Members of the Wisconsin legislature’s Joint Finance Committee voted last week on a bill that, if it passes the legislature, would cut $250 million from the state’s higher ed budget ($50 million short of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s request), eliminate tenure protections as a state statute and limit faculty participation in a highly-valued shared governance system at the state’s public universities.
Many at the state’s flagship institution have been very vocal in their opposition to this bill.
The shared governance structure and tenure protection—“those are two hallmarks of Wisconsin,” said Dr. Jerlando F. Jackson, Vilas Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of Wisconsin’s Equity & Inclusion Laboratory within the Wisconsin Center for Education and Research. “Those two things make this one of the best places to be a faculty member: the shared governance protection and having a state-supported tenure structure—those are very powerful.”
“There are a number of scholars that elect to take a lot less [money] … because they value those opportunities and protections provided to us here,” Jackson said. “And, whether those individuals will continue to see WIsconsin as the safehaven it has been for professors, I imagine that it’s going to be … increasingly leaning toward possibly seeing other places as equally or more desirable.”
Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is among those who have been very vocal about intending to leave the university if the bill passes the full legislature and tenure protection is no longer guaranteed by state law.
“We have a very robust tenure system. … It is not easy to get tenure at Madison. I don’t just mean you have to do a lot of work,” she said, adding that the review process is more stringent and not centralized within the department or even the school, as is the case at many institutions. “And so for those of us that have it, we earned it, and it was a hell of a lot of work.”
Goldrick-Rab points out that, as it is, tenure at UW Madison does not come with the privileges many think accompany the status.
