The Regent who wouldn’t leave

“[F]ixed terms of members of boards shall expire on May 1.” So says Wis. stat. 15.07(1)(c), the portion of state law that governs when the terms of state board members—including members of the UW System Board of Regents—come to an end. So it was curious to see that the UW System’s “Regent Bios” page, which is ordinarily kept assiduously up to date, continued to list John Behling, Regina Millner, and Ryan Ring as Regents until very late in May of this year. Behling continued to be listed as Regent President.

Millner and Behling served successive two-year stints as Regent President from 2015 to 2019. They were the first two appointees of former governor Scott Walker to serve as Regent President. Their presidencies were marked by a nearly nonstop state of outright calamity throughout the UW System: things that existed prior to 2015 but no longer do include real tenure for faculty; strong (not merely consultative) shared governance powers for faculty, staff, and students; more than $100 million in biennial funding from the state; nearly 15% of the UW-Milwaukee faculty; and the UW Colleges.

A less well-known but no less major change initiated in 2015 involved the way that UW System campuses select new chancellors. Under the previous policy, search and screen committees for chancellors had to be made up of at least half faculty from the campus in question, alongside staff, students, community members, and others. A Special Regent Committee was appointed to serve as liaison between the search committee and the full Board of Regents, which would ultimately appoint one of the finalists selected by the search committee.

Under the new policy (updated once again in 2017, before it was ever used), the Regents have taken over the entire process. Whereas chancellor search committees were previously unlimited in size, they now contain exactly ten members: five Regents, two faculty, one staff member, one student, and one community member. The Special Regent Committee remains, though its role is far less clear under the new system, and in both of the chancellor searches that have taken place so far the Special Regent Committee has consisted of the same five Regents who serve on the search committee.

The first chancellor search conducted under the new regime took place at UW-Whitewater. It was a mess from the start. The former chancellor resigned abruptly a week before Christmas last year, forced out by the Regents and System President Ray Cross in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal involving her husband. Rather than wait until the normal academic hiring cycle to search for a replacement, the Regents barrelled ahead immediately, with predictable results: two of the four finalists dropped out of the search, one of the remaining finalists was the interim chancellor whom Cross had initially decreed would be ineligible for the permanent position, and the faculty were so egregiously sidelined that it prompted an open letter of protest from the UW-Whitewater Faculty Senate and resolutions of support from governance bodies around the System.

This brings us back to our lingering Regents. Despite the rush, the Whitewater search process spilled into May, past the expiration of Regina Millner’s term as Regent. Millner was a Regent member of the Whitewater search committee and a member the Special Regent Committee, and she appears to have continued to take part in those committees’ deliberations and votes after May 1. It’s unclear whether she (or Behling or Ring) took part in the subsequent full Board of Regents vote, which was described simply as “unanimous.”

Unfortunately, Millner’s policy-bending decision to linger on the search committee past the expiration of her Regent term is not isolated. In what can only be described as a brazen act of clinging to power, John Behling appointed himself to the chancellor search committee at UW-Stout less than a month before his term on the Board expired. The Stout search is barely under way and Behling’s term as Regent ended over a month ago, but the latest Regent committee list names Behling as a “Regent Emeritus” member of the Special Regent Committee for the UW-Stout search.

To be clear, there is no such thing as a Regent Emeritus. John Behling is no more a Regent Emeritus than I am a Regent-in-Waiting. This is a silly, made-up title that is being used to justify Behling’s lawless insistence on remaining on the search committee. Wisconsin law says that John Behling is no longer a Regent. Regent policy says that the search committee and Special Regent Committee need five Regents. Behling himself helped craft the policy as Regent Vice President and Regent President! This isn’t complicated.

Whatever one thinks of Behling’s legacy as Regent President, his refusal to depart presents a crisis of governance for the UW System that should alarm everyone. The Board of Regents has arrogated to itself the power to conduct chancellor searches, but it is willing to bend the rules to allow a former Regent to have a hand in doing the people of Wisconsin’s work. This is simply wrong. The Board of Regents consists of the members it consists of, not the members its current and former leadership might wish it consisted of. It is hard not to see connections with other recent instances where Wisconsin Republicans have refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new Democratic governor, and taken legally dubious steps to blunt his power. John Behling is no longer a Regent because Scott Walker lost his bid for reelection. By permitting Behling to remain on the chancellor search committee for UW-Stout, the Board of Regents is acting out the fantasy of a Walker victory. His behavior, as well as that of the Board, is scandalous.

This story has yet to garner much media attention, despite the fact that state board appointments have been a major point of contention in connection with the ongoing litigation over last year’s lame-duck legislation. Indeed, Behling himself took a pointed (and highly inappropriate) political stand against the new governor in April, when he insisted on the validity of two Regent appointments that had been enjoined by a judge, and allowed those Regents to participate in the Board’s April meeting.

The Board of Regents needs to rectify this situation immediately. Behling is obviously without shame and will not step down; anyone who would step down in this situation never would have appointed himself in the first place. The Board must remove him. If the Board has even a minimal interest in appearing non-partisan, it would be wise to name one of the new Evers appointees as his replacement on the Stout search committee and Special Regent Committee. Even if not, there is simply no justification for allowing John Behling to continue to serve. The Board is inexplicably allowing a former member to create a governance crisis that will only further erode confidence in the UW System from all sides.

Over the past several years, the Regents have continually professed a need to win the confidence of the public. Once again, they are failing.

 

All rule, no law

At the heart of Wisconsin’s current special elections dispute is a syntactically ambiguous text. The first sentence of Wis. stat. § 8.50(4)(d) currently reads as follows:

Any vacancy in the office of state senator or representative to the assembly occurring before the 2nd Tuesday in May in the year in which a regular election is held to fill that seat shall be filled as promptly as possible by special election.

The ambiguity turns on the prepositional phrase (PP) in the year in which a regular election is held to fill that seat: specifically, on its syntactic position of attachment and its associated semantic import. Does the PP attach low, to May (or, equivalently for present purposes, to 2nd Tuesday in May; in either case forming part of the definite description headed by the), thereby telling us which year’s month of May we are talking about, in order to specify the point before which vacancies obligatorily trigger special elections? Or does the PP attach higher, at the level of the verb phrase, thereby providing an additional restriction on the event introduced by occurring, so as to limit the range of vacancies for which special elections must be called?

The grammatical structure of the text cannot tell us the answer. There are competing interpretations because the text is the (externalized, flattened) residue of at least two distinct grammatical structures. The pure textualist train runs out of track before we reach our destination. Nor will it help to appeal to canons of construction here, since the canons that deal with syntactic ambiguity are little more than labels for the competing readings. In order to rule one way or the other, we must look outside the text.

And we don’t have to look far before we find well-nigh dispositive interactions between the entailments of each reading and the legislative intent behind the statute. On the first (low-attachment) reading, the statute sets an upper limit on the date when vacancies trigger special elections. On the second (high-attachment) reading, it sets both upper and lower limits: in particular, a vacancy does not automatically trigger a special election if it occurs prior to January 1 of the year in which the seat would be regularly up for election. So, for example, on this reading the governor would be within his rights to leave a state senate seat open for as much of its four-year duration as he saw fit, provided the vacancy occurred prior to January 1 of the regular election year for the seat.

The second (high-attachment) reading of the statute plainly conflicts with legislative intent. The statute emphasizes that special elections should be called as promptly as possible, a clear indication that the purpose of the statute is to ensure that legislative seats not remain empty and that the people of the affected districts not remain unrepresented. While the grammatical structure of the statutory text is indeed ambiguous, only the first (low-attachment) reading leads to a sensible interpretation. This is enough to settle the question of the statute’s meaning. It’s not a close call.

The special election dispute has arisen, of course, because the governor has chosen not to call elections for two seats vacated in late December 2017, relying on the indefensible second (high-attachment) reading of the statute as his justification. It’s an obvious violation of the law as written, and it has now been duly laughed out of court. (Update: twice.) Notably, the DOJ recognized the absurd consequences of their chosen interpretation in a March 7 brief (h/t Jordan Ellenberg), where they insist that the special elections called by the governor to fill vacancies in 2017 were exercises of his discretionary authority, not fulfillments of his plain and positive duty under the law. They likewise fail to acknowledge or address the grammatical ambiguity of the statutory text, instead simply claiming that the second (high-attachment) reading is the operative meaning.

The reaction of Wisconsin Republican leaders is telling. The governor failed to fulfill his duty under the law, in obvious violation of the plain meaning of the statute. Plaintiffs went and got a court order (from a judge appointed by this governor, no less!) demanding that the governor call special elections by this Thursday. Legislative Republicans’ response? Change the law! The proposed changes to Wis. stat. § 8.50 would prevent the governor from calling special elections for the currently empty seats, and the bill text explicitly seeks to override the court order issued last week. At a minimum, this tees up another round of litigation, if not an outright constitutional crisis. All ostensibly to save the public the monetary expense of holding two small local elections.

There is no shortage of theories about the governor’s motivations for refusing to hold these special elections, and no shortage of irony in the legislature calling an extraordinary session to prevent special elections at a time of supposed legislative inactivity. The broader point, and the bigger concern, is the relationship between the exercise of political power and the restraints of the rule of the law. The governor has chosen to ignore the law in a case where it is contrary to his political will. The Wisconsin Department of Justice has been enlisted to defend the governor in flouting the law. His legislative allies have chosen to ignore the plain meaning of the law, to impugn the character of the judge who insisted that the law means what it does, and finally to change the law that they do not wish to be bound by.

Such is the law under organized one-party rule.

Laboratories of austerity

UW-Stevens Point has attracted national attention for its administration’s plan to shutter the bulk of its majors in the humanities and social sciences. UW-Superior’s administration summarily suspended 25 programs in October, sidestepping the governance process and triggering a vote of no confidence in the chancellor. And the UW Colleges and Extension is being dissolved as a freestanding institution, its 13 campuses to be absorbed by nearby UW universities barely 9 months after UW System President Ray Cross’s surprise restructuring announcement last fall.

In other words, we are now seeing exactly the kinds of developments that were made possible by the statutory changes to tenure and shared governance in 2015 and the resulting Regent policies on faculty termination via program change, which triggered no confidence votes in Cross and the Regents across the System in the spring of 2016. The ideological vision behind those changes is apparent in the squeezing of campus budgets and in the content of the resulting program change proposals, which uniformly point toward narrow job training and “career pathways” and away from the broad educational mission that makes a university what it is.

The elitism underpinning this set of developments has not gone unnoticed. The Colleges’ predicament was accelerated by the 2015 regionalization of administrative services, taking advising and other support away from where it was most needed on the System’s open-door campuses. The UW-Superior administration struck a remarkably patronizing tone, suggesting that its many first-generation students might be overwhelmed by the range of choices available at a truly comprehensive university. And the UW-Stevens Point administration has spun a tendentious hunch about its students’ career planning into a suggestion that they seek fancy things like English and history degrees elsewhere. This is not a strategic retreat from the educational ideal so that the university might be saved; it is an abandonment of our neediest students, of entire regions in central and northern Wisconsin, and of the democratizing mission of the public university.

The Stevens Point situation, in particular, cannot be understood in isolation from that of the Colleges. Stevens Point is set to absorb two Colleges campuses this summer. The Colleges restructuring was undertaken ostensibly to address a budget and enrollment crisis; merger with nearby UW institutions was presented as a favorable alternative to closing multiple campuses. What has never been made clear, however, is how the merger is supposed to mitigate any of the underlying issues. By going this route, Cross and the Regents have delayed the Colleges’ reckoning until after the reelection campaign of the governor who appointed them, and have offloaded responsibility for the truly tough decisions to local campus administrations, to boot. We’ll soon see what emerges from these laboratories of austerity.

Finally, it bears mentioning that the amounts of money involved here are not large. UW-Stevens Point’s administration says it is aiming to close a $4.5 million two-year budget gap. At UW-Superior, the budget deficit is $2.5 million. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Legislature approved $3 million in new funding in the 2017-19 biennium for a new “public leadership” center named after former GOP governor Tommy Thompson…at UW-Madison.

As the saying goes, show me your budget and I’ll show you your values. There is money to preserve and enhance UW-Superior, UW-Stevens Point, and the UW Colleges. There is money to restore Wisconsin’s commitment to world-class public higher education for all. The infrastructure is there, built by generations. It’s not a hard lift for us now. It just requires leadership willing to make the choice.

Fund the freeze

The UW-Madison Faculty Senate will vote on a resolution of no confidence in UW System President Ray Cross and the Board of Regents on Monday.  The proximate cause is the egregious handling of Madison’s faculty layoff policy by System legal counsel, Cross, and the Regents, all of which is detailed at length in the text of the resolution.  A further contributing factor is Cross’s much-publicized decision to scrap the Chancellors’ presentations on the effects of the 2015–17 budget cuts at the Regents meeting earlier this month (“no whining!”).  All of this is set against the backdrop of the nonstop crisis that has been with us since Scott Walker unveiled his 2015–17 budget proposal fifteen months ago, starting with Cross’s questionable and ill-fated decision to advocate a public authority model for the university system, and continuing through the gutting of shared governance, the weakening of tenure, and the soft-pedaling of the cuts’ fallout.

The prospect of a no confidence vote has caused a surprising number of legislators to lose their minds.  When a purely symbolic gesture by faculty elicits immediate threats of material retaliation from a powerful State Senator, it’s because it hits uncomfortably close to the mark.  Those Republican legislators who have weighed in have, predictably, played the class resentment card against faculty in an attempt to divert attention from the substance of the complaint.  In the current Wisconsin context, this means invoking the four-year tuition freeze early and often, and accusing faculty of not caring about tuition-paying students and families.  (No one ever bothers to explain how weakening tenure and shared governance will prevent tuition from rising, of course.)

Tuition had been in the news even before the no confidence resolution came to light.  At the most recent UWM budget forum, Chancellor Mark Mone repeated his (and, by extension, UW System leadership’s) hope that the Legislature will allow for a modest tuition increase in the next budget.  This led Rep. Dale Kooyenga to opine, “I just don’t get how the left can say the tuition cap is bad but yet many of the same people are ‘feeling the Bern,’ saying we need to have free college altogether.”  UW leadership is displaying the same political cluelessness around tuition that it did in the early public authority days, and legislators are wasting no time using administrators’ remarks as a pretext for beating faculty senseless.  (And if Mark Mone voted for Bernie Sanders, I will eat ALL THE HATS.)

So let’s be clear: I know I speak for many UW faculty when I say that we endorse the tuition freeze and want it to continue.  If anything, tuition should be decreased.  But a tuition freeze has to be funded by the Legislature.  Right now, the UW System is in the midst of a four-year unfunded mandate coupled with steep cuts in base funding, and it is hurting students.  A tuition freeze does no good when you can’t enroll in the classes you need and end up taking longer to graduate.  It does no good when it means the program you wanted to major in has to shut down.  Shifting costs away from students is the morally correct thing to do; declining to fund those shifted costs is pure deception.

All of which brings us back to the no confidence resolution.  The only way to contain tuition costs is for the state to agree to bear those costs through increased funding to the system.  The only way to get the state to increase funding is to make a compelling case to the public that our current path is harming students and families.  Ray Cross has moved, instead, to stifle public discussion of the cuts’ effects.  The Board of Regents has adopted tenure and layoff policies that will make it easier to accommodate continued austerity, and that will thus encourage additional cuts.  This is the heart of the case for no confidence.

Faculty are on the side of students and families.  Fund the freeze, fund a tuition decrease, restore our public commitment to public higher education.

UW tenure: as little as possible

“Tenure weakened in Wisconsin.”  So says the national AAUP in response to the UW System’s now-official policies on tenure, faculty layoff, and post-tenure review, which were adopted by the Board of Regents this past Thursday, unaltered in their essentials from the problematic drafts issued by the Tenure Policy Task Force in January.  At the Regents meeting there was much talk of difficult decisions and harsh new realities.  The first casualty of the new policies, it seems, is the pretense that they might be consistent with nationally recognized standards.

The formal decline of tenure in Wisconsin has coincided with renewed media interest in faculty pay.  System President Ray Cross said in an interview earlier last week that, while changes to tenure “are causes to make faculty nervous…the real reason I think faculty are being lured away is compensation packages.”  The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported on faculty retention efforts at UW-Madison, detailing the tens of thousands of dollars in raises and additional research funds that a handful of faculty have negotiated in the face of job offers from elsewhere.  The casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the end of tenure will bring a financial windfall for UW professors near and far.

Indeed, the elephant in the room last Thursday was money, particularly the Regents’ apparent unwillingness or inability to advocate for more of it in the face of legislative slashing and burning.  The overarching goal of the new policies, we were repeatedly told, is to give chancellors flexibility.  Flexibility, of course, is code for a host of austerity measures predicated on the consolidation of power in administrative hands.  It can also be read here as a byword for Regental buck-passing: far from standing up to legislators, the Regents have turned around and told chancellors to stand up to faculty, all while adopting policies that create a glide path for further cuts.  The time to draw a line in the sand was yesterday; instead, our new flexibility-enhanced chancellors will be able to use program prioritization and other means to enact a kind of financial emergency in slow motion.

Conspicuously absent from Thursday’s discussion was any suggestion from the new policies’ proponents that the changes will help the UW System regain the confidence of legislators.  Rather, endless austerity was presented as a given, with faculty chided for their lack of business sense.  The obvious cynicism of this line of attack didn’t prevent some faculty from rising to the bait, telling reporters of their long experience issuing layoff notices to academic staff.  The divide-and-conquer reflex was evinced by UW-Madison’s chancellor, as well.  In her prepared remarks and subsequent blog post, she spoke of the “different needs” of the various UW System campuses, a framing that meshes entirely too well with that of the right-wing Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which in a recent manifesto questioned whether tenure is needed at every UW campus.

Tenure has been modified, shared governance curtailed.  Local media has turned its normalizing gaze to outliers at the very top of the faculty pay spectrum.  The flagship’s chancellor appears poised to throw the rest of the System under the bus.  Campuses are struggling to absorb the $250 million in cuts handed down in the current cycle.  And with negotiations over the next biennial budget less than a year away, the Board of Regents has adopted policies that will make it politically easier for legislators to cut again.

Welcome to the 21st century, indeed.

UW tenure: a challenger appears

With the UW System Board of Regents set to adopt new tenure policies next week, Wisconsin’s right-wing policy apparatus has sprung into action.  On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) released a report questioning the value of tenure and urging the Regents to adopt policies allowing them to terminate tenured faculty for the full range of reasons delineated in Act 55: program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, and redirection.  The issue at the heart of the Tenure Policy Task Force’s work since last summer—namely, whether it is possible for the Board of Regents to adopt policies that are more stringent than those now enumerated in statute, and thereby to salvage something resembling tenure in Wisconsin—has thus been brought once again to the fore.

To repeat what has been said many times: allowing institutions to terminate tenured faculty for reasons of program curtailment, modification, and redirection—i.e., changes short of full discontinuance—is totally incompatible with academic freedom.  It is an open invitation to administrative abuse and political intrusion into the university.  Tenure is the guarantor of academic freedom.  The Regents have claimed since the summer that tenure will be safe in the UW System, and this claim has always rested on the proposition that the Regents will able to limit the range of circumstances in which tenured faculty can be fired, i.e. that the offending statutory language of Act 55 is “merely permissive.”

The Regents have thus implicitly acknowledged that an institution where tenured faculty can be fired for reasons of program curtailment, modification, or redirection is an institution that does not have tenure in any meaningful sense.  But this is what WPRI is now expressly advocating.

The WPRI report also offers some hints as to what future efforts to weaken tenure in the UW System will look like.  In particular, it suggests a classic divide-and-conquer strategy, questioning whether tenure is necessary in the UW Colleges and Extension, or at the four-year non-doctoral campuses.  UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee faculty thus must be prepared to stand up for tenure everywhere in the UW System.

The publication of the WPRI report underscores the importance of ensuring that the policies adopted by the Regents next week are as strong as possible.  To that end, the Faculty Representatives to the Board of Regents and the faculty members of the Tenure Policy Task Force have unanimously endorsed a set of recommended changes to the draft policies approved by the Education Committee last month.  Those recommendations address some of the well-documented deficiencies in the draft policies, which were written with minimal faculty input, despite the best efforts of the task force members.

WPRI and its backers want to kill tenure in the UW System.  Faculty across the System are, with remarkable unanimity, asking for modest changes to the draft policies that no Regent who actually cared about tenure and academic freedom could reasonably oppose.

Thursday should be interesting.

[Update, 3/5/16: Chuck Rybak offers an assessment of the WPRI report here.]

UW tenure: endgame

Two weeks ago today, the Education Committee of the UW System Board of Regents unanimously approved the new policies on tenure, faculty layoff, and post-tenure review developed by the Tenure Policy Task Force, forwarding them to the full Board for approval at its March 10 meeting. Hank Reichman at the Academe Blog has a writeup of the day’s proceedings. The policies were approved essentially unmodified: there was a minor change in the definition of the remediation time-frame in the post-tenure review policy. The faculty layoff policy was approved as drafted, with no discussion, despite the fact that the Education Committee had convened an extraordinary session with all Regents present for the express purpose of discussing the policies. Okay, then.

With no substantive changes to the earlier drafts, the policies’ many problems remain. Several Regents have tacitly acknowledged the existence of those problems by impugning the character of the policies’ critics rather than defending the policies solely on the merits. Regent President Regina Millner said that some faculty leaders would have complained about the policies “no matter what we wrote.” System President Ray Cross said, “It’s frustrating to me that the emotional reaction on the part of some folks failed to realize the substance of tenure was simply moved from statute to board policy.” Such emotional reactions apparently include that of the national AAUP, which wrote the following in a joint statement with AFT-Wisconsin: “We remain concerned, however, that some of the provisions in the draft regent policy documents fall far short of [AAUP] standards.”

The claim that tenure has simply moved to board policy is belied by Cross’s comment, two sentences later, that the new policy “also had to honor language in new legislation”. Chuck Rybak lays bare the illogic in the space of a tweet (journalists, take note!):

https://twitter.com/ChuckRybak/status/695768745105604608

Cross appears to be referring here to new legislation around post-tenure review, describing it as “new legislation concerned about accountability with reasonable timelines and processes to deal with underperforming faculty, and to reward faculty who exceed expectations.” Likewise, Regent Gerald Whitburn, the chair of the Education Committee, said of the UW System’s existing post-tenure review policy (adopted in 1992) that “It did not facilitate accountability and result in an even playing field across our institutions. Frankly, I think that’s why the Legislature did what they did.”

The thing to know about this, though, is that on post-tenure review, the Legislature did nothing. The Legislature made massive, largely destructive changes to the UW System in Act 55 (the 2015–17 biennial budget), but nowhere in Act 55 did they require the Board of Regents to make changes to its post-tenure review policy. It’s entirely plausible that individual legislators have told the Regents that they would like to see such changes, but there is no legislation to this effect. (Again, journalists, hello?)

A major remaining concern about the faculty layoff policy is the question of whether faculty may be laid off or terminated in program changes short of discontinuation. Chapter 36, as amended by Act 55, clearly says yes. The Regent policy says that layoff and termination can happen in cases of program discontinuance, but is silent on curtailment, modification, and redirection. After the policies were approved by the Education Committee two weeks ago, both UW System counsel Tom Stafford and Regent John Behling, who chaired the task force, insisted that the Board would not be permitted to lay off or terminate faculty in program changes short of discontinuation:

“Stafford told reporters Friday that if the proposed policies are adopted, regents would need to vote to change the policy before exercising their statutory power to lay off faculty for program changes short of discontinuation.”

“The new policy allows for faculty to be laid off only if their program is discontinued, however, and ‘clearly restricts’ UW officials from using the other justifications lawmakers gave them, said Regent John Behling, who led the task force that wrote the policy.”

If this is indeed the intended interpretation of the policy, then surely the Regents wouldn’t object to amending the policy to include a positive assertion to that effect? Perhaps something like “Notwithstanding the powers granted to the Board by Wis. Stat. s. 36.22 (2)(a), no faculty member shall be laid off or terminated as a result of a budget or program decision requiring program curtailment, modification, or redirection, unless that decision requires program discontinuance.” Such a change would be consistent with statute, would help build confidence with faculty, and, per the Regents’ own characterization, would be semantically innocent.

Modify and redirect

This week the UW System Board of Regents will take up the draft policies on faculty layoff and post-tenure review developed by the Tenure Policy Task Force, the latest versions of which were circulated on January 22.  The policies go before the Education Committee not at its regular Thursday meeting, but at an extraordinary session on Friday, with all Regents in attendance.  The policies will go before the full Board for approval at the Regents’ March meeting.

The draft policies are substantially similar to the versions released in December before the final meeting of the task force, and many of the criticisms of the December drafts apply to the current drafts, as well.  The “educational considerations” that are to serve as the fundamental criteria for program discontinuance decisions are still defined in such a way as to be inseparable from financial considerations.  Negative post-tenure review decisions are still not subject to institutional grievance procedures, a gross violation of due process; failure to complete a remediation plan can lead to dismissal for cause, in a cavalier expansion of the definition of just cause for dismissal.  And the preamble to the faculty layoff policy still purports to quote AAUP’s language on using layoff as a last resort, when in fact it says only that all feasible alternatives must be “considered” (AAUP says “pursued“).

One improvement from the December drafts concerns the institution’s responsibility to faculty who are laid off.  Both the financial emergency section and the program discontinuance section now contain the following language: “As provided in Wis. Stat. s. 36.22 (12), institutions shall devote their best efforts to securing alternative appointments for faculty laid off under this section, and also shall provide financial assistance for readaptation of faculty laid off under this section where readaptation is feasible.”  This is an aesthetic improvement to the policy, not a substantive one, since the protections enumerated here reside in statute (36.22 was created as part of 2015 Act 55, the biennial budget bill), but it is nonetheless welcome.  Wisconsin’s newly amended statute appears to be consistent with the AAUP’s Recommended Institutional Regulations on this point. [Update: Dave Vanness points out that AAUP RIR calls for a year’s severance pay for faculty for whom a suitable alternative position cannot be found, whereas 36.22 and the Board’s draft policy do not.]

What remains conspicuously absent from the draft policy on faculty layoff is any specific forswearing of the Board’s statutorily granted powers to lay off or terminate faculty in cases of program curtailment, modification, or redirection, i.e. program changes short of outright elimination or closure.  The ability to make such micro-changes to programs invites all kinds of administrative abuse and is a clear threat to academic freedom.

Let’s go through this piece by piece.  We begin with Wisconsin statute:

• Wis. Stat. s. 36.22 (2)(a): “The board may, under this section and s. 36.21, with appropriate notice, lay off or terminate any faculty member when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring a program change.”
• Wis. Stat. s. 36.22 (1)(b): “‘Program change’ means program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection.”

So, state law now says that tenured faculty can be laid off for essentially any reason whatsoever.  The UW System has a thing called tenure, but it bears no resemblance to tenure as defined by the AAUP, every normal university in America, and pre-2015 Wisconsin.  This was the starting point for the Tenure Policy Task Force’s work; it’s old news by now.

Now to the draft policy language:

• Faculty layoff draft policy (preamble): “As provided in Wis. Stat. s. 36.21 and Wis. Stat. s. 36.22, and Chapter UWS 5 of the Wisconsin Administrative Code, the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System (Board) has authority, with appropriate notice, to terminate through layoff a faculty appointment when necessary in the event of a financial emergency, or a program decision resulting in program discontinuance.”

True, but incomplete.  Continuing on:

• “The Board is permitted by Wis. Stat. s. 36.21 to adopt procedures relating to faculty layoff. Consistent with Chapter UWS 5 and Wis. Stat. s. 36.22, this Board policy sets forth those procedures. Faculty layoffs at University of Wisconsin System institutions may be undertaken only in accordance with this policy, Chapter UWS 5, Wis. Stat. s. 36.21, and Wis. Stat. s. 36.22.”

It’s hard to see how this rules out the possibility of layoff for the several reasons enumerated in 36.22 (2)(a).  Remaining silent on the matter of curtailment, modification, and redirection doesn’t mean that layoffs for those reasons are barred, or even that they are against Board policy…since the draft policy explicitly says that faculty layoff can occur in accordance with 36.22!  This isn’t exclusion by omission; it’s a glaring lacuna in Board policy.

It would be easy for the Board to adopt specific language addressing these points, e.g. by including a clause that says, “Notwithstanding the powers granted to the Board by Wis. Stat. s. 36.22 (2)(a), no faculty member shall be laid off or terminated as a result of a budget or program decision requiring program curtailment, modification, or redirection, unless that decision requires program discontinuance.” Such a clause wouldn’t contradict statute: negated “shall” is consistent with positive “may” (different ordering sources, if you want to get technical about it).  This is where the “merely permissive” rubber of the 36.22 language could have hit the Board policy road, as Ray Cross and Becky Blank repeatedly insisted it would.  Instead, we have a draft policy that does nothing to address the problem at the root of the Wisconsin tenure crisis, and that, if approved in this form, will consummate the elimination of tenure in the UW System in all but name.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the “discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection” language wasn’t plucked from thin air: it’s been part of the Wisconsin administrative code governing academic staff in the UW System for years.  Per UWS 12, academic staff with indefinite appointments—the analogue of tenure—are subject to layoff in all of the above scenarios.  36.22, in combination with the Regents’ selectively silent draft policy, puts tenured faculty on an equally bad footing.  Academic staff in the UW System have, and faculty soon will have, wholly inadequate guarantees of academic freedom.  It’s time to fix this for everyone.

UW tenure: the task force awakens

The UW System Tenure Policy Task Force has now circulated draft policies on faculty layoff and post-tenure review, to be discussed at its upcoming meeting on Dec 23. These are notable for being the first bits of actual policy language we have seen from the task force. At its Nov 30 meeting, the task force took up a set of recommendations about what the eventual draft policies should include, but proper policy drafts were not on the agenda. Those pre-circulated recommendations came under sustained criticism from the UW AAUP chapters and several task force members, prompting the scheduling of the Dec 23 meeting (Nov 30 was originally to have been the group’s last) and thereby giving task force members an opportunity to weigh in on the actual policy language that will be forwarded to the Regents.

The draft policies include some encouraging AAUP-inspired clauses: if the Board of Regents chooses to go against a faculty recommendation on financial emergency or program discontinuance, it should be “only for compelling reasons which should be stated in detail”; in post-tenure review, “[t]hose who must have a role…include peer faculty members”. In other places, a seemingly strong AAUP-derived principle is undermined by a subtle change: “faculty layoff will be invoked only in extraordinary circumstances and after all feasible alternatives have been considered”, says the draft, disquietingly non-committal next to the AAUP RIR‘s decisive “pursued”.

If one can glimpse daylight between the draft policy and AAUP RIR in the passage above, once we get to program discontinuance it’s time to break out the shades. The problem stems from how the draft policy defines the “educational considerations” that may lead to the closure of a program or department (and the faculty layoffs that may ensue). AAUP RIR 4(d)(1) puts things very simply, stating that program discontinuance must “be based essentially upon educational considerations, as determined primarily by the faculty as a whole or an appropriate committee thereof”, and noting further that “‘Educational considerations’ do not include cyclical or temporary variations in enrollment. They must reflect long-range judgments that the educational mission of the institution as a whole will be enhanced by the discontinuance.” The task force’s draft policy, by contrast, moves immediately and repeatedly to inject financial considerations into the definition of educational considerations:

• “Educational considerations may include financial or strategic institutional planning considerations such as long-term student and market demand” (II(1))
• “This includes the reallocation of resources to other programs with higher priority based on educational considerations. Such long-range judgments generally will involve the analysis of financial resources” (II(2))
• “The proposal…shall contain appropriate information and analysis regarding the educational considerations, including programmatic and financial considerations, supporting the proposed program discontinuance.” (II(3))

Where AAUP countenances program discontinuance as a possible outcome of academic reorganization in response to the advancement of knowledge, the task force’s draft policy sees it as a tool for shoring up the System’s balance sheet (or for kicking perceived moochers or other unfavorables to the curb). This is where the dirty work of downsizing the university is meant to fly under the banner of AAUP compliance: “educational considerations”, understood in this way, can be invoked to shut down academically unimpeachable programs in order to accommodate a legislatively induced financial quasi-emergency.

To fully appreciate the gulf between the AAUP’s recommendations on program discontinuance and the UW draft policy, consider the fates they respectively envision for faculty in the affected programs. For AAUP, this is spelled out in RIR 4(d)(3) (which, incidentally, contains the lone occurrence of the word “financial” in the entire section on program discontinuance): “Before the administration issues notice to a faculty member of its intention to terminate an appointment because of formal discontinuance of a program or department of instruction, the institution will make every effort to place the faculty member concerned in another suitable position. If placement in another position would be facilitated by a reasonable period of training, financial and other support for such training will be proffered.” AAUP’s injunction to retain faculty from shuttered programs is conspicuously absent from the task force draft policy. Indeed, the draft policy is totally silent on the matter of the institution’s responsibilities to faculty in discontinued programs (beyond the general requirements governing layoff and termination). It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the primary purpose of program discontinuance in the UW System will be to downsize the faculty workforce, and only secondarily to realign programs for educational purposes. [Update: see here.]

For all that, perhaps the greatest point of interest in the draft policy is its engagement with Act 55’s notoriously broad language around layoff and termination. Wis. Stat. 36.22(2)(a) now allows the Board to “lay off or terminate any faculty member when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring a program change”; “program change” here is shorthand for the Four Horsemen of the Tenure Apocalypse: “program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection” (36.22(1)(b)). UW administrators spent the summer and fall reassuring everyone that this statutory language was merely permissive, and that the Regents would be able to adopt policies that prescribed a narrower set of conditions on faculty layoff than the legislature put into law (and quite literally any set of conditions would be narrower). The task force draft policy is our first look at what the Regents have in mind. How goes the forswearing of broad firing powers?

Creditably, at least so far. The draft policy limits faculty layoff outside of financial emergency to cases of program discontinuance, as the UW AAUP chapters called on the task force to do: per section II(1), faculty “may be laid off in the event that educational considerations relating to a program change require program discontinuance” (keeping in mind the enormous caveat above about “educational considerations”). Curtailment and friends appear in the draft policy, but they are limited to cases of financial emergency (section I(1)). The charitable reader will imagine System lawyers assiduously including all of 36.22’s infamous defined terms while endeavoring to limit their scope of application so as to avoid making a complete joke of tenure. The skeptical reader will observe that the draft policy does not expressly prohibit the Board from firing faculty via curtailment et al. as part of a program change outside of financial emergency. And the observer of UW and Wisconsin politics will understand that those terms are but a single motion-to-amend away from potential reappearance at the Regents’ meeting in February.

In that connection, we must keep in mind that the task force’s work is advisory to the Regents, and that the draft policies we see this week are subject to revision by the Education Committee and the full Board. While the task force’s members have done an admirable job of pushing back against the worst proposals from the Regents in charge (though to little avail on negative post-tenure review decisions, which are still not grievable), they have been constrained by the task force’s rules of procedure, which have limited their role to one of reaction and consultation. The draft policies we are seeing this week were developed in their particulars and written entirely by System lawyers, never voted on by task force members. The task force is thus not so much a committee as a focus group, convened for the sake of showing that it was convened. Whatever the ultimate fate of their work, its members have a final chance to take advantage this public role on Wednesday.

(A footnote: in a document where “termination” and “layoff” are separate defined terms, specifying very different sets of rights for affected faculty, what on earth is the phrase “terminate through layoff” supposed to mean? It appears in the Policy preamble to the faculty layoff document.)

Austerity at UWM: CCOET

Budget cutting is in full swing at UW-Milwaukee. Beyond the loss of meaningful tenure protections (underscored by recent developments with the Regents’ Tenure Policy Task Force) and the gutting of shared governance, UWM faces a looming financial crisis. The crisis is the result of the massive 2015–17 biennial budget cut in combination with a variety of other factors. UWM’s chancellor, Mark Mone, has convened two groups to deal with the crisis: the Budget Planning Task Force, which has dealt with allocating the $30 million in cuts to UWM over the 2015–17 biennium, and the Chancellor’s Campus Organization and Effectiveness Team (CCOET), which is tasked with making recommendations for long-term structural changes to shrink the institution.

The bottom-line goal for CCOET is to cut $15–$20 million from UWM’s annual budget, permanently. CCOET has thus become the visible locus of austerity on campus. Its meetings, which are open to the public, are starting to attract crowds. Transparency, inclusion, and openness are the watchwords. The reality is a bit more complicated.

When asked about the relationship of CCOET to existing shared governance groups on campus, administrators have emphasized the degree to which CCOET’s membership includes representatives from those groups: the University Committee, the Faculty Senate, the Academic Staff Committee, the Student Association, and even our campus AAUP chapter all have members on CCOET. This is a canny way of constructing a committee whose membership is, in the end, dominated by administrators. Somewhat more troublingly, administrators’ responses to date indicate that this sprinkling of representatives is meant to serve as a kind of proxy for actual shared governance. It should be lost on no one that CCOET is, from a governance perspective, simply an extension of the chancellor, and that it therefore bears exactly the same relationship to other governance bodies that the chancellor himself does.

Sitting as it does in this uneasy space in the new shared governance landscape, CCOET’s role and powers have taken on a shape-shifting quality, changing to suit the purpose at hand. On the one hand, the committee is obviously meant to hash out the gory details of the campus’s downsizing: the task is enormous, with huge consequences for the institution, and all the heavies are there. On the other hand, the committee co-chairs often step back and remind us that they are simply generating recommendations to submit to the chancellor, as if to establish plausible deniability in the face of questions about adherence to established governance practices. The chancellor, meanwhile, indicated at today’s campus budget forum that he hopes to begin implementing CCOET’s recommendations within a matter of weeks after they are submitted to him in February, a timeline that holds out almost no hope of a meaningful vetting by the Faculty Senate or any other shared governance body.

The substance of those recommendations, meanwhile, remains a major unknown. CCOET has exhorted the campus community to give it its best ideas about how to restructure the campus to save money. Those calls ring hollow in the absence of detailed, interpreted, publicly available financial data on which to base such ideas. CCOET has trumpeted its transparency, and it is certainly to be commended for holding open meetings and posting meeting notes and selected data presentations on its website. But CCOET, or a subset of its members, is very obviously working with far more financial data than has been shared with the campus. This is, to some extent, inevitable: university budgeting is complex, and even the best-informed CCOET members have remarked publicly on the ways in which they have only belatedly come to understand certain aspects and implications of the data. It is not in and of itself a problem that CCOET has more data, or a clearer interpretation of the available data, than everyone else does at this point. What is a problem is that CCOET will soon be making detailed proposals on how to proceed, without the campus community (or, if last week’s meeting is any indication, even the entirety of its own membership) having had access to that same set of interpreted financial data. How can CCOET’s members, much less the broader campus community, assess the merits of a funding formula with very disparate impacts on UWM’s different schools and colleges without having had the chance to consider other possibilities? The accelerated timeline and the asymmetry of access ensure that only a select few will have an adequate factual basis for making recommendations; everything else is moot.

Meanwhile, CCOET’s recommendations will come on the heels of the FY16 and FY17 cuts enacted by the Budget Planning Task Force. The FY16 cuts were decided on over the summer, but, rather amazingly, the campus administration still does not have a comprehensive picture of what has actually been cut. Those FY16 cuts were one-time cuts in the amount of $15.7 million, coming in part from spending down the campus’s now almost entirely depleted reserves. The chancellor has now accepted the BPTF’s recommendations for the FY17 cuts, which are permanent base-budget cuts of $14.5 million, $8.8 million of which will come out of Academic Affairs. Details of the FY16 cuts have now been collected and will be shared with everyone soon; units have until Dec 23 to provide details on how they will handle the FY17 cuts. Meanwhile, CCOET is working on further permanent cuts of $15–$20 million, doing the bulk of its work without any detailed knowledge of the cuts that have gone before.

So, we are rushing headlong into an extraordinary budget-cutting process that, for all its invocation of inclusiveness and transparency, will be decided by those few who have both the information necessary to make concrete recommendations (or something approaching it) and the power to enact them. Top administrators and CCOET members insist that the research mission of the university is not on the table; but it is hard to avoid the feeling that CCOET’s work amounts to flinging the entire institution against the wall and seeing what sticks. Meanwhile, rumblings about cuts to the UW System in the 2017–19 biennium have already begun.