Professor tenure is important to universities for the retention and innovation of professors and should stay in state statute regardless of Gov. Walker’s budget power-trip.
The policy jurisdiction Walker gives himself during budget season is unprecedented. Walker’s 2015-17 budget went far beyond its purpose, attaching numerous hyper-partisan policy items that were unrelated.
The budget included provisions to drug test welfare recipients, expand voucher schools, strip multiple expert boards of their active power, turning them into mere advisory committees and vast changes to the UW System, including the dismantling of shared governance and professor tenure.
In a listening session with faculty, Chancellor Rebecca Blank may have put it best when she declared, “Tenure exists not to protect individuals, but to protect ideas.”
Blank hit the nail on the head. When Republicans try to shift the narrative to unearned job security, they are disrespecting the entire history of innovative ideas born out of the safety-net that tenure provides professors.
When Galileo proposed that the earth was not the center of the universe in the 17th century, he was placed under arrest for the blasphemous idea. Galileo was brave enough to not back down from his ideas even in the face of arrest, but had tenure existed at the time, Galileo would have been safe from persecution.
We need tenure to protect the sanctity of innovative ideas.
Today, academia is still controversial. Just this month, debate has erupted over the use of fetal tissue in research. As Republicans in the Capitol are entertaining a ban on this research, UW faculty are speaking out about the vast scientific value.
More than 700 faculty recently sent a letter to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel expressing the harm the bill would have on research. Without tenure, professors could very well lose their job for speaking up in favor of fetal tissue research.
This hypothetical becomes all too real when taking into account the fact that the Board of Regents, who would hold the power to fire professors, is made up largely of Walker appointees.
It is ironic that the tenure changes are poised to hurt conservative professors the most. Two conservative professors at UW, Donald Downs and John Sharpless, published an article in Politico voicing their deep concerns about the tenure changes.
In a biting response to the attacks Republican lawmakers have waged on tenure, Downs and Sharpless said, “Outnumbered and often targeted for our beliefs by members of the campus left, constitutional conservatives like us — who take individual liberty, freedom of speech and academic freedom very seriously — have long relied on tenure to protect our right to dissent and to preserve the free exchange of ideas in academia.”
While it is true the Board of Regents have said they intend to maintain tenure in some capacity, they will, from now on, hold the power to arbitrarily change the policy if they so choose.
There is no longer anything standing in the way of the Board of Regents’ agenda. Tenure has historically been strong in Wisconsin and enjoyed its codification in state law. That is all now gone.
These changes to tenure policy will hurt not only professors, but UW students, as well. Without tenure protections, many professors are leaving for jobs at other universities where they can express their ideas freely without the worry of job loss.
Students will feel the blow as the best professors leave and the overall quality of education at UW declines.
Furthermore, the precedent has been set that the budget process is open-season for the majority party to push controversial policy items unrelated to the budget. This is a slippery slope that will inevitably lead to more extreme policy enacted under the guise of the budget.
August McGinnity-Wake ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science and environmental studies.
