The University of Wisconsin-Platteville is the latest campus to announce terminations in a Wednesday statement, following a summer string of layoffs, furloughs and shutdowns at UW System campuses and branch campuses.
Administrators will hold in-person meetings with 60 employees to inform them of non-renewals or layoffs, UW-Platteville Chancellor Tammy Evetovich said in an email to faculty and staff. They also cut 31 open positions.
"Through reorganization, expenditure reductions, increased revenues, restructuring divisions and departments and the difficult task of position elimination, we have reduced our fiscal year 2025 structural deficit by over $9 million, and we will be submitting a balanced budget for the upcoming year," Evetovich said.
Taking into account other terminated positions, the layoffs amount to 12% of the school’s overall workforce, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The layoffs come after the UW System received a $32 million budget cut from the Republican-led state budget-writing committee in June. UW System administrators and chancellors have pointed to a decades-long tuition freeze and wavering enrollment numbers while explaining the need for cuts.
At UW-Platteville, those cuts contributed to a $9 million structural deficit, which administrators will attempt to reduce with the layoffs. Enrollment at UW-Platteville increased slightly in 2023 — a 250-student increase over 2022’s enrollment — but the university still faces a tenuous financial situation.
Evetovich said the layoffs were data-informed and are meant to minimize impacts to student-facing services.
Other UW System campuses have been feeling the heat as well. Employees at UW-Oshkosh walked out to protest furloughs and termination during an Oct. 3 demonstration. And at UW-Madison, students and staff protested outside Union South in solidarity on the same day.
One of UW-Platteville’s branch campuses, UW-Platteville Richland Center, also fell victim to budget cuts and the UW System’s teetering fiscal state.
The satellite campus will fully shut down on June 30, 2024, the same day UW-Oshkosh, Fond du Lac and UW-Milwaukee at Washington County will cease in-person classes.
Liam Beran is the former campus news editor for The Daily Cardinal and a third-year English major. He has written in-depth on higher-education issues and covered state news. He is a now a summer LGBTQ+ news fellow with The Nation. Follow him on Twitter at @liampberan.
