Before an upcoming Board of Regents meeting concerning tenure policies, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute released a report providing various recommendations for revised measures surrounding tenure.
Suggestions in the report include more transparency in tenure decisions and more explicit metrics. It also promotes requiring chancellors to justify how granting tenure to a faculty member in consideration would be beneficial to their department and the entire university.
The Board of Regents addressed the issue of tenure after Gov. Scott Walker struck the measure from state statute in 2015. The board will vote on the final policy, drafted by a special task force and the Regents Education Committee, at its meeting Thursday.
According to the report, “If the regents adopt the narrower language proposed by the task force, chancellors who get Board of Regents approval would only be able to lay off faculty if they discontinue a program in its entirety.”
WPRI President Mike Nichols wrote that it would be beneficial for chancellors to have more discretion in laying off tenured faculty based on program shrinkage or modification.
“Programs are already being redirected or modified rather than discontinued,” Nichols said in the report. “And if schools are to become more nimble and responsive, chancellors need the ability to lay off faculty even when entirely eliminating an entire program is not merited.”
The WPRI proposed that the regents make use of the Legislature’s flexibility and allow chancellors the ability to decrease or redefine useful programs that are evolving or becoming less popular and/or crucial.
Individual campuses and the UW-Extension notably vary in their concentration of research, instruction and community interaction, and should be asked to express how and when tenure is merited or not, according to Nichols.
“Each time a person is considered for tenure, chancellors should articulate why the department and university will benefit from having a tenured employee rather than a member of the instructional staff operating on a contract that assures academic freedom,” Nichols said in the report.
The regents will vote on the final tenure policy at their meeting March 10.
