A Brawl Over Tenure on Wisconsin Campuses By Christian Schneider
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-brawl-over-tenure-on-wisconsin-campuses-1434755937
Professors reacted to the budget move as if lawmakers had tried to ban tweed jackets with elbow patches.
On a sunny, early summer day, Memorial Union Terrace on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is idyllic. The high, cloudless skies and cool blue water of Lake Mendota serve as a backdrop to coeds drinking beer, sunning themselves and studying for exams.
Yet for weeks now this utopian campus has been awash in dyspepsia, ever since the state legislature’s Joint Finance Committee passed a budget motion concerning faculty tenure. Wisconsin is the only state where the university tenure framework is codified in statute. Under the new plan, tenure would be instead administered by the University of Wisconsin system’s governor-appointed Board of Regents.
In theory, the move was intended to give the UW system more flexibility and control over its labor costs. Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal cuts the university by $150 million next year, then freezes funding at that level for 2017. But the governor also wants to give UW administrators the tools to handle the budget cuts by, say, adjusting tenure rules and asking professors to teach more classes.
This is similar to how Gov. Walker’s blockbuster Act 10 worked in 2011, cutting direct state funding to elementary and high schools, but reforming government union rules and ending teacher tenure. “Today, graduation rates are up, third grade reading scores are up, and ACT scores are second best in the country,” Walker spokeswoman Laurel Patrick told me. The governor has embraced the comparison, saying that the new budget package “will be like Act 10 for the UW.”
In practice, however, the University of Wisconsin’s tenure system likely won’t change at all. Professors reacted to the budget motion as if the legislature had moved to ban tweed jackets with elbow patches. Faculty leaders warned of a “mass exodus” of instructors. More than 350 professors signed a petition urging the Board of Regents to reject the “elimination” of tenure, and four professors showed up at a regents meeting with tape over their mouths. In response, the regents quickly adopted tenure rules identical to the ones that had been ensconced in state law.
Regent Mark Bradley, who was appointed by former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, argued at a committee meeting that faculty became upset because state Republicans had passed their motion without first identifying any problems with the status quo. But tenure has long been debated in the public forum—and ought to be. Every other citizen of the world, save the occasional Supreme Court justice, manages to do his or her job without a lifetime guarantee of employment. What makes university faculty so special?
Professors argue that protections are needed to ensure their “academic freedom.” But too often that means allowing them to cut back on teaching and withdraw deeper into arcane research. Earlier this year, UW-Madison faculty published a study in which they wrote songs for cats and then tested whether the felines liked them. “We are not actually replicating cat sounds,” an emeritus professor of psychology told the university’s news service. “We are trying to create music with a pitch and tempo that appeals to cats.”
The argument that tenure has led to any modicum of ideologically diverse thought also fails to hold up. There may be no profession more monolithically progressive than university professors. One 2010 analysis by the Huffington Post found that 94% of the 248 UW-Madison faculty and staff who donated to political candidates in 2008 gave to Democrats.
What tenure does well, however, is allow high-paid faculty to keep collecting paychecks while untenured academic staff and teaching assistants conduct the classes. The average “nine-month” professor at the UW-Madison earns $123,500 in salary, before benefits. Yet only 47% of the campus’s classes are taught by faculty. According to the UW-Madison chancellor, taxpayer-funded faculty taught an average of 3.41 classes a week in 2013 and spent an average of 21.3 hours a week on research. The end result is that students wind up paying rapidly rising tuition for professors they’ll rarely see.
The power of the professoriate ensures that striking tenure from Wisconsin’s statute books will accomplish little. Simply look at private colleges, which are bound by no state tenure law, and which still operate under faculty-protection schemes.
The irony is that while UW professors complain that the tenure controversy damages the university’s reputation nationwide, their theatrical aggrievement spreads the misperception that this will amount to anything more than a technical change. Perhaps Wisconsin should institute a test: Any professor crying that he is about to lose tenure should actually lose it.
Mr. Schneider is a columnist and blogger for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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