- Education
A plan will go before the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee faculty senate Wednesday that could include the layoff of up to 35 tenured faculty — the first at any UW campus since state law weakened the tenure system nearly a decade ago.
The faculty senate’s executive committee has published a report recommending the layoff as both necessary and regrettable. Some on campus are pushing back, however, including the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an advocacy group for faculty members.
The plan is tied to UWM’s shutdown of satellite two-year campuses in Washington and Waukesha counties that became part of the university six years ago. UWM closed the Washington County campus this year and will close the Waukesha campus at the end of spring semester 2025.
When both campuses close UWM will dissolve the College of General Studies (CGS) — an institution the university created when the two campuses were put under its umbrella. The college was the vehicle for awarding two-year associate degrees and for other specialized programs connected to Washington and Waukeha campuses.
The college and its departments were created “to provide an organizational structure” for the two suburban campuses in the merger, in the words of the proposal to dissolve CGS that was submitted in May by UWM Chancellor Mark Mone.
Closing CGS will lead to layoffs or nonrenewal notices for 64 academic and university staff, according to a review of the proposal by the UWM University Committee, the executive committee of the university’s faculty senate. None of those positions are tenured.
The college employs another 35 faculty members who have tenure, and the UWM administration proposal calls for laying them off as well, under Regent Policy 20-24, adopted by the UW Board of Regents in 2016.
The regents adopted the policy after the Legislature and then-Gov. Scott Walker enacted changes that deleted tenure-related guarantees from state law and allowed tenured faculty to be laid off due to changes in university programming.
Regent Policy 20-24 allows for faculty layoffs “for reasons of program discontinuance.” Under that policy, “faculty layoff will be invoked only in extraordinary circ*mstances and after all feasible alternatives have been considered.”
In concurring with Mone’s proposal, the University Committee pointed to sharply declining enrollments, not just at Waukesha and Washington county campuses but at nearly all of the UW system’s 13 branch campuses.
Total enrollment across the branches fell from 9,959 in 2010 to 3,556 in 2023, and the decline “started well before the merging of the former UW College campuses with various four-year campuses in 2018,” the University Committee review states.
The enrollment at the Washington and Waukesha branches fell about 65% in that same 13-year period.
The review found little prospect of that changing, citing a combination of cultural and demographic trends, notably a decline in the number of high school students since 2010.
“No one involved takes this decision lightly and all would wish for a different resolution of the situation,” the committee report states, acknowledging that the action would contribute to the decline of tenured faculty at the university. “However, a lack of investment by state legislators, continued declining enrollments at CGS, and the current financial realities on the main campus, leave UWM with no clear feasible options for retaining these positions without risking greater campus-wide financial instability.”
Faculty push back
Faculty advocates are urging the faculty senate to reject Mone’s proposal.
“If this proposal goes through and if the administration does indeed lay off the entire faculty of CGS, then that would be an unprecedented event in the history of the UW system, and it would be a very troubling precedent,” Nick Fleisher, a UW faculty member and president of the AAUP’s Wisconsin conference, told the Wisconsin Examiner on Monday.
While AAUP operates in some colleges and universities as a union, its Wisconsin chapters are advocacy organizations that promote academic freedom and shared governance but don’t have a collective bargaining role.
Tait Szabo, a member of the CSG faculty and a representative of the college to the UWM faculty senate, submitted a comment calling for the rejection of the plan and of the University Committee’s recommendation to discontinue the college.
While the UW Board of Regents would have the final say on the plan, in the event of a faculty rejection the chancellor would have to address that opposition when presenting the proposal to the board.
Szabo’s comment notes that in 2018, when UW-Stevens Point’s faculty faced an administration proposal to discontinue departments and impose faculty layoffs, they voted to reject the plan and succeeded in blocking the proposal. “UWM faculty can do the same,” he writes.
His comment includes an alternative path that, instead of following the Mone proposal, would address the future of the CSG — including its possible closure — while following procedures that Szabo says would respect existing UWM policies and procedures.
Szabo argues that the proposal misinterprets the regents’ policy on faculty layoffs, that its analysis of the situation involving the CSG and its faculty is “flawed and misleading,” and that the proposal’s “implications are unacceptable.”
Declaring that the College of General Studies does not qualify as “a program” that if discontinued can warrant tenured faculty layoffs under Regent Policy 20-24, Szabo notes that several programs administered by the CSG will be continued.
While the regents’ policy refers to programs being discontinued for “educational reasons,” Szabo argues that the focus in the proposal on financial and budgetary reasons for closing CSG falls short of that requirement. “The proposal itself gives no information about what educational considerations necessitate a program discontinuance,” his comment states.
Szabo also takes issue with the financial analyses in the proposal and the University Committee’s recommendation for it.
“The proposal amounts to the following: the College of General Studies (CGS) is closed, and its tenured faculty are laid off,” Szabo writes. Various CGS programs are continued, moving to UWM’s College of Letters and Sciences, which “staffs the courses in those programs with untenured instructors or teaching faculty.”
The proposal “implies that UWM may at any time and only for financial reasons close any existing college and lay off the tenured faculty in that college,” Szabo charges. “UWM is effectively proposing to render tenure meaningless, and it is doing so based upon untenable interpretations of policy and flawed analysis.”
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