BY MIKE NICHOLS & MARK LISHERON
The number of tenured faculty in the University of Wisconsin System has fallen roughly in line with the decrease in student enrollment since 2015 — the year a legislative decision to take tenure guarantees out of state statute unleashed a torrent of blowback from professors who called the move by Republican legislators “destructive” and “remarkably chilling” and like “a death in the family.”
A look back at what has happened to tenured faculty since then uncovered no deaths.
Or even much use of the replacement policy that was passed by the Board of Regents.
The numbers of tenured professors in the System decreased approximately 8% — from 4,561 to 4,209, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau — between the 2016-17 school year and 2021-22. Student enrollment was down 9% over the same time period.
Evidence in retrospect shows that the much-derided change in tenure protection — which took place in stages, first in the Legislature and then at the Board of Regents, in 2015 and 2016 — has had very little impact at all in the eight or nine years since then.
The changes were relatively simple.