW System spending and operations if he is elected governor.
The Badger Institute contacted all other Republican and Democrat candidates.
Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann is on the record in support of changes to tenure if warranted but did not respond to a request for an interview. There are seven announced Democrats in the race, none of whom have yet addressed the tenure issue.
“We reformed tenure a decade ago,” Tiffany said. “It’s worth going back and reviewing whether it did what it was supposed to do. At the end of the day, there has to be accountability.”
As part of the 2015 budget process, the Legislature removed tenure protections from the Wisconsin Administrative Code. The Board of Regents created its own policy, stating that a tenured faculty member “may not be terminated except for cause, for reasons of financial emergency, by resignation, or by retirement.” A second regent policy allows schools to lay off tenured faculty if a program is discontinued.
A Badger Institute paper, The Trouble With Tenure, pointed out that UW System campuses eliminate, suspend and add programs nearly every year. Tenured professors can now, at least theoretically, be eliminated when programs are no longer necessary — exactly the way jobs are eliminated every day in the private sector when the market changes or demand dries up. The reality is that never happens.
We recommended eight years ago that the Board of Regents go further. They had the ability to allow layoffs of tenured faculty for reasons that included significant program reduction or modification, not simply program discontinuance, but declined.
We still believe that giving chancellors that sort of latitude would be more than appropriate.
The universities are required to review the performance of tenured professors at least once every five years.
As the Badger Institute reported last year, only once since the change has the tenure policy been questioned. In August 2024, the regents approved allowing the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to end the College of General Studies at its two-year branches in Waukesha and Washington counties and to lay off 35 tenured faculty.
These financial decisions are often portrayed in the media by academics as an attack on academic freedom. The results of an audit by the Legislative Audit Bureau in the spring that showed more than $40 million had been spent on DEI programs across the system suggests how tenured faculty are deployed is instead an accountability issue, Tiffany said.
Across the system, there were 4,073 tenured faculty — professors and associate professors — teaching at the 13 schools in 2023-24, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s annual report.
That number is down from the 4,676 tenured staff working in the 2014-15 school year, a reduction of 12.9 percent. However, total enrollment during the same period was down 10.2 percent, to 162,531 students from 180,979 a decade earlier, according to Fiscal Bureau data.
Enrollment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been on a steady rise, up 17.4 percent, from 42,865 in 2014-15 to 50,335 in 2023-24. Total faculty during that time is up 5 percent, to 2,245 from 2,139, while tenured faculty is down slightly, from 1,629 to 1,593.
Even with those flat faculty numbers, universities President Jay Rothman asked for $855 million for the system’s 2025-27 budget. The Legislature gave him $256 million with a requirement that all teaching staff teach a minimum of 12 credit hours a year and at least one course a semester.
University officials late last month circulated a proposal accepting the workload with some exceptions. The Board of Regents has until Dec. 1 to approve the agreement and send it on to the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Employment Relations.
However, some faculty representatives are watching to see what the joint committee does with the proposal, raising the possibility of the same kind of challenge from a politically riven state Supreme Court as happened last summer when justices overruled a Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules action.
The pushback from educators is misdirected, Tiffany said. “They (the university system) brought this on themselves with their slush funds for programs like DEI,” he said. “The money is going into administration rather than the classroom. Students and their parents ought to know how this money is spent.”
A canvass by the Badger Institute found that in nearly a third of states, legislative bodies over the past two years have taken aim in some way at tenure. The pace of action has accelerated in the last year.
Nebraska is mulling whether to become the first state in the country to end tenure in its public institutions of higher learning and begin the process of “getting rid of professors who are not pulling their weight,” according to state Sen. Loren Lippincott, who introduced a bill in January.
Ohio has called for annual tenure reviews, leaves open the option to fire a professor for underperformance, and considers student evaluations of a professor’s ability to keep his classroom free of political, gender, racial and religious bias.
Kentucky this spring passed a bill requiring tenure reviews every four years and creating the option to fire tenured professors who fail to meet performance standards. North Dakota now has tenure reviews every five years.
University administrators in Arkansas are now allowed to call for an immediate review, to withdraw tenure or to fire a professor for cause. Indiana this past spring passed a law calling for productivity reviews of tenured faculty with an option to terminate the professor. Utah codified annual tenure reviews last year.
Texas has tried and failed in its last two sessions to end tenure altogether. The Kansas Legislature narrowly missed doing the same this past session. Lawmakers in Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and West Virginia have taken cracks at reforming or abolishing tenure.
Schoemann told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier this week that if he were elected governor he would be open to eliminating tenure as part of “significant reform.”
Tiffany stopped short of calling for the end of tenure but said it was past time to review the entire way the UW System does its business. If tenure needs to be changed, he’d support it.
“I believe it’s time to put the entire UW System budget under the microscope,” he said.
Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute.
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