In its semester-long saga to establish a desirable job-security practice, a University of Wisconsin Board of Regents committee voted Thursday to seek the opinion of its chancellors in a possible transition to fixed-term contracts for top administrators.
"We're clearing the decks of the controversies," Regent Tom Loftus, a member of the Business, Finance & Audit Committee, said. "[We should] try to pursue something that we would think would have the confidence of the people of the state, the Legislature and the governor."
Some members of the public and the Legislature expressed outrage earlier this semester over the so-called "backup positions" UW formally offered as job security, seen most evidently in the continued employment of former Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Paul Barrows at UW-Madison.
"Security and the exit strategy and how we handle these things [are] very important," UW-Oshkosh Chancellor Rick Wells said.
For the time being, the UW System will continue to follow a resolution passed by the regents last month, which preserved the practice of treating top administrators as limited-term appointees who serve at the pleasure of the regents.
The resolution also banned granting controversial backup positions to non-tenure-track limited-term appointees hired from outside the system. Instead, this group was made eligible for a maximum of six months' notice of termination.
"It affects a fairly narrow group of individuals who are from out of state," UW System Vice President of Human Resources Al Crist said.
Though General Counsel Patricia Brady called this current practice "fairly flexible" in terms of management, she acknowledged that its drawbacks include the inability to completely remove undesirable employees from the payroll.
Because of this shortcoming, some regents and chancellors want the university to entertain the thought of changing the state statutes to make top administrators fixed-term contracted employees rather than limited-term appointees.
"The potential for severance and liquidated damages also have tax consequences that you need to take into account," Brady said, noting the caveats a fixed-term contract system would contain.
She added the benefit of a fixed-term contract system, however, is that the regents would know ahead of time the amount of money they would have to pay if an individual's employment was unsuccessful.
UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley expressed concern about the regents progressing too far in trimming job-security perks, asking the board whether or not his hands would be completely tied to rules initiated to "deal with an errant case — a one-of-a-kind case."
"A university's quality rises and falls with the quality of its people," Wiley said. "We do need a certain amount of flexibility in replicating the kinds of working conditions that exist elsewhere."
Replicating, if not exceeding, the opportunities of other universities is of obvious concern to UW, and Crist said the question of job security is secondary to providing salary figures more competitive with its peers.
"Most people, I think, are willing to take a chance," Crist said of job-security concerns. "[But with salaries], we're falling so far behind from our peers and others."
